Recognizing The Limits

Like the American press, the foreign press is also fixated on the economic wreck unfolding before our eyes. A brief survey of the articles at Watching America makes that clear. Coming in at a close second is the presidential election because the two issues are often linked. But more is going on in the world, things that also affect Americans, often in very direct ways. One of those stories is the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both initiated by the Bush administration.

To my way of thinking, all three of the top stories are linked in various, often subtle ways. Surely incurring hundreds of billions in debt to wage the two wars has had some impact on our economy, and the focus on funding the Pentagon's wish list has exacerbated the problem even further. Only the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon's favored private contractors have benefited by the two wars.

Now we're beginning to realize that the war in Afghanistan, the "good war," is going badly, so badly that at least some in the British government have admitted that the war is simply not winnable. Rami G. Khouri (yes, him again) provided a pretty solid analysis of why we are going to fail in Afghanistan and he does so with an eye toward the American elections.

The two American presidential candidates both have recognized the dangers in Afghanistan and seem willing to raise the tempo and scale of the war there, perhaps in line with a slow retreat from Iraq. So this is a good moment to raise the issues in Afghanistan that were not sufficiently discussed about Iraq before the Anglo-American invasion of that country in 2003.

The basic question that needs answering is whether foreign military power is a credible, legitimate and effective means to address political violence that is anchored in local socio-political issues and historical problems of state-building.

To their credit, American military commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have regularly spoken about the limits of military power. The problem is that their civilian leaders, the generally mediocre and often ignorant politicians to whom they report, are not as aware of the limits of military force. The idea of sending tens of thousands of new troops to Afghanistan to break through to victory is much too simplistic a response to a situation that defies military solutions. The problem for anyone in the US or other countries that sends troops to Afghanistan is that leaving the status quo as it is also is unacceptable, given the power of tribal leaders and military forces that rely on income from narcotics, the limited impact of the central government, and the continued sanctuary available to Al-Qaeda and other militant groups in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions.

There is no easy solution that will transform Afghanistan into, let's say, Belgium. Western leaders should somehow adjust to the fact that the goals of stable statehood, legitimate governance, economic prosperity and overall security will come from an indigenous process of historical evolution anchored in native priorities and interests. It will not come from forceful interventions by American, British and other foreign armies, no matter how many sophisticated ways they have to find and kill enemy targets.

The simplest reason for this is that in history nationalism trumps imperialism, and defense trumps offense. Foreign military interventions and invasions will always spark resistance that is fierce and sustained because it blends the two indomitable elements of personal humiliation and nationalistic self-assertion. Historical factors also play a role in countries like Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan that were born in conditions that were either traumatic or colonialist, and did not allow for a natural percolation of legitimate nation-building elements.

Introducing foreign armies into such situations only makes the underlying tensions worse. The foreign armies always leave one day, and the locals resume the two dynamics that have defined their lands and people for millennia: contestation of power in a national context, or negotiating coexistence in a tribal context. [Emphasis added]

We soon learned that George Bush either didn't know or didn't care about the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims and what that meant to the social fabric of Iraq. It's now become clear that the administration also didn't have a clue as to the nature of tribal connections and competition in this area of the world and what that would mean in any foreign invasion. And it's not like the administration didn't have any way to find out: the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the not-so-distant past gave plenty of evidence of the difficulties involved when even a military super-power bullies its way into such a situation.

Unfortunately, the two men who want to lead the next administration haven't demonstrated that either of them have any sense of the problem. Both still insist on a calculus for "winning," with each claiming to have the better numbers. Neither has yet learned the hard lesson that there are indeed limits to the effective use of military force. Hopefully shortly after January 20, 2009, whoever will be sitting in the Oval Office will have that important lesson drilled into him.