Some Hard Questions

The blog TomDispatch has some very important, very hard questions for Americans:

So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What’s the military’s skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe’s leading experts in good government anymore? And while we’re at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation’s capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can’t do it in Washington or Sacramento?

Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world’s leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan President Hamid Karzai into “a Winston Churchill who can rally his people,” as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal -- and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington? And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the “mayor” or “president” of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan?

There's more. Go read the whole posting.

This Afghanistan mess reminds me of the continuing stream of "new promises" and "new starts" in Vietnam. All the while the US government was secretly carrying out a bloody war of assassination within South Vietnam and subversion of governments all around the region. Hamid Karzai reminds me of the endless line of puppet leaders foisted by the US on the South Vietnamese after the US sponsored the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. The "pacification" of the South Vietnamese into "strategic hamlets" was the bright idea of the US. The US has a similar "bright idea" for Afghanistan with McChrystal's "nation building" in Afghanistan.

My unsophisticated opinion was that the US should have supplied weapons and training to South Vietnam for a couple of years (which it did) and when that country's leadership couldn't pull it together and defend itself, the US should have stopped the military assistance (say by 1964). In Afghanistan, the US was justified in bombing the hell out of the Taliban and helping the Northern Alliance take over, but it should have stopped at that (in early 2002) and issued a warning that harbouring any more Al Qaeda would bring back the bombing. This idiocy of "nation building" is a joke. And Tom Englehardt's blog posting makes it very clear: just why is a dysfunctional America trying to nurture "nation building"? It makes no sense. If you can't put your own house in order, why are you out trying to "fix" your neighbor's house?