Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan

Tom Engelhardt

 So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable?  What's the military's skill set here?  What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on?  Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe's leading experts in good government anymore?  And while we're at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation's capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can't do it in Washington or Sacramento? 

Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world's leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess?  Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan President Hamid Karzai into "a Winston Churchill who can rally his people," as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal -- and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington?  And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the "mayor" or "president" of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan? 

And someone tell me: Just who picked the name Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja?  Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan?  Though news accounts say that the word means "togetherness" in Dari, why do I think that a better translation might be "crushing embrace"?  What could "togetherness" really mean when, according to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal "stepped into his armored car for the short drive... to the presidential palace," and reportedly roused President Karzai from a nap for "a novel moment."  Karzai agreed, of course, supposedly adding, "No one has ever asked me to decide before." 

This is a black comedy of "governance."  So is the fact that, from the highest administration officials and military men to those in the field, everyone speaks, evidently without the slightest self-consciousness, about putting an "Afghan face" on the Marja campaign.  The phrase is revelatory and oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not that the Americans involved would ever stop to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face" on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual "face" of the Afghan War, which is American. 

National Security Adviser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the Marja campaign having "'a much bigger Afghan face,' with two Afghans for every one U.S. soldier involved."  And this way of thinking is so common that news reports regularly use the phrase, as in a recent Associated Press story: "Military officials say they are learning from past mistakes. The offensive is designed with an 'Afghan face.'"

And here's something else I'd like explained to me: Why does the U.S. press, at present so fierce about the lack of both "togetherness" and decent governance in Washington, report this sort of thing without comment, even though it reflects the deepest American contempt for putative "allies"? Why, for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal reporters write without blinking:  "Western officials also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into strategy discussions, allowing them to select the officials who will run Marjah once it is cleared of Taliban, and pushing them before the cameras to emphasize the participation of Afghan troops in the offensive"?  Allow?  Push?  Is this what we mean by "togetherness"?   

Try to imagine all this in reverse -- an Afghan general motoring over to the White House to wake up the president and ask whether an operation, already announced and ready to roll, can leave the starting gate?  But why go on? 

Just explain this to me: Why are the representatives of Washington, civilian and military, always so tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other cultures?  Why is it so hard for them to imagine what it might be like to be in someone else's shoes (or boots or sandals)?  Why do they always arrive not just convinced that they have identified the right problems and are asking the right questions, but that they, and only they, have the right answers, when at home they seem to have none at all?

Thinking about this, I wonder what kind of "face" should be put on global governance in Washington?

 
[Note on further reading:  The single best piece I've seen suggesting answers to some of the questions raised above is Andrew Bacevich's "Government-in-a-box in Marja," in last week's Los Angeles Times.  As ever, I recommend that, on war and peace subjects across the Middle East, Central, and South Asia, you check out Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog (never to be missed),Antiwar.com (an invaluable daily resource), and the War in Context website, which I've always relied on and which now exists in a new, more focused iteration.  (It has been riveting lately as it follows the spreading scandal surrounding the assassination in Dubai of a senior Hamas military commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.)]  

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, where this article first appeared. He is the author of The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols for GA State House