Andrew McCarthy does a very good job of teasing out the willfully blind assumptions about Islam that permeate General McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy. While Obama’s push-back on this strategy is likely rooted in crude politial calculation and general weakness, conservatives should not assume the converse: that McChrystal’s nation-building and troop build-up counsel is an effective one. McChrystal’s biggest source of confusion is the same as Bush’s, a confusion about nationalism, Islam, and our capacity for addressing root causes.
McCarthy writes:
When McChrystal is not getting Islam hopelessly wrong, he makes the fatal error of ignoring it — a mistake that has characterized U.S. strategic thinking for at least two decades. Thus he asserts, for example, that “the insurgents have two primary objectives: controlling the Afghan people and breaking the coalition’s will” — as if there were no rationale (besides the unremarkable tyrannical impulse) for “the insurgents” to behave this way. But the Taliban and its allies want to control the Afghan people in order to reinstitute what they see as the purified Islam of Mohammed’s Companions. They are not just “insurgents,” they are jihadists who see themselves as pursuing a divine commandment to impose Allah’s law. In a great many cases, they are doing so in their own country, and with the support and respect of many of their countrymen.
So while McChrystal is correct that a majority of Afghans (especially those who practice more moderate strains of Sufi Islam) rejects the Taliban, a sizable minority sympathizes.
I agree completely, and I would add that the McChrystal/Bush/Surge approach is similar to the liberal, 1960s approach to crime. We were told, “We can’t just arrest criminals and throw them in jail, we have to end poverty first.” How’s that working out?
The mistake in the case of Aghanistan and the War on Poverty is to think that we can’t deal with a problem other than by addressing a root cause, or that it’s always more efficient to address root causes rather than treat symptoms. Sometimes it’s most efficient to treat symptoms and mollify effects, and this is the meaning of such earth-shatteringly simple ideas like locking up criminals to stop crime or wearing a seatbelt to avoid injury in a car wreck.
Subscribe To This Feed
I demur from this critique insofar as I’m not so sure McCrystal is ignoring Islam so much as trying to avoid fanning the very flames of anti-western sentiment among non-Talibam tribes he is trying to quench by mentioning Islam in the same breath with an officially announced strategy to kill what are, after all, Muslims. True enough, the optimum strategy should be to arm/bribe/support the Tribal Chieftans who are the natural rivals of the Taliban and modern progressives by comparison, but there is probably not enough time to do that now. The Taliban has re-equipped in the safe areas of Pk to such an extent that they probably would overpower
the locals now, hence the need for a temp increase in American firepower and feet to create a protective bubble within which the
Tribes can be armed, etc.
Obviously in the long-run we have neither the patience, time,nor money to create a socially cohesive society loyal to a national govt with a sense of national identity. Geography, history and anthropology argue against the very possibility of this ever happening. Better by far to arm and bribe the Tribes and let them love us, our money and our arms from afar. Such a policy should suffice to keep the Taliban at bay without depending on a corrupt central govt hated by the outlying tribes as a rapacious tax collector which returns little in the way of service. This was the British philosophy in handling events in that part of the world for a very long time.
As one British diplomat once said in reply to being praised for the efficiency with which England “ruled” Egypt: “Oh, we don’t ‘rule’ anyone, but we DO control those who do.” Would that we abandoned
our Wilsonian “We are going down in Mexico to teach the Mexicans how to elect good men!” utopian nation-building and played the role of Perfidious Albion more often.