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COMMENTARY
February 29, 2012
Come to grief
When one cannot trust one's own allies not to murder one, one is in a fix. It is not an unusual fix, as the history of this planet goes, and particularly the history of Afghanistan. But the circumstances in which two American officers at the Interior Ministry in Kabul lost their lives on Saturday were discouraging. The assailant seems to have been an Afghan police intelligence officer. That says something. That he was able to escape after the shootings says more.The incident was one of many which followed news of the Koran burnings at the Bagram airfield. That event, from what I can gather, was reported in detail within Afghanistan. I am not being droll here: I mean the fact that the tomes were tossed in the "burn pit" by mistake, having already been defaced by Taliban prisoners who were using them to pass messages, was widely circulated. To the western mind, this should make a difference in the perceived profanation: intention always counts. But to the mind of many Afghan people, quite capable of stoning a woman to death for adultery after she has been raped, it made no difference. Nor, dare I add, could President Barack Obama's public apology over the affair make any difference: for it was the kind of profanation for which apologies are not accepted. Obama, consciously doing "the right thing" to defuse tensions, is consistently out of his depth in dealing with these matters; for despite his own Islamic background in Kenya, and Indonesia, he is a product of Ivy League America. George W. Bush would have done the same. It is pointless to rail against a worldview that differs from ours profoundly. One cannot reason with people who accept none of our premises, and to the point, none of our inherited western notions about justice and mercy. The people in Afghanistan who even begin to understand our moral categories, remain a tiny minority. And note: we are in their country. To the "traditional" Afghan mind, regardless of ethnic-linguistic group, the West presents moral horror. As Laura King, a Los Angeles Times reporter, describes, it is a vision of malls, smartphones, girls with gel-spiked hair, restaurants full of foreigners drinking alcohol, where the sexes freely mix, and who knows what going on behind the walls of the guarded compounds. News of the Koran burnings fed into that, along with recent video of U.S. marines urinating on Taliban corpses. That news was presented by female anchors on television, plastered in western makeup and with no coverings for their hair. Forget implicit western feminism: Afghan women as well as men are appalled by such scenes, which convey to the received Afghan world view a destructive immodesty. As one who travelled fairly extensively through Afghanistan as a young man, in the days when it was still a kingdom, I grimace at the decade-long slap in the face we have, unintentionally, administered. For the "democratization" of Afghanistan is not associated with "higher moral values," but with libertine demoralization. It rides a magic carpet of cheap consumerism, itself alien and misunderstood. Afghans, enmired in the unending catastrophe that began even before the Soviet invasion of 1979, when "westernized," secular leftists first seized control in Kabul, feel twisted and shorn. They had no preparation for "post-modernity." Things like the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, inconceivable in the Afghan past, were themselves products of this titanic clash. An essentially tribal society, whose mores developed organically through countless centuries, encountered the black hole of post-modern nihilism. And on that analogy from physics: those not absorbed were spun off at the most extraordinary angles. As it is the 29th of February, let me perform an uncustomary retraction. Looking back over the history of the last 10 years, through which I have been writing these columns, I'm now persuaded of a major misjudgement. While I supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq - still do, and "would do it again" without qualms - I see ever more clearly that the "Bush doctrine" of exporting "democracy" was an unnecessary mistake. Our interests in these countries were military; we had dangerous enemies to destroy. That was achieved with dispatch by U.S. and allied forces: with remarkably few casualties all round. We had a continued interest in preventing the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, and in the destruction of Islamist cells in Iraq. All fine and good: these were necessary adventures, for the defence of legitimate western interests. I was never comfortable with the grand bureaucratic project of "nation building" that followed. But while I hinted at my objections, I nevertheless conferred the benefit of the doubt on an American-led project, predicated on post-War successes in Germany and Japan. In retrospect, the circumstances were so utterly different, and the times so utterly changed, that the mission was unachievable, and could only come to grief. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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