I have a new piece up in the Columbia Journalism Review, discussing how badly our public commentators are failing us, in this case on the issue of bribing Pashtuns. A snippet:
There is a dark irony to the faintly racist idea that Afghans are unprincipled mercenaries available to the highest bidders, especially given the rampant panic in Washington at the inescapable conclusion that Hamid Karzai stole his own reelection…
The obsession with “tribe” and our apparently limitless funds for bribing them has its roots in a stereotype of Afghanistan, a false mythography that crowns them peerless warriors driven by xenophobia and locked into rigid cultural norms we’ll never understand.
Comments, as always, are welcomed.
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
{ 23 comments }
Perhaps we should be supporting the locals to tell us whats going on, so we stop looking at 100 year old texts and Cold War strategies?
Some thoughts: http://smallworldnews.tv/2009/10/06/afghans-need-better-aid-transparency/
Great article
It strikes me that complaining about the ignorance of pundits about Afghanistan realities is pissing up a rope. Since when have Americans collectively EVER taken the time to understand other cultures? Quite frankly, most Americans don’t understand their own culture(s). I can’t even understand my own daughter’s fascination with Facebook, much less the cultural chaos that is now Afghanistan and central Asia.
At least I’ll admit it. You won’t hear it from people who are determined to stir up foreign hornets’ nests for ideological and financial purposes.
As it is, we have our own mercenaries available to the highest bidders (called Congresspersons) to worry about. Racism has nothing to do with such a classification of persons; you find liars, cheats, thieves, and frauds in every culture.
Ex 18A,you are right on the money, man.Only brave people can appreciate a person who calls a spade a spade, and your posting should be read by all those who care.That said it is undeniable that alot of evil is practiced in Afghanistan mostly due to their practice of evil islam and when you are infected ,as the Afghans are, with the virus of islam,your brain cannot do things right just as when a compuetr is infected with a virus,it cannot function properly.And this is why Afghans are so miserable and this is why theu need help so the rest of the world is left in peace.This is why,got it??!!
That’s true enough, although I, unlike a lot of Americans, don’t share the view that Islam is “evil.” Perhaps that’s because my geographic “area of expertise” as a military officer was the Middle East and my language Arabic. There’s much about Islam to admire.
Be that as it may, it is not clear to me that fighting Salafist Islam in Afghanistan and other Islamic countries will leave the rest of the world in peace. I do think that American support for Israel and American greed for Middle Eastern oil has a lot to do with our current problems; we’re certainly not making things better by our largely imperialistic presence in the Middle East or Central Asia, any more than the British or Russian presence did.
Quite frankly, I think things will continue to deteriorate whether we’re there or not, for example, for ecological and environmental reasons.
Further, we have our own versions of religious/political fundamentalism in the US (the Christian right, neo-nazi/white supremicists, anti-immigration/anti-abortion radicals, etc.) and I believe that these right-wing groups pose a far greater threat to this country than Al-Qaeda ever could. The United States Government does not seem much interested in dealing with these groups.
In short, any people has to solve its own problems, and to the degree that we are ostensibly solving problems elsewhere, we’re not solving them here.
Further, we have our own versions of religious/political fundamentalism in the US (the Christian right, neo-nazi/white supremicists, anti-immigration/anti-abortion radicals, etc.) and I believe that these right-wing groups pose a far greater threat to this country than Al-Qaeda ever could.
Uh, seriously dude? Remember September 11th?
Intel Trooper
That’s a non sequitur, dude. I also remember the KKK and anti-civil rights violence of the 60s.
Ex 18A
Americans have for too long seen the little people of other nations through their gun sights. In Vietnam VC was “Mr. Charley” and “our” Viets were “gooks.” Even generals spoke of “the Vietnamese,” referring to the Northern invaders of South Vietnam. But the fate that befell that outpost in Afghanistan last week may well raise a lot of questions about what we understand at the command level about COIN. I recall a lot of CAP and MAT teams in the same situation and they were not overrun because by then the PFs/RFs were committed to resist the “Vietnamese” from the North. Afghans have also no choice but somehow to survive. Yet, the pundits were calling the Vietnam War lost. It is here that “pundits” make their living, being declarative instead of analytical. I recall one network’s bureau chief complaining about all the Olympic size swimming pools and bowling alleys for soldiers at the Bien Hoa super-base. That guy was proven by the DoD investigators to be receiving his payroll in dollars, changing it on the black-market and paying his employees in piasters. Today he’s still a big mouth looking down on the mere mortals in combat. But truth be told, one should read the NY REVIEW OF BOOKS and take note of how the whole media was worked after 9/11. NEVER did it take note of the fact that if the rules set by the FDA in the 1970s to a) make the pilot’s cabin of airliners impenetrable and b) to put two sky-marshals on every airliner, 9/11 would never have happened. Indeed, Mr. Atta flew back and forth coast to coast and saw the pilot’s cabin ever open before he submitted his master plan to his masters. So, 4 planes were taken over within ten minutes each. Yet, the day after, on a network TV show, an airline exec explained that the pilot’s cabin door is kept open “because people in First Class pay a lot for that ticket so they deserve to see that someone human is flying this thing.” His interviewer let him slip by; after all, commercial issues were at stake. So we painted an image of alQaeda as a giant, not us as dumb midgets for allowing the airlines to greedily violate the rules. Now we continue to fear bin Laden, though Bush told us that “I don’t care about him” and do very little to secure our domestic vulnerabilities. None of the pundits really let be known what is the level of competence of our Wash DC massive bureaucracies, despite spectacular leaks like to them like “Curveball,” because today’s great scoop will deny you any more tomorrow and, hey, they have to seem all-knowing every day so they depend on kissy insiders.
The Ambassador Joe Wilson case is an interesting case-in-point. This man first went public on Iraq because he loved Poppy Bush. So on the urging of Bush 41, he went out to say that, NO, we are not invading Iraq because we have too much to do in Afghanistan. Under Cheney’s orders, Scooter Libby went to work poisoning the grapevine with rumors about Wilson’s motivations and the involvement of his CIA wife. It was only meant to be that typical Wash DC underground spring of poisoned rumors designed to toxify Wilson without his even knowing it. Alas, Novak needed material for one of his scoopy columns so he blew the secret to the surface.
Today, the internet makes freedom of speech a lot more real but a lot less credible. Most of us who post do NOT post to tell you “this is it” but rather to urge you to “look into this.” Yet people are lazy and media is scoop hungry so they go with stuff they never confirmed or keep silent after confirmation so they will be given something uniquely scoopy in exchange. We should not confuse these overpaid “opinion molding” Wash DC pundits whose first priority is keeping themselves overpaid with the hard working journalists putting their lives on the line but never getting a byline. The real tragedy is that, unlike during Vietnam, academia is keeping mum in fear of losing grants or wanting “terrorism” grants for pro-Gov pontifications in a vacuum. So the old “teach-in” system where MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE where debate was the rule instead of polarized monologue as now by blog owners has polarized the population. As a result, in the words of one guy,” blogging is a lot of people writing for a few readers.” The disconnect syndrome of Americans means that blogging is subsistence survival at best unless you get a big grant by a partisan sugar daddy.
A lot of VERY GOOD STUFF is out there and this is a wonderful site, agree or disagree. There are many good sites like this. Alas, people are inured by all the polarized commentaries and the mainstream media’s dirty dealing to compete with it. Since “it ain’t my kid going to Iraq/Afghanistan” there’s no incentive to laboriously go through all the punditry. That’s too bad because since 2003, the Bush ship of state totally leaked and one could write history quite accurately by sifting through the tons of material.
Please note that rarely is media output analysis of greater depth than the official stuff. A lot of guys and GALS go to theater to pick up handouts from command that are illegal for the Pentagon to distribute at home. Suddenly these pundits become experts on what the Taliban is thinking without ever looking face to face at a Taliban. The “think-tanks” have made this a horrible misrepresentation. So people are just tuned out, as Obama will find out the hard way, because the pundits have unfortunately turned off the people to their duty to be informed as Americans. Punditry is the worst enemy of analysis because it only gets paid on the basis of convincing millions that “this is it and I know IT.”
Ex 18A: There is no “anti-civil rights violence” (outside the scope of criminal activity) going on now, so what’s your point?
I second “IntelTrooper 10/7/2009 at 1:59 pm” comments to Ex 18A.
I have never felt threatened by religious Christians in America. I like religious people, from all religions, actually.
“Brian 10/6/2009 at 12:48 pm” Nice comment.
“There is a dark irony to the faintly racist idea that Afghans are unprincipled mercenaries available to the highest bidders” Nicely put Joshua. Unfortunately, ethnocentric “faintly racist ideas” seem to be a major challenge for westernized societies (including perhaps to a lesser degree westernized people of local descent who live in developing countries.)
I have seen Americans eat their racism without hesitation. So I don’t think that’s the issue. I think, being moms and dads that go in intel blind, language deaf and cuture dumb they are scared for their own families and easily confused. If Taliban reached out to them the way VC did to US soldiers, you might get a lot of sympathetic vets coming home as happened in Vietnam with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Most of them really cared about how we Americans were hurting Vietnamese peasants that we feared. 9/11 can make one hateful just so long. Watch, you’ll see a lot of guys who go back there to do NGO work in a couple of years. But a lot of pundits are for profit blah blahs and that causes them to become professional American jingoists. Just ask a lot of Afghnas who lived here in the 1980s. People were extremely sympathetic.
DE Teodoru, I wasn’t just talking about Americans. People from other countries are often worse. At least GIs are more intellectually humble, and don’t think they have all the answers. Because of this, they are less “racist” than many know it all American academics.
I agree that many currently serving GIs will likely work for NGOs in the future.
Two world wars have exhausted European patriotism and militarism. Sure, go to, let us say, the European Neuroscience Conventions and you can see French neurobiologists pooh-pooh the posters of German scientists or visa-versa stemming purely from nationalist bias, but you will not see that expressed as marshal tendency. So the young Europeans who enlist are not always, as in America, country boys who want to see the world and look at it with intellectual humility as you said. I cannot tell you how much affection and compassion for Vietnamese I saw expressed by American foot soldiers in Vietnam, even as the peasants stood mum while GIs walked into booby traps. Frustrated and enraged, many GIs just understood that these peasants couldn’t afford to warn them. Indeed, I keep seeing behind my eye lids the American GIs that gave me chocolate bars as a kid in DP camps post-WW II. The problem is those for whom the war is not a tactical reality, as, for example, some officers for whom it is a careerist strategic abstraction instead. And still, as I said, most US soldiers now are moms and dads that fear that the next step may leave behind only widows and orphans back home. Thrown into a guerrilla war intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb, they are more afraid than hateful, just like so many of the Russians there I saw in the last war. The frustration of seeing your buddy blown up and you can’t communicate can turn you into a stone cold killer. Because NATO troops are not, as rule, every-day-Joes as are US soldiers, you see, as you said, arrogance covering confusion makes for destructive cover-up, just as we saw in German soldiers under occupation back then. This is why I think that what’s needed now is a GRANPA CORPS of retired old men with useful skills whose age provides a very different image from that of scared and confused younger soldiers asking village elders stupid tactical intel questions through an interpreter. Watch FRONTLINE about Afghanistan Tuesday on PBS at 9 PM to see what I mean. Unarmed old men coming to live in the villages to share their skills with the Afghan people will be seen through local customs differently than armed and confused young men. Our lives are over, we are as good as dead, living our last days eating today our grandkids’ lunch of tomorrow as pension. But in contributing what we have to offer as volunteers (we need no salary because we all have pensions) we might attain an initial benefit-from-doubt that would not be rendered to a unit of armed young men. If we behave in the old way by which our generation was raised, right there we will acquire 10 points in common with the elders of the villages we visit. Age does have its prerogatives in less modern states and what we have to offer as retired volunteers with skills will be far less suspect than empty promises made by psyops soldiers. So, do you think a low-cost, straight forward GRANDPAS CORPS would help in the civilian side of the struggle rather than young men who’d rather be elsewhere starting a career?
I like the GRANDPAS CORPS a lot. You are right that Afghans and older Asian cultures in general would be receptive to a GRANDPA Corps. They would be an ideal “civilian” surge. Getting civilians from China, India, Indonesia (if Indonesia is possible) and other countries would also be positive. Finally, so would bringing foreign woman who could interact with Afghan woman. Interestingly enough, this was a common request among Iraqi men (American woman civilians who could interact with their woman.)
The question is how to bring this about? I don’t understand why Obama isn’t demanding that Russia, China and India play a bigger more positive role? Why he isn’t demanding that they send a civilian surge, and billions of dollars in additional economic grants? Why isn’t Obama taking advantage of prior offers from India and Russia to train and equip the ANSF? {I mean trainers, not emdedded combat advisors for the ANSF, which might be viewed with more suspicion by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.}
Anan, thank you for the dialogue, I think it the best way for those who care to do something useful through the internet.
Obama is obviously reacting in retraction from the war. For Obama the issue is whether we will allow Iraq/Afghan struggles to be the expeditionary (remember we attacked both) millstones around America’s neck that keeps our economy prisoner of Chinese bankers. The vacuum created by US presence contraction will suck in all of Afghanistan’s neighbors, not necessarily with troops, for none would feel safe with an aggressive Jihadi system next door. The difference is that, knowing each other well, they would better mix diplomacy and force than our negotiator, whose Dayton Accord leaves a lot to be desired. The US has totally discredited itself with the Afghans and so must transit out in order to make room for the neighbors to fill the vacuum. But taking the lead in the manufacturing cities project would be a great way to compensate for the mess of the last 8 years.
As for the Grandpa Corps it is easier than you think, for they would only go where they are wanted and more or less secure. They can find channels for communicating the arrangement and would serve as buffer between ISAF and the locals, being, in effect, guests of the locals. The more you structure it the more baggage the project carries as a psyops stunt by ISAF. Far more important is to get all sides to declare acceptance of them as guests rather than they come on a truck waving one faction’s flag or another.
As for the cities, population control is achieved in them while they go up, with life-style changes for the construction crews just as the buildings go up. The problem is to coordinate the job market, the educational and logistic lifeblood in advance. People that are busy building something are too busy to engage in Jihad. And people who built something that looks more like a dream than the dread reality that was all their lives will not allow strangers to come in and wreck it. There is no better proof that the fact that the VCI never got to work the refugees in Saigon and other cities during Tet 1668 after losing them from the countryside. It took a total infiltration and invasion of forces from OUTSIDE and that failed due to lack of infrastructure. This was Le Duc Tho’s analysis in 1984, insisting that the war was all North Vietnamese and that the VC were a mere “nuisance” to Thieu. Right now people don’t want to step ahead of their struggle to survive in order to commit to strangers that are just as likely to make things not work and leave. Urban centers that are capitalized to make a real economy where things are made, wages are payed and reabsorbed with goods that give the cities added value could be controlled enough as of square one in construction to be smooth flowing enough to attract the >50% of Afghanistan under 25 y/o that is vulnerable to Taliban recruitment. They must be given a future that’s good enough and sure enough to get them to both work hard while studying and acquiring skills but also defending the project that is their future. Manufacturing cities have historically proven to be the only way such revolution can occur. The idea is not to do it in as a corrupt a way as it was done in Saudi Arabia, for example, where so much goes for corruption that there are no reserves for when oil drops in price. You can’t protect farmers, especially when they plant illicit crops that feed crime and insurgents. There’s too much down time in a rural setting and too many superfluous people. A vibrant urban center that demands concurrent education as a requirement for employment creates new cultures that are immiscible in the old chaotic force-driven rural ones. If Komer were alive, God bless him, he could tell you how to do it. But his documents for how CORDS absorbed the urbanized Viets into a commercial environment are available. The commitment we must take is not to quit this project when we lose military interest in Afghanistan, as we did with South Vietnam, and to constantly plug it into profitable markets. Above all, we must avoid the extreme– many 0000000 after the number– corrupt American and Western corporations given grants to do the construction and maintenance as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. No Afghan, as was the case in Vietnam, could steal a dollar of US aid unless his American partner in crime got $5. Liability must be severe. Tribalism and warlordism could collapse in this urban center within a decade. Anthropological studies done since the 1950s show that once urbanized, the generation that came in as children would never be able to adapt to rural life again. So if you start this you must commit to seeing it through for over a decade. However, you would not have all these soldiers using excess firepower out of fear but you would have well paid and trained Afghan police forces (whose families are kept abroad in US and Europe until it is safe for them to return) that impose the rule of law through far less “kinetic” and costly measures. It’s easy on paper but in implementation is very hard. But not as hard as the current mindless approach that depends on commanders who follow some foreign algorithms with no understanding of the local situation because they are intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb. Like bad surgeons, they don’t recognize their limits and, when they fail, they deem regaining their reputation as more important than saving the patient. And still, they talk a lot about “a new strategy,” yet from their proposals it is clear that they failed to analyze what went wrong and why. It is like a surgeon never going back to surgical texts to see what he did wrong, instead calling changing the color of the drapes and scrubs “a strategy change” instead of looking at surgical manuals to see how the operation might be done correctly.
These guys aren’t just whistling Dixie.
http://www.splcenter.org/index.jsp.
One of the most important things I accomplished while on active duty was kicking neo-nazis out of the Army, including Special Forces, whenever I found them. And I found them more often than it appears IntelTrooper and Anan would admit.
That’s the point, dudes.
Ex 18A:
White people playing soldier in the forest because they think the government might try to come get them doesn’t constitute a movement that has killed 3,000 Americans here in the US and hundreds abroad.
Were you focused on kicking Hispanic, Black or Asian racists out of the Army too? Or are did you just focus on neo-Nazis because they were easy to spot?
Since Ranger haircuts and naked upper lips were de rigeur among SF at Bragg, it was impossible as a practical matter to profile white neo Nazi-skinheads, so I used the tried and true command tool of the health and welfare inspection to ferret out these guys. Reverse racism certainly had nothing to do with it; to suggest otherwise is bullshit.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19960717&slug=2339666
That Al Qaeda killed more people on 9/11 than were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing is a function of the targets and weapons of assault chosen, not the threat posed. The fact is that the various right wing militia groups are indigenous and are here, and they’re here in widespread numbers throughout the country, while Al-Qaeda is not anywhere to the same degree. The main difference between the two is that the former as yet have no competent leadership. That doesn’t mean that that they’re less a threat than Al-Qaeda.
You’re right, Ex 18A, the NYPD and FBI should have quit wasting their time on these harmless fellows and concentrated more on racists:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520908,00.html
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/19/zazi.arrest/index.html
But seriously, I’m glad you’re so much more enlightened about Islam than the rest of us hateful Americans.
IntelTrooper
Well, why do you suppose Americans are so popular in the Middle East and southwest Asia? If you believe the Bush/neo-con assertion that they hate us because of our freedoms, then you’re going to be real disappointed when you come home, because the United States Government under Bush/Cheney did exactly what AQ intended, and killed the US Constitution with a thousand cuts. What freedoms do we still have, by the way?
Ex 18A wrote:
Well, it appears that we still have the freedom to speak our minds, even when sound judgment advises otherwise.
In a related story, I heard Marc Sageman describe the Afghans as available for rent at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on AQ last week. . .
Ex18A, you cannot imagine how much good it did my aching old America loving heart to read this from you:
If you believe the Bush/neo-con assertion that they hate us because of our freedoms, then you’re going to be real disappointed when you come home, because the United States Government under Bush/Cheney did exactly what AQ intended, and killed the US Constitution with a thousand cuts. What freedoms do we still have, by the way?
It reminds me of the opened-eyed and clear minded American soldiers I met as a kid in post-WW II Europe; they were no corporate dupes and stood up to corporate crap once back home. All is not lost so long as men like you see the problem and refuse to surrender the freedoms you represented in uniform. One might think that we all became corporate dupes hunting for WMDs when we really were securing oil wells. Still, good clear minded soldiers from colonel down cannot make up for bad generals and so it’s up to us the public to get out of our “ain’t my kid going to Iraq/Afghasnistan” disconnect synsdrome now that there’s no draft and stop swallowing corprate scare propaganda. If we start saving instead of shoping until we drop we will free ourself from our Chinese bankers and become a great power again.
After the Vietnam fiasco I went home to study in the belly of the Red beast throughout the Soviety Afghan War and so can compare now with then. Then, Reagan was President and whatever you may think of him, on his issues he led– going in and pulling out if he saw it was going South, unfazed by politics. I just don’t know if Obama is as strong or will be cowered by the collar stars, the neocons and the neo-Republicans (they-re nothing like the Republicans I was with!).