The Republic of Dissent

Not yet

This from Gregory Mann is worrisome:

Mali differs from Afghanistan in important ways.

Mali is not (yet) a deeply militarized society — although in the months since Tuareg fighters returned from Qadaffi’s Libya that is changing rapidly.

Mali is not (yet) a narco-state. Northern Mali has become a lucrative zone for drug smuggling, which finances al Qaeda franchises worldwide. Yet none of those drugs are produced in Mali, where Afghanistan’s poppy growers have no parallel. Faced with stiffer surveillance and interdiction, smugglers will go elsewhere.

Finally, Mali is not (yet) a failed state. True, it is grievously weakened, and its army is in disarray. But the government continues to function in the territory it holds. Children go to school, civil servants go to work, and people go about their business.

 I have the sinking feeling that most people are guessing when it comes to Mali just as they were about Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and that more often than not their guesses are not even educated, but based on hubris and wishful thinking.

Occupation and fiasco

Juan Cole on the latest troubling 'incident' in Afghanistan:

An Afghanistan expert asked me, “How was an armed soldier able to leave a well-defended US military base at 3 in the morning without being challenged?” “There is more,” he said darkly, “to this than meets the eye.” Another troubling question is whether it was wise to send this man on 3 Iraq rotations and one Afghan one. Wouldn’t that warp a person, that intensity of years-long combat?

The fairness or unfairness of the contextless collage below is irrelevant to its emotional impact on Afghans whose sense of national sovereignty is being injured by the more-than-a-decade US occupation of their country. Going into homes where there are unveiled women, and exposing them to the gaze of 18 year old strange American men, is always going to anger Afghans. I’ve had US government people almost shout at me that such considerations cannot be allowed to come into play when you are doing counter-terrorism, that the chief thing is to find the weapons caches. But this kind of thing is why the Iraqi parliament voted the US troops right out of their country as soon as they could, and if the Afghan parliament had any real power, it would, too (some parliamentarians have already called for a jihad against the US over the Qur’an burning fiasco).

The disturbing thing is that it is possible to know how that the war in Afghanistan will end and the sole issue is how much the US will lose getting to the end because it cannot admit that it can't win.

Afghan quagmire

Unfortunately, I have the strong suspicion that Hamida Ghafour is right when she says this:

It’s extraordinary that, after a decade of engagement, the Americans could be so clueless about the handling of Islam’s holy book, an ignorance the Taliban leadership deftly used for propaganda purposes by dispatching a suicide car bomber on Monday to a NATO air base in eastern Afghanistan. At least nine people were killed.

It’s a cynical business far removed from spirituality or Islam.

These protests are not really about religion, as offensive as it is to burn any holy book. They’re about poor, disenfranchised people expressing anger over lack of progress and security and finding an easy vehicle for that rage.

The oft-heard refrain that the West has spent billions of dollars in the past 10 years on a failed nation-building experiment simply doesn’t hold up. The vast majority of the money has never reached ordinary Afghans. It has paid for Western armies, the building of embassies, inflated overheads of international aid organizations and corrupt contracts that end up lining the pockets of a few Afghans and Westerners. Western taxpayers, including Canadians, are rightfully fed up with paying for this intractable war.

It's almost as comical as it is ironic that it is a president that was supposed to be exotic, different, worldy, multicultural  understand the world because he spent a few years in Indonesia and has a Kenyan father that made the decision to have a surge in Afghanistan (I have always argued that Obama is what he does, that he is as American as George Bush and thus a normal American president) and that seems to be unable to understand one of the most important lessons of history:

There can't be such a thing as a  friendly and civilizing occupation.

Losing...

Mohsin Hamid, the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, on the US's involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

For Hamid, by launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and funding the highly compromised Pakistani security forces – he calls them the “insecurity forces” – America has fallen into bin Laden’s trap. The fatal mistake, he says, was to take seriously the notion that al-Qaeda could somehow establish a “caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia”. That was always a chimera. By launching the unwinnable “war on terror”, Washington has curbed the civil liberties of its own people, stretched its finances to breaking point and helped radicalise the Middle East. In other words, it has done exactly what bin Laden wanted.

“He was one crazed mass murderer. His was not a coherent political, economic, social ideology and certainly not a particularly attractive one to most people between Morocco and Indonesia, or even a significant minority of them.” Bin Laden must have been surprised at how fully America rose to the bait, he says. “You’re sitting in your cave thinking, ‘You know, I’d really like to change how things in America work, I’d kind of like to create this new rift.’ And to get halfway there, or whatever, is an incredible success.

The indication that Obama, no matter how well he pronounces Pakistan, and is curious about the world around him, is like Bush on this issue is the fact he is obsessing about winning or rather about not losing any ground even if it means sacrificing the long term for the short-term.  My argument isn't that neither Obama nor Bush understood the issue, but rather that they were too afraid of taking punches in the short term to make the right decisions.

Winning

Sugary excerpt of the day is the beginning of David Hawkes must-read article in the Times Literary Supplement :

A Martian visiting the United States early in 2011 could have been forgiven for assuming that the most momentous event taking place was the public disintegration of the actor Charlie Sheen. The nation was captivated by Sheen’s YouTube broadcasts, in which he repeatedly insisted that, despite his manifest problems, he was nonetheless “winning”. This seemed to strike a chord in the popular mind. It was as if Sheen had happened upon a fundamental, but generally unstated, truth about our current condition. Where competition is the basis of social life, “winning” is an end in itself. If the purpose of life is success, then “winning” automatically brings redemption from any kind of turpitude or disgrace. The pejorative effects of megalomania or drug addiction are negated by the simple, irrefutable fact of “winning”

For some weird reasons, those sentences takes me back to a segment on last Sunday's 60 minutes about the war in Afghanistan in which Lara Logan asked a high ranking officer whether the US was winning the war. The question was odd, because the question isn't about winning and losing, but rather about justice and means. The point is that in America and increasingly in the rest of the world the focus placed on winning shortchanges the debate and encourages short-termism.

Aggressiveness and extremism

I don't agree totally agree with Mehdi Hasan on this, but the fact that I can't say he is just wrong, shows that he has a point:

On Thursday the US president said Pastor Jones's plans to burn the Qur'an would be a "recruiting bonanza" for al-Qaida. Yet he fails to recognise how the west's war in Afghanistan provides a similar boost to extremists – on both sides. The "enemy" in Afghanistan, concluded the IISS report released on Tuesday, is "incentivised by the presence of foreign forces". And inside the US the likes of Jones and rightwing Republican bigots, frothing at the mouth over the "Ground Zero mosque" take their cue from aggressive leaders like Blair, Bush and Obama – who send more and more troops to fight and die abroad, in faraway Muslim countries, while denying any link between Islamic militancy and western foreign policies.

When Karzai outsmarts Obama

Juan Cole asserts rightly that Karzai has beaten Obama:

Obama had tried and failed to dislodge Karzai by disparaging him, had opposed Karzai’s negotiations with insurgents, and had imposed on the reluctant Karzai and enormous new military occupation of his own power base in the Pashtun West.
Relations got so bad that a few weeks ago Karzai threatened to go over to to the Taliban.
This week in Washington, Obama finally backed down. He feted Karzai and made sure he felt wanted. He acquiesced in Kabul’s outreach to the insurgents. He reconfigured his troop escalation as helpful pressure on the guerrillas to force them to the negotiating table.

Obama is stuck in situation where he cannot win no matter almost no matter what he tries. It was a mistake to declare the essential nature of Afghanistan without making sure that Karzai was reliable or at the very least useful and that an escalation on the ground would further American interests.

Fighting and Dying for a mistake

I agree with Tom Engelhardt on this:

Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously?  Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England?  It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey.  Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.

I am reminded when I think of Afghanistan of John Kerry and of what he asked during his days as an anti-Vietnam activist "how do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" Remaining in Afghanistan is a mistake not because it is Vietnam for all wars are different, but because the war is not winnable. It takes political courage to admit it and to realize that not every single battle against terrorism has to become an armed conflict. Whatever NATO does in Afghanistan there will always be Talibans  and Al Qaeda. It cannot change that essential fact because what is happening on the ground isn't changing that reality is feeding the hatred against 'foreigners' because they cannot transform Afghanistan into Japan.

The world has fallen out of love with America

Henry Allen on what he sees as the death of the American century, which is the end of a time when America was beloved and when everybody wanted to be 'Americanized:

Barack Obama won the presidency with a campaign promising a bigger, better war next door in Afghanistan. As always, under the mandates of the dream, we would invade a country for nothing but its own good. This is the part people don't seem to get.
As in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, which American soldiers abandoned last Wednesday, five years after invading it to bring truth, justice and the American way to Afghans who responded by hating us.
We gave them money, all kinds of goodies. They hated us.
We begged them to let us build a road that would link them with the outside world. They hated the road. And when we didn't get the point, they blew away six members of the road-building crew.
They hated us so much that we had to bribe them to let us leave -- 6,000 gallons of fuel and a crane -- without killing us for the sheer joy of it.
We were foreigners. As it happens, many people hate foreigners. (That's why they call them "foreigners.")
People like foreigners only when they come in small numbers, spend money and leave; or when they come in armies, drive out other, even-more-detested foreigners and leave. I had tea once with an Indonesian village chief's wife. She remembered when the Japanese were cheered for freeing them from the Dutch, until they hauled Indonesian men off to labor camps, and then the islanders cheered the Americans for driving out the Japanese.
There is no special love for us. We have our unique virtues, and we have come closer than any other nation to fulfilling Jesus's command to love our enemies. But we are awakening from the dream.

The fact is that very few people like a big and powerful country when they perceive it as being menacing, authoritarian and arrogant. It's what, as sports fan,  I like to call the Yankees or the Serena Williams complex. People love underdogs. They stop loving winners when they believed that they win all because of some unfair advantage. In the Yankees case, the unfair advantage is believed to be money and the New York factor (I'm a Yankees hater by the way as are all 'good' Red Sox fan ought to be) and in the case of Serena Williams it is simply physicality, nature, which lead people to believe that she wouldn't be a tennis player if she was the size of Justine Henin.

In any case, I don't believe that America ought to be obsessed by the death of the American century, but rather with the necessity to make its policies, whether foreign or domestic reflect its values and the image of itself that it sells to the world. In short, America needs to be America once again not necessary to be loved and respected, but to remain itself instead of being solely preoccupied with remaining the best and on top by all means necessary.

'Women's rights' as a pitiful justification for wars

Johann Hari on the use of 'Women's rights' (I hate the expression by the way because it implies that women are so particular that Human rights aren't for them) to justify the Afghan war:

The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."

I'm always annoyed or amused depending on the eloquence of the ones making the argument when people argue with a straight face that a war is fought to liberate women when all one has to do is to look at the fact that women's bodies are still the subject of a vicious ideological battle in the US for example to see that 'men' are never going to fight for the rights of 'foreign' women to have the same rights that they have when they aren't willing to do the same in their own backyard.