Afghanistan: The Danger of Washington's "Experts" on Intervention

On the eve of President Obama's announcement on the next steps for the US in Afghanistan --- expect a public escalation of 30,000 more troops and a lot of rhetoric about non-military programmes and the necessity for the Afghan Government to be free from corruption and to take responsibility for security --- The Security Crank offers a loud, troubling polemic against so-called "expertise" in Washington.

It’s settled: the discussion about Afghanistan is no longer about Afghanistan. It is, instead, now a contest of who can write the most ridiculous article demonstrating their ignorance of the country. This isn’t a small deal: most of the people we’ll highlight below hold positions of great influence, including on General McChrystal’s review team this past summer. But they are all, pro- and anti-war, morons.

Afghanistan-Pakistan Video & Text: US Envoy Holbrooke Briefing (23 November)

It’s important to note that these opinion-mongers are not operating in a vacuum—they have willing accomplices in the media, most of which is utterly subservient to the U.S. military. In a lot of cases, this change is recent: Dexter Filkins, for example, used to write hard-hitting, critical pieces about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he writes this:

The Pashtuns, who form the core of the Taliban, make up a largely tribal society, with families connected to one another by kinship and led by groups of elders. Over the years, the Pashtun tribes have been substantially weakened, with elders singled out by three groups: Taliban fighters, the rebels who fought the former Soviet Union and the soldiers of the former Soviet Union itself. The decimation of the tribes has left Afghan society largely atomized.

Afghan and American officials hope that the plan to make peace with groups of Taliban fighters will complement an American-led effort to set up anti-Taliban militias in many parts of the country: the Pashtun tribes will help fight the Taliban, and they will make deals with the Taliban. And, by so doing, Afghan tribal society can be reinvigorated.

The Afghan reconciliation plan is intended to duplicate the Awakening movement in Iraq, where Sunni tribal leaders, many of them insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and in many cases were paid to do so. The Awakening contributed to the remarkable decline in violence in Iraq.

I didn’t realize the Taliban were led by a group of tribal elders. Yuck. This reads almost like a press release from ISAF [International Security Assistance Force]: demonstrate one’s understanding of a SAMS course on Afghanistan, then talk about how it’s America’s job to reshape Afghan society into what we think our image of it should have been before the Soviets ruined everything. The arrogance the first pair of paragraphs requires—starting with the assertion that Pashtuns are tribal and form solidarity through kinship and ending with the assumption that we can repeat the Awakening movement in Afghanistan—is really just… wow.

These assertions have been discussed at length in a paper prepared by the Human Terrain System, which practically begs the Army to stop trying to repeat the Sunni Awakening in Afghanistan. “The desire for “tribal engagement” in Afghanistan, executed along the lines of the recent “Surge” strategy in Iraq,” it says, “is based on an erroneous understanding of the human terrain.” The reasoning is that tribes in both countries are structured fundamentally differently, and that Afghans, even Pashtuns do not primarily organize around tribal lines. (More on the tribal militia idea-that-just-won’t-die is here.)

The military has largely ignored this paper—why is that, do you think? Do they not like having their assumptions about a neat tribal solution to all of Afghanistan’s problems challenged? Like this former Taliban official says, no one in the West has done their homework. Well, no one in charge, I should say. To bring up our old theme: they just don’t care.

But it’s not just reporters losing their clinical distance who have been dumbing down the public understanding of Afghanistan. Below are some key concepts the willfully ignorant propagate in order to push whatever pet issue they have, which also happens to either obscure or twist a much broader, more fundamental issue—a children’s treasury of ridiculous assumptions and pet issues.

Pretending the War is Ethnic

Selig S. Harrison is by far the worst offender of the bunch. Without any evidence, and with a history that jumps from Alexander the Great (326 BC) to the British Army (1842) to the Soviets (1979), he says that all Pashtuns are xenophobic zombies who will unite against all outsiders and always win. Harrison supplements this argument by saying that this time, the Taliban’s xenophobia is being driven by a hatred of the Tajik minority lording itself over the Armed Forces, police, and government agencies. Needless to say, his argument is confusing and contradictory, starting with his apparent belief that Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, is a Tajik puppet.

Gareth Porter makes a similar argument: Tajiks are disproportionally more prevalent in the Army, so therefore Pashtuns are culturally compelled to resist the government. Missing in both kinds of argument is a realization that their ideas of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate ethnic ratios are 100% arbitrary, utterly dependent on which native informant happened to be whispering in their ear at that time. Neither demonstrates any understanding of ethnic relations (the original Taliban wasn’t xenophobic but kafiphobic—mistrustful of all non-Muslims), or why the Taliban actually gains social market share. But the neo-Taliban are a pan-Islamist resistance movement: they reject tribal and ethnic distinctions so long as everyone follows their version of Islam. There’s nothing ethnic about it.

Assuming arbitrary troop numbers will fix things

One of the key offenders here is Leslie Gelb, an otherwise respectable foreign policy scholar. The fact that anyone with his background—that is, with almost no academic or policy experience in Afghanistan of Central/South Asia—would say he’d prefer 15,000 trainers over the 34,000 foot soldiers President Obama is due to approve speaks volumes to the astounding ignorance of our pundit-class. Why would he know? Gelb has argued elsewhere that the troops in Afghanistan are being misused: how could adding more troops into that mix correct that?

SUUUUUUURGE!

You have to love the Kagans [Frederick and Kimberly]. They helped create the Surge in Iraq, which funneled troops into an area already in open revolt against AQIM [Al Qa'eda in Mesopotamia]. And of course, they blame themselves for it working, and not the thousands of Sunni Iraqis who decided to reject the insurgents operating in their neighborhoods half a year before the first surge troop arrived. It wasn’t those dirty browns we’re trying to rule, it was us and our surging, that saved the day!

Anyway, so they’ve been writing weekly op-eds in major newspapers about how badly we need more troops in Afghanistan ever since they realized their impassioned pleas in 2006 for America to ignore Afghanistan in favor of surging into Iraq was in fact a bad idea that needed to be reversed, even though they refuse to acknowledge they were one of the main drivers of said strategic inattention, but still this time their advice is super correct because they clearly got Iraq right because the country is peaceful and everyone really likes living there.

Their latest op-ed is a real gem, however: in a thousand-word explication on the necessity of using troops for political leverage, a lamentation of how the debate has ignored force levels (when in reality the debate has been dominated by a discussion of troop numbers), they can’t bring themselves to mention the Taliban once. I mean, even ignoring the ridiculous assertion that more troops will improve governance, development, education, law enforcement, health care, and whatever else… even ignoring all of that, they say troop numbers will fix Afghanistan but don’t mention why we need troops in the first place.

Somehow, these people are taken seriously. Do you get it?

Healthcare!

I don’t even know what to say: in a world of limited resources, the Obama administration is choosing to emphasize physical security over additional health care spending. This is a tragedy for the Afghans who won’t get health care, to be sure… but is it really undermining the government and the war?

Pee-yew. This is exhausting. I’m sure you get the idea. It is damned tough to find knowledgable people writing about the wars these days. For some reasons, the opinion pages seem dominated by ignorant celebrity-pundits, who of course tell us that we are good and never do wrong and always on the side of Right. Of course we want to believe them—who wouldn’t? But listening to these people both within and outside the government will, quite literally, result in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. They are making life and death arguments, and doing so without even basic diligence. I think we owe everyone—ourselves and the world—a tiny bit more effort than that.