09.28.09

Afghanistan

Posted in Foreign Affairs, Current Events at 11:50 am by diantus

Afghanistan has returned to the headlines.  General McChrystal has come forward and told the president with little ambiguity that without additional resources, our armies will be unable to hold onto that country.  Almost immediately analysts on both sides started coming down for either withdrawal, or for a major revision of strategy and tactics - neither of which would involve stabilizing Afghanistan.  Of course, missing from these debates are serious considerations of either the future of American foreign policy or the future of the Afghan people.  For the sake of all parties, we cannot simply return home.  Like it or not, our short attention span and proclivity for war fever have indeed tied our fate to that of unhappy Afghanistan.  What is needed in a dramatic shift in our perception of the conflict to one that fits the conditions of the country and our relationship to it.
However, there are a couple of claims that needs to be dealt with to understand why we are misreading the nature of this conflict.  The first that deserves some attention is the idea that Afghanistan will somehow turn out just like Vietnam.  The Vietnamese, so it goes, also unconquerable, withstood the might of American military force and fought us to a virtual standstill while driving public opinion over the precipice and against any further involvement.  Afghanistan, it is popularly believed, has a great deal in common with Vietnam.  Of course - Vietnam is not Afghanistan.  Vietnam, a country with a long and proud tradition of ethnic and national identity was a nation accustomed to centralized government.  They possessed cultural traditions that made easy room for a system of organized rule that could be translated into a nation state.
The problem in Vietnam was never that the “borders were too porous” or “the people to tribal to be ruled.”  If that were the case, the communists never would have commanded such broad support.  The Vietminh were a nationalist movement attempting to to secure an independent future for their country.  The Vietnam War was never a question of how much force, or how best to secure public support; it was a question of how to disassociate ourselves from the legacy of colonialism while fighting an anti-colonial movement; an effectively impossible task.  The war was initiated under false pretenses against an enemy that we shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place - we misread the nature of the Vietnamese communist movement.  The war in Vietnam turned into a campaign to reassert western dominance in a region trying to break free from such things.  We should not have been supporting the French in the first place, and would have done better to foster a more peaceful transition to independence.  Hindsight, of course, is 20-20.

Afghanistan is a wholly different sort of war.  There is not now, nor has there ever really been, an Afghan state to speak of.  The tribal coalitions function in a swirling mass of shifting alignments and temporary unions while different factions fight for control of opium money.  The Taliban never really controlled Afghanistan - they lived in Kabul, collected revenue from local farmers, which they kept in a box, and used to buy old soviet weaponry.  They ruled only through the approval of local warlords who controlled most of the country, which limited any real power they might have possessed.  More like an anarchistic feudalism.

If fact, I have very real doubts as to whether or not the group we are fighting today in Afghanistan can rightly be called the Taliban, or if they are simply a collection of semi-organized, neo-feudal and islamic interests that will go back to killing each other as soon as we leave.  Needless to say, pretending that we are working against an enemy with much of a centralized command structure or even a set of rational unifying principals is probably unhelpful (though I will grant that there is increasing evidence that they may be developing both of these as the conflict continues).
Regardelss, lumping all concerned under the name “Taliban” is useful only in newspapers, and doesn’t make it true.  Even assuming that they are the same group who once claimed to rule,  those who advocate withdrawal or draw down want to suggest that the Taliban has learned its lesson; that they would never allow a group like al Qaeda to re-establish itself in Afghanistan.  However, even if the Taliban was able to stabilize the country, and even if they didn’t share al Qaeda’s political and social agenda, would certainly be unable to keep them out or under control.  However, we cannot pretend that 8 years of exile to the wild borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan have helped the remnants of the Taliban learn to respect the power of the Americans and the importance of good government.  Moreover, one cannot simply hand the reigns of leadership over to anyone, and expect everything to be suddenly fine.  Afghanistan is better understood as a sea of anarchy with islands of enforced calm.

No, we should be looking at other examples of conquest to understand how best to deal with Afghanistan.  I use the word conquest deliberately of course.  Nation states are created - typically through conflict or at least in that context.  Any monopoly on law, order, and the use of force is earned, not granted by US or UN fiat.  Our objective in Afghanistan must be to establish a monopoly on political power so that it can be relinquished to the Afghan people in a timely and orderly fashion.  This means co-opting local leaders, eliminating resistance, and setting up the institutions of centralized government.  The example to be examined is the one set by the British in India when they successfully established a centralized government over a number of minor kingdoms and unified the territory under a small and lightweight colonial administration.
The catch of course, is that he process will likely take decades, and America will have to be willing to cede power once the Afghans are ready to take it.  At least one generation of Afghan children will need to grow up under relative stability before any sort of democratic civil society can be created, and the international community will need to pour in billions of aid and assistance.  The US, as the leader of this coalition and de-facto leader of the UN, needs to take charge and stop trying to pass the buck if the Afghans are to have a future.
Nation building is not a quick and easy processes.  The institutions that make for stable government evolve over many years, and cannot simply be imposed.  No person is born with an innate love or desire for democracy, but they can learn to have one, once they see the benefits.  Democracy must be actively desired.  It is not a passive creed.  For the Americans, we must decide if our great nation, with all of its power and wealth, can actually make the world a better place, help others to gain the benefits of freedom as we know them, and stand for something other that the simple glorification of our own names.  It is up to our leaders to act responsibly and help the public understand that.

07.09.09

Our Crazy Northern Neighbors

Posted in Foreign Affairs, Politics at 9:16 pm by diantus

The endless swirl of words and ideas that orbit the issue of North Korea consistently fail to give either policy makers or laymen any sense of how to make progress.  We are always told to examine the issue from the perspective of the North Korean leadership.  However, what is consistently misrepresented is exactly where the North korean leadership gets that perspective from.  Experts don’t know much about North Korea, and they mask that ignorance under a vast store of historical precedents that don’t exactly add to a coherent foreign policy.
North Korea faces a very unique set of problems, and is unlike any regime in history.  It is natural to compare it to Stalinist states like East Germany or Romania under Ceausescu.   These closed societies, based nominally on the political system invented by Lenin and Stalin, and inspired by the writings of Karl Marx were ostensibly international and the promise of material improvement that Communist ideology was intended to promote.  When this improvement failed to manifest and the undeniable wealth of the western world became clear, the systems lost their basic source of legitimacy: the idea that things were getting better.  Communism came apart in Europe because it was unable to make good on its promises.
Enter North Korea.  Like the states of Eastern Europe, North Korea used the appellation “communist” to describe its political and economic system.  To some extent, there is no denying that an effort has been made to communize certain elements of their society.  However, given the absence of a national program to collectivize agriculture (a staple of most communist regimes), and the state’s encouragement of private markets in the countryside, the genuineness of the DPRK’s ideological commitment is dubious at best.  North Korea is promising something else to its people, and it isn’t economic progress and equality for all.
Instead, we might do better to understand North Korea as a closed nationalist/fascist state dedicated to a unique ideological and racial identity - one that is applicable only to their special circumstances.  The North Korean leadership has worked very hard to paint itself as the defenders of pure Korean-ness.  South Korea, they would argue has been corrupted by outside influences.  Instead theirs is a system that takes it’s cue from a highly volatile history, and a sense of helplessness at the hands of  outside forces.  The fragility of their self-perception helps to keep them as closed a society as they are.  The South isn’t free.  They have become corrupted.  They yearn to be more Korean.  North Korea believes itself to be the last bastion of the real Korean identity.
One major problem exists for North Korea.  The existence of South Korea.  South Korea is bigger, far wealthier, and more militarily sophisticated than the North, and North Korea’s leadership and population knows it.  The image of the South’s government as little more than a puppet of the west, and its population as pinned under the imperialist heel of the west is losing traction.  The development of North Korea’s “military first” policy is the last gasp of a political system seeking to justify its existence to its own people.  This is why North Korea proceeds with its nuclear program regardless of the threats of further isolation from the international community, and invests ever more in the military despite the horrendous cost to her people.  Every “victory” no matter how narrow, gives the leadership some small success to help the appearance of legitimacy at home.  Apparently this strategy is working, as there is little evidence of serious internal unrest in the North despite the ongoing crisis in the production of food and other essentials.
I don’t think that North Korea expects to win their 60 year struggle with the South.  But as more and more of its ideological foundation falls apart,it is likely to become increasingly erratic and unstable.  Worse, the nation is now facing a leadership crisis as Kim Jong Il becomes increasingly sickly and unable to head up his government.  The system has demonstrated that it is economically unsustainable.  How much longer can it maintain itself on increasingly rocky ideological footing?  In other words, the DPRK is under incredible internal pressure to deal with its problems.  The reactions of western governments thousands of miles away aren’t their most pressing concern.  The much harder question for the rest of the world to answer is how best to approach North Korea in order to keep this situation from boiling over into a wider war.  So long as we continue to make the mistake that the North is either approaching the world as a Communist state, and that internal pressures are somehow less important than external, there is no way we can understand what is happening.