Spencer Ackerman is right: this Weekly Standard piece about exporting Anbar kind of jumps the gun a bit. Indeed, it is all well and good to talk about how AQI pissed people off in Anbar, Iraq. But, Spencer asks, are the situations really that similar?
I’ll quickly answer, “absolutely not,” and highlight one thing: Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Joshua D. Goodman can’t seem to bring themselves to ask any actual Afghans if that plan is a sound one. Like everyone else, they have been so laser-focused on Iraq they can’t see outside it… right down to asking Iraqis if their uprising should be shipped a thousand miles east. What about any of the Afghans who would have to actually execute this uprising? Well, it worked in Anbar. I daresay Spencer is being far too kind with this sort of arrogance.
As for Afghanistan’s specific experience… recall that in 2002 our biggest problem was bands of unaccountable militias and their warlords controlling vast areas of the country. We spent a lot of time, effort, and money to either disarm, disband, or integrate those forces into the Afghan government. While in a few limited cases the idea might work, it is fraught with so many Afghan-specific problems, I’m forced to wonder if anyone with a deep knowledge of the country thinks it a good idea. Certainly no Western expert. Christian may have been a bit too early in his obit of the idea.
But this gets at an entirely larger phenomenon, beyond the mere annoyance at ambulance-chasing pundits seeking continued employment in Afghanistan. The United States has a particularly tinny ear when it comes to Afghanistan—over the last seven years they’ve been called “tribal,” “backward,” “terror-supporting,” and “victims.” Very rarely are Afghans called “people,” regular people who want to raise their kids and be left alone. It sounds maudlin, but think about that—all the exotic-sounding words to describe things like honor, and duty, and family, and dignity… they get in the way. They result in us treating them like animal-servants on our bases, like regular animals in the countryside, and in otherwise smart people thinking a podunk Arab tribal elder has anything to say about Afghanistan in the slightest.
Small wonder we are losing the Pashtuns. We haven’t realized they’re people yet.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust