Even though I still find it damned near impossible to read, I have been realizing that, contrary to its many claims of hipness, “THE NEW FOREIGN POLICY DOT COM” is a very good barometer of establishment thinking. (It’s what happens when you only hire establishment thinkers and writers.) That being said, establishment thinking on Afghanistan and Pakistan is just as terrible as it always has been—new administration and all. Only this time, it’s guys like Steven Walt and David Rothkopf who are still behaving like it’s 2002 all over again, only this time with even less clear thinking.
First, Steven Walt:
Our efforts in Central Asia are confounded by two fundamental problems. First, our understanding of Pakistani and Afghan society is limited, which makes it hard to know which groups or leaders to support and makes it virtually certain that any effort we undertake will generate lots of unintended consequences.
There is a lot to unpack there: assuming that we should be picking winners and losers from amongst the many brutal war criminals who happen to run things in Afghanistan itself demonstrates a “limited” understanding of the country; why we should be forcing any kind of leadership solution on Pakistan is totally lost on me; since both countries are democracies (at least in the sense that they have held mostly legitimate elections to choose their leaders), why is it even a question which leaders to support? If we believe our own rhetoric about freedom and democracy, we will support Karzai and Zadari until elections give us someone else to support.
But that such things are even questions is why there are “unintended” consequences. I would rather call them consequences born of ignorance. The rest of Walt’s post is of a similar bent: lots of pretty sounding theoretical discussions of the situation there, without any understanding of why these things that made sense six or seven years ago should not have at the time and definitely should not now—right down to his skepticism that we might actually need troops to push al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan to prevent future acts of terrorism on U.S. soil.
Rothkopf is a slightly different story:
America’s hand-picked man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, put those differences in stark focus with his decision to sign a new law that legalizes rape within marriage and prohibits women from venturing outside the house without the permission of their husbands. The law, deeply objected to by human rights groups and, one can only suppose, anyone with a brain or a heart, was characterized by Senator Humaira Namati, quoted in a story in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, as “worse than during the Taliban.”
Again, that he is surprised over this law (my friend Megan properly outlines just how patently and objectively offensive it really is) is probably reason enough not to trust his judgments about the situation and choices we face in Afghanistan. This is a country, remember, who sentenced a 23-year old journalism student to death for printing something off the Internet; that attempted to execute a man for converting to Christianity; that has, in fact, done very little to advance the status of women since the U.S. take over (the much-lauded construction and operation of girls’ schools has actually been at the hands of the U.S. and individual communities, and not the Kabul government).
Then again, this is a man who thought the Mujahideen are one of the worst U.S. allies in history. Don’t even get me started on that one (which is, again, riddled with inaccuracies and misconceptions about who they are, what we did to them, and who the Taliban are and who we allied ourselves with to defeat them).
But anyway, Rothkopf’s complaint, and seemingly everyone’s, about that odius law seems to be that it does not match with our idea of what constitutes human rights—right down to quoting opposition politicians who claim, without merit, that it is “worse than during the Taliban” (the Taliban’s women and religious laws were still far far far worse). What’s more, this petty outrage seems born of layers of misunderstanding of what contemporary Afghanistan actually is—the law, for example, is directed primarily at Shiites (think of the 15 year old Hazara girl who was raped and had her baby forcibly aborted by her mother and brother), and is not materially different than the normal experience of rural women anyway. The crime here is not that a law is being passed to normalize a routine practice; it is that this was a routine practice and we chose not to care about it in the first place.
Because our primary goal in the region—and we should be absolutely honest about this—is to destroy al-Qaeda. Now, I happen to believe that we can best do this by helping to create a stable, progressive-for-Afghanistan government. These things take time—you cannot reverse three decades of shock and fracture overnight, or even over a few years. Changing a society takes time, especially when large segments don’t want to change. Rather than hectoring them about how backward they are, we could maybe try relating to why this law seemed like a good idea in the first place—and then using persuasion, rather than petty moralistic finger-wagging, to convince them otherwise. As long as we act like the pursed-lip governess of the country, we’re not going to get many places.
Anyway, both of these guys are really smart, but they seem completely unable to escape from the bounds of the narrow policy set centered in DC. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it severely limits how they can react to these kinds of situations—and in the specific case of Afghanistan just has them spouting silly and pretty ignorant crap in the guise of serious thought. Lucky for them, I suppose, they are not alone: this is a problem endemic to the entire foreign policy establishment. In that sense, they were both good choices for Foreign Policy.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 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
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{ 1 comment }
Pssst “odious”