NATION BUILDING IS A DISTRACTION IN THE MOSLEM WORLD
DIANA WEST
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1009/west102309.php3?printer_friendly
When it comes to Afghanistan, what separates President Barack Obama
and Gen. Stanley McChrystal?
Not much. Neither wants to destroy the Taliban — just tamp it down to
the point where an as-yet non-existent Afghan state can function.
Which is why — prediction time — McChrystal won’t quit when Obama
gives him fewer forces than McChrystal is asking for.
McChrystal’s assessment frankly states that what the general calls his
“new strategy” — an intensification of “population protection” at the
expense of “force protection” — is his top priority, not increased
troop levels. But this strategy is ignored in the debate, and
certainly by most conservatives, who only emphasize the need to “give
the general the forces he needs to win.” What it is that McChrystal
actually wants to win — namely, the support of the Afghan people — is
rarely mentioned.
And how to win that Afghan support? The man has a plan. It amounts to
a taxpayer-funded, military-implemented bribery scheme. As the New
York Times’ Dexter Filkins recently put it: “McChrystal’s plan is a
blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state
in Afghanistan, where one has never existed. … Even under the best of
circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years,
cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many
more American women and men. And that’s if it succeeds. ”
In other words, the Afghan “surge” under consideration is for “nation-
building,” not war-making.
But guess what? The United States of America already tried building a
modern state in Afghanistan — or, at least, building a state of
modernity in Afghanistan — and it just didn’t stick. And this was no
fly-by-night operation. University of Indiana professor Nick Cullather
describes the 30-plus years of sustained U.S. development in
Afghanistan as “an `integrated’ development scheme, with education,
industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single
controlling authority” — a massive dam project known as the Helmand
Valley Authority. As historian Arnold Toynbee observed in 1960: “The
domain of the Helmand Valley Authority has become a piece of America
inserted into the Afghan landscape.” And from the project’s beginning
in 1946 — designed by Morrison Knudson, builder of Hoover Dam, the
Golden Gate Bridge and Cape Canaveral — to 1979 when it ended, there
was no Taliban “insurgency” complicating the social work of nation-
building.
But this crucial episode of U.S.-Afghan history has been erased from
national consciousness, pricked only by the odd remember-when news
story. Of course, these historic U.S. efforts in Helmand Province —
the Taliban-spawning, opium region into which 4,000 U.S. Marines
“surged” this summer — have themselves been erased from Afghanistan,
which may explain the amnesia.
Still, for nation-building utopians such as Gen. McChrystal, those
from Left to Right who see different peoples and cultures as
interchangeable markers on a game board, reality never tempers the
fanaticism. A blind faith empowers believers both to see their utopian
visions and to block out the reasons they can never materialize — in
this case, the specifically Islamic reasons (Sharia) Afghanistan can
neither serve nor fulfill Western ends.
A similar blindness afflicted the Soviets in the USSR’s war on Afghan
“insurgents.” Christopher Andrew, citing KGB archives smuggled out of
the USSR by Vasili Mitrokhin in “The World Was Going Our Way,” writes:
“Islam became the unifying bond of opposition to the (Afghan Communist
Party) and its Soviet backers. Afghan resistance to the regime was
thus transformed into a jihad in defense of Islam whose significance
was grossly underestimated by the KGB. None of the reports noted by
Mitrokhin even mention the threat of jihad…” — a point I have made
about the McChrystal assessment, among all too many other U.S. policy
documents.
Once again, here lies the fatal flaw in our strategy. Like the doomed
Soviets, the United States and its Western allies ignore the threat of
jihad, a threat now on a global level unimagined in 1979 when Soviet
tanks rolled into Kabul. “We miniaturize the challenge,” writes Andrew
C. McCarthy at National Review Online. “Thus, the war is said only to
be in Afghanistan. The ‘challenge’ is framed as isolating a relative
handful (of extremists) rather than confronting the fact that tens of
millions of Muslims despise the West.” And even worse, the fact that
tens of millions of Muslims work to assuage their feelings by
following and imposing Islamic law across the West.
In other word, nation-building in the Islamic world is a distraction
from nation-saving in the Western one.
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