Ambassador from the Taliban

Review of "My life with the Taliban" by Abdul Salam (Mullah) Zaeef

Ever wonder what it's like on the other side of the news? What it's like to be a mullah? What it's like to help found the Taliban? What it's like to win a civil war? What it's like to be an ambassador? What it's like to be invaded by the US? What it's like to be taken prisoner by the US and rot in Guantanamo? If so, this is your book.

Deciding on today's title was quite difficult. Zaeef's book is so full of rich and ironic themes that many titles suggested themselves. I will pepper in some of the alternates as I go along.

Abdul Salam Zaeef grew up in rural areas in southern Afghanistan around Kandahar, attending madrassas, (thus becomming a talib, then a mullah), joining the Mujahideen against the Soviets, briefly running a mosque (thus becomming an Imam), helping to found the Taliban movement that took over most of Afghanistan, and rising to become its ambassador to Pakistan. After the US invasion, he was imprisoned and eventually shipped to Guantanamo for years of imprisonment, finally ending up as a private citizen in Kabul (under close supervision) in his early forties, writing his memoirs.

His story is well and briskly- occasionally movingly- told. Orphaned at a young age by his parent's deaths from illness, (his father was a minor Imam), then at age seven ripped from his younger sister by her arranged marriage, inspired at age fifteen to join the mujahideen and partipate in Afghanistan's brutal wars, and later shockingly abused by the US, he has plenty to be bitter about. The hold of a victimization narrative couldn't be stronger. The US is always killing women and children, while the Taliban is always seeking peace and friendly accord. [Studies in narcissism, Taliban division].

In Jungian terms, he seems quite unfamiliar with his own shadow side, which embodies the inevitable opposite of our positive qualities. Each of us has an individual shadow side, which we tend to project onto others rather than own up to ourselves. Cultures, too, take on communal shadow sides. The work of psychotherapy, in this school, is partly to bring the shadow to consciousness so that the individual can withdraw the shadow projections and start dealing with reality in more constructive ways, than simply to hate and trample on some object of projection- the scapegoat. So I would suggest that Afghanistan undertake a few decades of mass Jungian analysis(!). [Shadow over Afghanistan].

In fairness, principal policy makers in the US were hardly more reflective, as exemplified by the recent memoirs of Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush, both out to generally dreadful reviews. I would bet that, for an adventurous book club, the Rumsfeld memoir would make an intriguing pairing with Zaeef's!

But there is also love- specifically Zaeef's love of study, love of Islam, and love of his comrades in the great war against the Soviets. [We happy few, we Taliban]

"May God be praised! What a brotherhood we had among the mujahedeen! We weren't concerned with the world or with our lives; our intentions were pure and every one of us was ready to die as a martyr. When I look back on the love and respect that we had for each other, it sometimes seems like a dream."

Indeed, he recalls some earlier childhood preparation:

"We led our armies into fierce battles, slaying our enemies to defend our kingdoms. We ruled our land just like ministers and kings, at times demanding tax for the right of passage, or negotiating deals and truces. I think this is what all children do around the world."

I don't recall doing this, personally. At any rate, he also proclaims love of the Afghan people, and even includes a sugary plea to the US for better understanding in his preface and again at the end, accompanied by some other good advice.

"The world should realize how bad the situation for Afghans is, and how oppressed they are. People should be kind and compassionate to them."

His love of Afghanistan manifests in the crucial pivot of the book, in 1994, when the demobilized taliban faction of mujahideen around Kandahar, (one of many factions), with Zaeef in the lead, decide to take matters in their own hands against the local warlordism and banditry. They elect Mullah Omar as their leader, and set up a political network of mullahs that ousts each minor bandit in turn, gathering popular support and eventually taking complete charge of the area, including Kandahar. If the story ended here, (summary), it wouldn't have been such a bad turn of events. Zaeef doesn't say much about it, but the Taliban went on to fight a brutal war for the rest of the country, ousting the nascent regime of Massoud and Rabbani in Kabul (with the help of 20,000 Pakistani soldiers and floods of Saudi money).

The unasked question is- why? Why fight for the whole of Afghanistan, taking so much foreign support, committing massacres, and terrorizing the population? What was the big difference with the Northern alliance, headed by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud? Why did the Taliban suddenly  become so bloodthirsty? Both sides were Muslim. Both were Afghan. Both had had plenty of war and suffering. The answer is they had fundamentally different views of Afghanistan's future- theocratic or democratic:

To take a quote from Shah Massoud:

"The Taliban say: 'Come and accept the post of prime minister and be with us', and they would keep the highest office in the country, the presidentship. But for what price?! The difference between us concerns mainly our way of thinking about the very principles of the society and the state. We can not accept their conditions of compromise, or else we would have to give up the principles of modern democracy. We are fundamentally against the system called 'the Emirate of Afghanistan.'" ... "There should be an Afghanistan where every Afghan finds himself or herself happy. And I think that can only be assured by democracy based on consensus."

Massoud was a committed democrat, and had progressive ideas about running Afghanistan, which were just coming to fruition after the civil war he fought from his position as defense minister in Kabul, against a variety of Islamists and other former mujahideen. Note also how Massoud mentions women as part of the democratic polity, something Zaeef never does. Zaeef hated him, as he describes upon hearing the announcement of a post-commnist government:

"Why did he appoint Massoud? Why would he take a decision like that? I knew [president] Mr Mujaddidi was a jihadi leader, who himself had fought against the Russians and the Communists. He had suffered and sacrificed in the name of God. Why would he now do something that would cause even more suffering? What was in his heart? In a split-second my happiness left me, my eyes turned red form the tears that came pouring down my cheeks and my cry turned into a scream."

Why indeed? I can only speculate, since Zaeef doesn't reveal his motivations (and may not know them, really). Massoud had certainly suffered and fought no less than the other mujahideen. Indeed, his northern region of operations was on the Soviet border. Perhaps it was simple tribalism, with Zaeef as a Pashtun shocked to hear of Tajiks (Massoud and Rabbani) running things. [Blood is thicker than religion]

But I think religion was actually more important. Zaeef seems to have had his heart set on the new government being a theocracy rather than a pluralist/democratic government that seemed to be excluding Islamist elements. His mujahideen faction in the war was the taliban- students from madrassas, mullahs, and others who chose an Islamist organization over the many other tribal and party-based mujahideen groups. A big part of their anti-communist motivation reacted to the Communist's aggressive modernization, in terms of women's rights, expropriation of large landholders, de-emphasis of religion, and the like. Clearly Zaeef was not alone, since the country promptly fell back into civil war, mostly due to the exclusion of, and brutality by, another Islamist group, the Hezbi Islami, or HIG.

Perhaps even more significant, Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani were Sufis, and there are few internecine hatreds so bitter as that between fundamentalist Sunnis and Sufis, who turn many of the violent and retrograde facets of Islam on their head. Sufis are accommodators, modernizers, and mystics. They are the anti-fundamentalists.

It is a sad story. We all operate from a position of great compassion for the people of Aghanistan and recognition of their right of self-determination. We can accept that Afghan revolutionaries and freedom fighters deserve high respect. They are Afghan. They sacrificed everything to free their country from the Soviets. They come from the people whom they seek to govern. Who are we from the West in comparison, when it comes to running Afghanistan?

But then one views the fruits of their efforts in self-government. The warlord period after victory over the Soviets was a Darwinian bloodbath. The Taliban's own rule, however effective in imposing brutal control, was a nightmare of a different sort. And finally, the Taliban's current efforts are once again singularly brutal and horrifying as they use mafia tactics to re-impose their rule over the poor people of Afghanistan. Has the cultural implant from the West over the last decade been enough to guide Afghanistan to a better future once we leave in a few years? It is very difficult to say.

But let us return to Zaeef's story. Mullah Omar gave him several ministerial posts in the new Taliban government (styled an emirate, under Omar as the Emir, I believe), culminating with the post of ambassador to Pakistan, easily Afghanistan's most important foreign mission, and eventually its only contact with the outside world. [Diplomat, mullah, patriot]. Zaeef characterizes Pakistan well, as the two-faced nation:

"Pakistan, which plays a key role in Asia, is so famous for treachery that it is said they can get milk from a bull. They have two tongues in one mouth, and two faces on one head so they can speak everybody's language; they use everybody, deceive everybody. They deceive the Arabs under the guise of Islamic nuclear power, saying that they are defending Islam and Islamic countries. They milk America and Europe in the alliance against terrorism, and they have been deceiving Pakistani and other Muslims around the world in the name of the Kashmiri jihad. But behind the curtain, they have been betraying everyone."

"The wolf and the sheep may drink water from the same stream, but since the start of the jihad, the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan, like a cancer puts down roots in the human body; every ruler of Afghanistan complained about it, but none could get rid of it."

It is fascinating to hear about Zaeef's time as Ambassador, trying to ride the raging bull of the Taliban's international relations. He was a perfect person for the role, completely committed, yet soft-spoken and highly insightful when convenient. One of the greatest difficulties arrives in the form of a fatwa that damns and encourages the assassination of any Muslim who fights against the Taliban (as Musharraf and Pakistan were doing at the behest of the US). [Fatwa of the damned]. In the end, after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is ushered off the stage, Zaeef was, for good measure, personally betrayed by the Pakistanis, who imprisoned and handed him over to the US. [US respects diplomatic immunity. Not!].

This part of his story is deeply troubling, indeed mortifying, to read as a US citizen. We've all heard about the horrors of the US's foreign prisons as well as Guantanamo. The stupidity of treating people in bestial fashion, of expecting them to break under torture, of driving them insane, not to mention the moral depravity ... there is no sufficient way to characterize it, other than to recount it in detail, as Zaeef does for us here. [US respects human rights. Not!].

"Each brother who spent time in Camp Five [Guantanamo] looked like a skeleton when he was released; it was painful to look at their thin bodies. When Abu Haris returned from the camp, I did not recognize him; there was no resemblance between the man who had been taken away and the body that was returned. I was so scared by his appearance that sometimes I would even dream of him and wake up screaming. May almighty Allah release all Muslim brothers in good health and save them from the hands of the pagans and cruel people."

Not only have we made countless enemies in the Islamic world through this despicable behavior, we have hardly gained any information that we couldn't have through perfectly cordial conversations (this book, indeed, is a testament to Zaeef's willingness to talk!). And we have subverted our own legal system and standing in the international system, rendering Guantanamo's imates more hardened, more difficult to repatriate, and impossible to prosecute in any rational way.

Now Zaeef is back in Kabul, essentially under government watch and quietly twiddling his thumbs. But he has also apparently resumed his role as interlocutor for the Taliban, being whisked to Britain recently to confer with their foreign office.

For regular Afghans, the Taliban are unwelcome, as is the current fully corrupt Karzai government, as is the contest between the US and both of the above. What should we do? Zaeef's prescription is to go with the Taliban, which represents traditional and Islamic values from his vantage as a Kandahari and fundamentalist Mullah:

"Americans should know that they are no longer thought of as a people of freedom and democracy. They have sown the seeds of hatred throughout the world. Under their new banner they have declared a war on terrorism and terrorists, but the very term 'terrorist' is of their own making. The jihad against them will never stop as long as America doesn't take steps to correct its mistakes"

"Secondly, eliminating the word 'jihad' from the curriculum of the schools and some other subjects is extremely worrying. Jihad is a central concept within Islam, and understanding it is an obligation of every single Muslim."

"It is astonishing that after eight years, with tens of thousands of troops, warplanes and equipment, and a vast national army, facing down some estimated ten thousand insurgents, leaving some two-thirds of the country unstable, that foreign governments still believe that brute force is a solution to the crisis. And still they send more troops. The current conflict is a political conflict and as such cannot be solved by the gun."

"How much longer will foreigners who fail to understand Afghanistan and its culture make decisions for the Afghan nation? How much longer will the Afghan people wait and endure? Only God knows. One again, I pray for peace. Once again I pray for Afghanistan, my home."

One can easily draw out the many contradictions at work here. Zaeef prays for peace, but believes in jihad (real jihad, not some namby pamby Sufi spiritual jihad). He believes arms can not solve the political problems of Afghanistan, but apparently hasn't communicated this insight to his brethren in Pakistan.

This kind of self-blindness makes our common goal of preventing civil war and anarchy in Afghanistan extremely difficult. Perhaps mass psychotherapy won't be possible. Perhaps the Pashtun code and Islamic religion are both fundamentally violent. Perhaps the Afghan government is impossibly corrupt. Perhaps Pakistan is a relentlessly meddlesome and deceitful neighbor. Perhaps democracy doesn't map effectively onto the tribal and hierarchical social structure of traditional Afghanistan, which restricts the effective franchise only to the upper (male) tier of landholders/power brokers. (A bit like colonial America, come to think of it). It isn't going to be easy or pretty getting out of Afghanistan, but the surge of democratic sentiment sweeping the Muslim world has to make one hopeful.

• An interview with Abdul Zaeef.
• Sample of news conference in Pakistan, as ambassador and in denial.
• Some recent Talib propaganda.
• Someone else's review of this same book- taking a rather dim view, really.
• Complete rot at the top in Afghanistan.
• So Karzai hates us, naturally, and bumbles along.
• Hitchens flays the "human rights community".
• We are talking to the Taliban.
• Appreciating the dark side of our archetypal narratives.
• Historians sort of agree with Mullah Zaeef.
• A little history of Libya.
• USA is number... er ... 31.
• Non-islamic terrorism ... yawn ...
• Lincoln puts his foot down.
• Screw the workers!

"Recall that in recent years, we've witnessed two separate debates over two types of taxpayer-subsidized laborers. First, we saw a brief argument over how much taxpayer money should pay government-sponsored bankers on Wall Street. Now, we're having a more prolonged discussion about how much taxpayer money should pay public employees in our schools, police departments, fire departments and infrastructure agencies."

• Bill Mitchell quote of the week:

"The IMF helped cause the crisis. It has no credibility in lecturing us on what we should do to resolve it. Its notions of fiscal sustainability are based on meaningless financial ratios. It talks about being worried about jobs and poverty but then forces agreements on nations which unambiguously cause a loss of jobs and increasing poverty."

Did we screw up Afghanistan?

Conventional wisdom is that the US "deserted" Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in the 90's, so everything afterwards was our fault.

Mired as we are in a decade-long nation-building and counter-insurgency project in Afghanistan, I keep thinking about its antecedents and background. A frequent narrative is that the US, after supporting the Mujahideen (jihadists) operating out of Pakistan through the 80's against Soviet occupation, dropped them like hot potatoes and was therefore derelict in its humanitarian, moral, and strategic duties in rebuilding Afghanistan.

It is surely a complicated issue, but I'd like to suggest that this narrative is wrong, and that the US was holding to its principles in leaving Afghans to their own devices, and doing very much the right thing. It seems deeply patronizing to say that without our "adult" supervision, the many fighters who had made the Soviet military machine cry uncle couldn't come up with a viable political structure for their own country. The natural presumption had to be that the Afghans, after so much sacrifice, had earned the right to direct their own affairs and form a government to their own liking.

In the first place, the analogy to our own revolution comes to mind. Would we have wanted France to "assist" us in setting up a new government, perhaps supervising our constitutional conventions or installing a temporary king? Clearly not. We muddled through with the Articles of Confederation for a decade, without any serious interference from Europe, and were glad of their neglect. After a decade or more of valiant war, the Afghans would hardly have wanted to exchange one colonizer for another, however well-meaning. Even now, after their own political system melted down further through chaos, civil war, and through to Taliban tyranny, it would be hard to say that the majority of Afghans want us there. Nor would Russia or the international community have seen us as terribly benevolent in taking advantage of the sudden collapse of the Soviet system by rushing into a former client.

Secondly, Islam presents itself as the ultimate political structuring ideology. It is a complete solution- a "government in a box", if you will, encompassing the spiritual system, social system, and political system. We had our Founders and our enlightenment principles, leading to durable social and political structures. Islam has its thorough compendium of Koran, hadith, sharia, and other legal structures, expressed to various extents in current Muslim states. Pakistan calls itself an Islamic republic, and Afghanistan just as much views itself as an Islamic state, whatever the vagaries of local tradition. Both should have been able to cooperate as friends and allies to bring the Islamic political vision to pass for the Afghan people.

Now of course I write with my tongue partly in cheek, since the empirically speaking, Western enlightenment principles of government are far superior to what Islam has been capable of, mired as it is in frankly medieval political theory with huge gaps where rational government, personal freedom, and popular legitimacy would otherwise be (though ironically, Islamic government during its golden age, a millennium ago, wasn't so bad). One solution is that of Turkey a century ago, which threw the whole Islamic edifice out the window and started from scratch on a Western model. And cancelled the caliphate for good measure. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and other Muslim countries have all tried to find middle ways, none very good to Western eyes. But who are we to criticize? If another country can keep itself together and not trouble its neighbors, that should be well enough. Right?

So one question is how capable the Mujahideen were of founding a decent Afghan state. We knew they were no Jeffersons and Madisons, but still, we had little right to meddle in their post-war arrangements. In fact, many had been brutalized through the Soviet war and related internecine wars, to the point that they could hardly conceive of a government not imposed at the tip of an RPG launcher. They also continued the age-old fissiparous traditions of Afghan tribalism which saw little need for a central government at all, but rather an unending small-bore contest of charismatic personalities and ad-hoc militias, harkening back to ancient Greece and before. But that again would not be a huge issue for us on the outside, as long as some internal arrangement arose, however decentralized.

This is one reason why Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Panjshir warlord most resistant to the Soviets and the Taliban, remains so revered in Afghanistan. He seems to have been the one person closest to a founding father, among all the parochial warlords and mafia figures, who towards the end of the Taliban era was broadcasting a broad vision of a unified and civil Afghanistan, before being assassinated by Al Qaeda. He was the only major leader not coopted by Pakistan, Iran, Russia, or other foreign powers, as well as not being Pashtun and thus particularly interested in a non-sectarian vision of Afghan unity. Now the country limps along under the tutelage of Hamid Karzai, originally thought to be a similarly unifying figure, but as it turns out, one with a much smaller vision, with deep problems of corruption and nepotism, who has been seriously undermined by our own failures and lack of understanding.

Another large question is the influence of Pakistan. After supporting Afghan nationalism for so many years, it was hard to believe (for a naive person, perhaps) that the Pakistanis would so thoroughly abdicate their brotherly and Islamic role in Afghanistan's postwar future by promoting the most vicious civil war, continuing instability, and ultimately, the rule of astoundingly regressive Islamists orginating from the madrasahs of Pakistan (the "students", or Taliban). But that is what happened.

Of course, the Pakistanis have little to crow about in their own governance or neighborhood relations, so this also would have been less surprising to experienced US policy makers. All the same, the malign influence of Pakistan, even if fully recognized, was hardly reason for us to enter the treacherous Afghan political scene in a more direct way, especially as we had let Pakistan control our aid to the mujahideen for years. Even now, when Pakistan remains the bulwark of Al Qaeda and Taliban resistance to Afghan and US interests, we are, of all things, giving them arms and calling them our "allies".

So we were honestly and rightly reluctant to have any deep role in Afghanistan after the Soviet era. Should we have given more aid? Perhaps, though it is hard to see to whom that aid should have gone. Should we have watched developments carefully and nurtured our own intelligence and language capabilities for Afghanistan? Of course. Should we have put the screws on Pakistan to turn off their spigot of arms and not play strategic games with their neighbor, poor and weak as it was? Sure, that would have been nice, but ineffective in light of our current influence on their perpetually self-defeating policies. By the late 90's, we had put Pakistan in the deep freeze anyway over their nuclear testing.

Now, two decades on, we are very much in Afghanistan, and need to be clear on the vast scope of what we are trying to do. Which is, to reshape the political culture of Afghanistan from top to bottom, easing Afghans out of a civil war mindset, sidelining Pakistan's influence, and protecting nascent civil life and political institutions, patterned partly on Western models, from the constant assaults of insurgent violence and islamist ideology. It is an enormous job, and not one we would have willingly gotten into without the absolute necessity of "fixing" a nexus of failed governance and playpen of global jihadery.

Can we fix it? That we pulled the bacon out of the fire in Iraq is promising as a model, but the problems of Afghanistan are less tractable- especially the influence of Pakistan and the Afghan's own lack of experience in state structures vs tribalism. We are perpetuating the civil war as participants, so it is hard to say that our influence is entirely good and pacific. Nevertheless, the main need is time, since the core of the job is a slow process of cultural change. Afghan minds are turning from internecine warfare to democratic political contests and quality of government issues at all levels. The deal is that we will leave once enough Afghans have turned the corner and once the middle tier of warlords and mafiosi has been disempowered, replaced by public servants. The US and NATO, as representatives of, let us just say- empirically superior Western governing practices, are protecting and teaching, but it is up the Afghans to listen and hear.

• The civil surge.
• Eating in Afghanistan.
• Women in Afghanistan.
• Nation-building: what US soldiers do.
• Kristof on Pakistan.
• Van Morrison- shirt's tight, but the music is hanging out.
• On the meaning of baptism.
• Social security: not broken.
• We know very well who is to blame for the crisis.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week:

"The current state of affairs – with appallingly high unemployment and low activity levels – can be considered an equilibrium in the sense that there are no dynamics present that will change the situation. Firms are producing and hiring at levels that are consistent with their sales. The unemployed clearly desire higher consumption and would buy more goods and services if they were working but that latent demand is “notional” and not effective (backed by cash). The market fails to receive any signal from the unemployed and so firms cannot respond with higher production."

..."My own profession should hang its head in shame for being instruments of this religious persecution of the disadvantaged."

The policy is crazy

Pakistan literally has a policy of crazy, repelling everyone around it.

After being bamboozled for decades, the US is beginning to face up to the fundamental challenge of Pakistan. From its founding, Pakistan has employed its "tribals" to harrass, first India, and now Afghanistan. The policy is habitual and deeply intwined with its religious and political roots. Mohammad Ali Jinnah first created Pakistan as an extortion demand, saying in essence "Give us a rich slice of India, or you will have a civil war". Well, India still got an ugly civil war at partition as well as several wars with Pakistan since.

Why? Why all this crazy? The Mughal empire at 1700 ruled almost all of what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Empires in decline tend to have feelings of entitlement that can lead to lashing out. Muslims see themselves as a martial culture, (rightly so), and thus destined to rule over the vegetarian acolytes of the cow. At independence, Muslims couldn't psychologically deal with the prospect of no longer being in charge .. not even being used by the British as their cat's paws and administrators, but rather being swamped to insignificance in a democratic and majority Hindu country. The irony, of course, is that Pakistan has been perpetually politically dysfunctional; not capable of ruling itself, let alone anyone else, while India has become more stable with more durable democratic institutions.

Thus the rump Mughal mini-empire of Pakistan was born, founded as an Islamic state, a tenet of which is to wage Jihad, and not just the internal, meditative kind. Immediately, an irritant presented itself in the form of Jammu and Kashmir, provinces of the newly minted India that were majority Muslim (67%), but whose Sikh Maharaja, already under attack from Pakistan, decided to join India. The blatant insult of a possible province not seeking to join the already militaristic and dysfunctional new state of Pakistan was too much to bear, and Pakistan has continually thereafter trained, funded and made it a matter of official policy to destabilize and terrorize Jammu and Kashmir as best it can.

Why do its own people put up with this craziness? And more to the point, why do individual insurgents put their lives on the line for such a hopeless and frankly evil policy? Here we get to the true evils of religion, which can plant such certainty, such social solidarity, and such aggressive doctrine into the hearts of its adherents that they are usable for suicide bombing.

Fast-forward to the 1980's, and the interests of Pakistan and the US aligned fatally with the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan. Pakistan had the network of crazies, the US had the money and arms. A match made in heaven, at least as far as waging Jihad against the Russians. The US essentially endorsed what had become standard Pakistani policy for giving itself a feeling of security on each of its borders- behave like a nest of killer bees, ready to be stirred up at the least provocation and able to project force via the conveniently "ungovernable" terrain all about.

Friends? Who needs friends when you have terror on your side? Yet there was one thing Pakistan did need, which was money and military toys to keep its political elite in clover. The US was thus diddled along with promises of "cracking down" on terrorists, non-proliferation,  and being a strategic partner against the Soviets. Which was something of a live issue back when India had pro-Soviet sympathies and Afghanistan had been overrun, but no longer in 90's and after.

Once used to the taste of governing another country, (or at least de-governing one), via its Taliban friends and other networks of Jihadis, Pakistan was never going to give up willingly after the Taliban's fall and let the flowers of democracy bloom. All and sundry, including Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar were taken in and nurtured in Pakistan, with a wink and nod. Selected individuals of US interest from Al Qaida were captured, but the infrastructure of the Taliban was never touched, and was even allowed to take over whole provinces in the northwest. What one might charitably call provincial autonomy in the tribal areas was studiously used as cover for a continuing policy of stabilizing the Taliban and destabilizing Afghanistan.

The sad part is that these countries had all the makings of great friends. Closely tied by culture, religion, geography, even blood and tribe, they could have been like the US and Canada, one the slightly more rural and nice version of the other. But no! Closeness can engender blood feuds and condescension as well. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the militarism of Pakistan means that its political elite sees its political stability built on outside threats and domestic fear, not on friendship and commercial progress. (Is this reminiscent of a recent US administration?)

Now the US and Pakistan have settled into a dysfunctional relationship, with the US never able to tell whether Pakistan's latest promises of virginity are any truer than its last. Would its behavior improve more if we cut the cord, sending Pakistan into a nuclear-armed renewed bitterness, or if we held Pakistan closer with "assistance" by which it is enabled into a quasi-stable and quasi-cooperative relationship?

The answer is obviously that the latter has not worked and will not work. On the street, Pakistanis are virulently anti-US. Pakistan continues to have a policy of destabilizing Afghanistan- indeed much more actively than Iran has dared to do in Iraq or Afghanistan. Pakistan continues its internal dysfunction, with a highly militarized political culture replete with corruption and callous disregard of its own population (especially its various ethnic minorities and "tribals"). Pakistanis routinely claim that they have borne the brunt of Islamist violence, and that is true. But it is only true because they have been playing with fire since their founding. Whether it is the fault of Islam itself, or its embittered historical legacy, Pakistan has brought that problem entirely on itself. Our role should be to contain it as much as possible and support its progressive institutions, but to not financially- let alone militarily- abet their militarism and their tragically short-sighted policies.

An interesting fact in the mix is that there is no formal border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan's military rulers have found it convenient to keep the area porous and putatively uncontrolled, while Afghans have in principle opposed dividing the Pashtun people. It may be time to turn this state of affairs to advantage by breaching the Drurand line, taking some of this territory for Afghanistan and uniting the Pashtuns, while at the same time bringing these tribal areas under better (Afghan) government. As things stand, these border areas of Pakistan (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA) have been put explicity under Taliban rule via active Pakistani policy. Obviously, this is untenable for both Afghan, US, and global interests, not to mention the locals who have been either cowed or executed. Taking the fight to the FATA in person, rather than solely via drones, would be a logical step in light of the perpetual duplicity, not to say hostility, of Pakistan (and might be quite a morale builder for Afghanistan besides). Then Pakistan could decide whether it really wants a war against a country with which it could have very friendly relations, or will accede to better administration.

My prescription would thus be to double down on Afghanistan, strengthen ties with India and Russia, and treat  Pakistan as it has asked to be treated- with some hostility. We should cut our aid and assistance (certainly military) while offering the prospect of better relations when Pakistan's political elite decides to grow up. Would we lose what help Pakistan now gives us? Probably yes- all our shipping-based supplies to Afghanistan go through Karachi/Quetta, and we have various secret military bases in the country, as well as implicit drone attack rights and some intelligence assistance against Al Qaida. So this would not be a minor loss. But what does it help us to get logistical support from Pakistan if we are fighting Pakistan at the same time?

Might Pakistan be driven into the arms of, say, Iran or China, to form a new axis of the disgruntled and misunderstood, not to mention the Jihadi? That would be a likely outcome, seen in formal terms. Our policy towards Iran and Pakistan should really be similar- friendly to their people and their progressive sectors, but awaiting maturity and reciprocity instead of giving gratuitous aid to their retrograde leaders. Pakistan would need a friend somewhere to fend off encirclement by the many powers who just "don't understand". But at some point, one wonders whether they might find it within their power to take a look within and do the hard work of psychotherapy/demilitarization/de-Islamization ... and realize that the enemy was never outside to start with.

Here is a quote from a recent Pakistani newspaper commentary, showing typical narcissistic victimhood, not to mention a unique brand of English:

"Besides the physical threats to security of Pakistan emanating from multiple directions, Pakistan has to contend with never-ending vicious propaganda campaign launched by Indo-US-western-Israeli-Afghan nexus to demean Pakistan and its premier institutions."

• The Pakistani-India border dance, complete with coxcombs.
• A fine book on the topic excoriates all concerned, especially the US, as if we were supposed to save the "region" from its own immaturity and dysfunction.
• In the meantime, Pakistan needs some help!
• Banking with squids.
• Class war could hardly be more obvious, could it?
• The "Discovery" institute seems incapable of learning, ironically.
• Sphagnum  moss ejects its spores at 32,000Xg.
• A fascinating graduation address.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week:

"But the US political scene is even more moribund than ours if that is possible. Even the progressives are claiming there is a fiscal crisis. The facts speak otherwise."...

"So the only “deep hole” I can see in the US is the gaping real GDP gap and the resulting and shocking labour underutilisation data. Which sophisticated nation thinks it is acceptable to have 16.5 per cent of your willing labour force idle in some way or another? Answer: None. Only a nation operating under the destructive spell of neoliberalism would envisage making such a situation worse by cutting back the very thing that is maintaining growth at present."

We are Afghanistan

The troubles of forging unity from tribalism and chaos are universal.

With support for the nation-building effort in Afghanistan waning, it seems timely to discuss how common its lessons are for societies around the world. Afghanistan has never had a strong central state, unlike, say, Iraq or the US. As we in the US rush headlong into an always-on, utterly connected, everyone talking to everyone else world, we have left the insular tribal worlds of our own forebears far behind. Even the Germanic tribes of pre-Roman Europe seem to have been more organized and cosmopolitan than what we are facing in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, the perennial pull of state's rights here at home, the nihilism of modern Republicanism, and insurgent subcultures like urban gangs, remind us that state legitimacy is not secure even in the most "advanced" cultures- it has to be earned perpetually. And overarching all these organizations is the international political system, which remains dedicated to an anarchic individualism reminiscent of the Germany of Luther's time, or before.

So what will it take to glue Afghanistan back together, and what lessons can be taken to or applied from elsewhere? I'll start in my backyard. One blight of urban life is gang tags, which are applied dog-like to territories to proclaim gang "ownership", a form of sovereignty among gangs, or in extreme situations, over everyone else in the territory as well, as we see in Brazil's favelas and Mexico's cartel-owned cities and provinces.

Erasing such tags is part of a "broken windows" strategy to assert the legitimacy of a community's silent majority over the vandalizing minority who by their "ownership" signs try to assert political hegemony. The lesson is at once extremely simple and complex- that whoever controls the local infrastructure and public spaces gains social power. If we concede our public spaces to corporations in the form of billboards, we give them dominant legitimacy. If we concede our public spaces to gangs, we give them legitimacy, first to tag and counter-tag territories in never-ending internecine battles, and then, if we are sufficiently negligent, legitimacy over other aspects of our lives, like parking lot security, small business security and shakedowns, and eventually coercive power over the entire local political system.

What's the lesson? An obvious one is to know what is going on in order to know how to wield power. We have to know what is going on with gangs in order to realize that their tags are not gifts of public art, but adversarial political statements. We need to know the real power structures on the ground in order to break them and replace them with more broadly legitimate structures. Likewise in Afghanistan, we need to know the social / political setting in order to know the signs they produce. Schools for girls may make *us happy, but they might be threatening to a hide-bound traditional culture. While rebuilding Afghanistan requires some degree of cultural change on its part, we'll have more success the less such change we demand. I'm no expert, only commenting on the need to know what we are doing before trying to rebuild a nation, rather than reading the lessons of failure afterwards.

A second lesson is that the (silent) majority needs an active voice if it is to drown out the vocal, even armed minorities vying for political control, including whatever elite class currently holds power. Such majorities are easily cowed by armed coercion, so it can be tricky to know their true attitude, especially in a canny and beaten-down culture like Afghanistan. The Afghan tradition of elder conclaves remains one of the bulwarks of civil political dialog, and needs to be fostered throughout the system, especially at the grass roots. More generally, such a voice requires media that discuss and bring to light gang/Taliban activities, corruption, cultural ideals, etc. And it requires official channels that control coercive power, are responsive to community needs, effective in addressing them, (such as apprehending gang members), and free of corruption that impairs each of the foregoing elements.

Afghanistan is sadly far away from each of these elements- militias roam the country, the Afghan army has little loyalty or competence, the government is breathtakingly corrupt, the population is largely illiterate, and the stolen presidential election indicates a certain lack of responsiveness to the populace. Where will all this end? The situation is not lost, but without more trust and organization among the anti-Taliban, pro-democracy and pro-state elements, our role is futile.

One critical angle is the nature of central government in Afghanistan. With artificial borders, impassable terrain, and multiple quasi-independent ethnic groups, central governments have never been very strong even when they have been brutally tyrannical. Yet empowering the presumed silent majority of Afghanistan (including women) over the various gangs either allied with or part of the Taliban requires that the state have quite a bit of countervailing power- power that needs be legitimate in that majority's eyes if it is to be effective in the long run. That is the basic trick- how to draw the allegiance of the people (who may or may not have voted for the government) to its use of power over Talibs and other fanatics whether religious, mercenary, or the usual mixture thereof.

The alternative model is one of decentralization, where the parts of Afghanistan go their own way under token sovereignty in Kabul. In the absence of external threats, this would be quite attractive, but it lays the country wide open to divide-and-conquer by the Taliban and its ISI/Al Qaeda allies. That is the threat that necessitates our involvement and in the long run necessitates a strong central state, however novel the idea is for Afghanistan. One way to help this along would be to put the tribal areas of Pakistan on the table- to start discussing the idea that there is a cost to Pakistan for destabilizing Afghanistan, and that cost is US and international support for transferring the "tribal areas" that Pakistan has never shown much constructive interest in to their more natural home in Afghanistan, forming a more unified Pashtun region.

(Incidentally, the firing of General McCrystal puts another interesting light on the universality of these state power issues. It would not serve America well to put its own constitution in danger for the sake of more effective Afghan rebuilding. Seen from the perspective of ancient Rome, we are already in mortal danger by having standing armies, paying them as mercenaries rather than drafting them from the eligible population, paying various proxies to fight for us, sending them off to countless far-away wars and garrisons with little end in sight, and having a sclerotic and corrupted Senate virtually unable to serve the public interest. The last thing we need is military insubordination that brings ultimate civilian control into question.)

This brings me to the international system- another political system with some need of integration and federalization. Right now, nations exist in a largely lawless domain where armed states and non-states compete for shifting alliances either trying to gain legitimacy in the eyes of some audience, or trying to exert direct power over or under the table. The powerful bully the weak, and chaos is held at bay largely through the good (or not so good, depending on your perspective) offices of Pax Americana.

Al Qaeda has shown the power of PR over mere bombs and aircraft carriers. Their message continues to corrode the status/legitimacy of the US in the Muslim world. This is doubly remarkable because their own brutality hardly renders them attractive, as might be, say, the far more justified plight of the Tibetan people under the Dalai Lama.

Having a more organized and democratic international system (i.e. a world government) would be very helpful to address such issues of common concern, like the lawless fishing of the seas, pollution, and climate change. Perhaps the greatest need, however, is to set a floor of minimal standards of local governance, monitoring failed states before they became festering international sores and taking a systematic, organized response that is stronger than the shrugging and flaccid UN ministrations they are met with today. With respect to Al Qaeda, a coherent world government would be much more likely to treat such irritants as policing and governance issues rather than some kind of clash of civilizations / war on terror, etc. The US didn't have an international structure to turn to, forcing it to "go it alone" with all the problems attendant to such foreign adventures.

Afghanistan is a model of state failure, suffering decades of civil war capped by the brutally benighted government of the Taliban. The international system as sponsored by the US is not in quite such a chaotic state, after the last century gave us such cautionary lessons. But the US will not always be the global superpower, nor is it universally appreciated in that position. So it would be wise to build international institutions, as we are building national Afghan institutions, that can further the peaceful interests of humanity in an effective way.

• Friedman is pretty down on Afghanistan. But how can our work there not "resonate" if it has world-wide importance?
• Know thy parents.
• Why are we failing? Because markets are not enough.
• Who governs Britain?
• Stem cells to the rescue.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week, explaining the curious phenomenon where the private markets were clamoring for public debt issues even when the government was running surpluses. And secondly, the fact that public debt has always found a market:

"If you then think about this, independently of the specific proposal that the paper is considering, public debt serves a core function for private profit-seeking. The mainstream macroeconomics textbooks and commentators never emphasise this aspect of public debt.

They are always relating it back to profligate government spending and the sovereign default. The reality is that public debt plays no fundamental role in funding government spending. But it plays a very crucial role in underpinning the risk management in the private sector.

In other words, public debt is really corporate welfare."

Afghan reboot

What should we do now? Boots or no boots?

The Afghan war/nation building/counterinsurgency/hearts-and-minds operation has largely gone down the drain. A recent report described the utter futility of our training efforts for the Afghan army and police force, whose members are cashing out and disappearing as fast as we "train" them, then coming back for more pay and more training with new names. Pakistan remains likewise uncontrolled, with their border home sweet home for insurgents and jihadists of all sorts.

The core of the problem is corruption. While there is plenty of corruption and stupidity on the part of US and its contractors, the more serious problem is that the Afghan government is fully corrupt, with little hold on the affections and respect of the populace or any plausible way to engage with it, certainly not after the shameful election antics just witnessed. In Iraq, the US faced a population that had long been used to a powerful central state. However frightfully it fell apart into a lord-of-the-flies free-for-all, Iraqis generally nurtured the hope that eventually chaos would recede, either at the hands of another strongman, or directly at the hands of the US occupiers, and they could resume something like normal life in a semi-developed country.

But in Afghanistan, the political culture has never gotten to the point of effective centralization, let alone parliamentary democracy, checks and balances, technocracy, and the many other ingredients of modern statehood. Decades of civil war have eviscerated basic expectations of normalcy. The situation is reminiscent of the rotten governments of South Vietnam, successively installed by the CIA via coups d'état as the US blindly tried to prop up the South with hardly any knowledge of its culture or history. In effect, the US was busily turning the population of the South against its government instead of for it, giving them over into the arms of the Vietcong.

As the Taliban are today, the Vietcong were indigenous (i.e. grass-roots), nationalistic, ruthless, and far more efficient than the government or US forces. They had inherited a mantle of anti-imperialism, first against the Japanese, then the French, as the Taliban have against the Russians and the Americans. Their all-important currencies were credibility and sympathy- sympathy by being of the rural South Vietnamese culture, and credibility both through their history and by way of their organizational skill and successes against their enemies.

How are we winning the sympathy of the population of Afghanistan? It is a complicated question, but basically, the answer varies between not very well and not at all. The vision of a well-run state with women's rights, security, and economic development is, in the Afghan context, a far-away utopia. The competing vision of traditional Islam and plenty of money from poppy cultivation makes a good deal more immediate sense, at least to the middle power-brokers- the warloads, tribal leaders and family heads. And if the Taliban has more effective grass-roots mafia-like enforcement of power and security, then that would be icing on the cake, despite other problems with their vision- that unremitting and barbaric shariah is hardly palatable to most Afghans either.

My take on all this is that our numbers of soldiers is not the issue. The issue is the nature of the government, and how well-aligned it is in the near and far term with its people's aspirations. The situation is worth saving, both for our own interests, for our historical debt to Afghanistan, and for purely humanitarian reasons. The answer is to boot the government out as soon as possible and replace it with direct temporary control by NATO.

The local nation-building process needs to begin not from the top down as it did with power-brokers held over from prior puppet governments, tribal organizations, mujahideen and civil war antagonists. These may well end up being the relevant powers in a new Afghanistan, but they should get there from the bottom up. A caretaker central government organized by NATO could rapidly organize a skeletal federal system and local civic processes and elections (supplemented by jirgas where those might offer extra inclusion and participation). There should be a step-wise process working up the ladder of governance, from local to provincial to national, focusing on each in sequence so that there are civic institutions and experience at each level before the next level is put under local control.

Such a government would not be filled with Europeans, but have a mix of Afghans and NATO / UN officers enforcing rules against corruption and ineffectiveness, with accountability flowing from the top, and all the churn and active firing and hiring that would imply. It will take time to assemble an effective government and weed out bad elements, but it will take less time through reconstitution than it will by jollying the current system along while also fighting a war at the same time. We should honestly recognize that we gave it a good shot through the original Loya jirga, national elections, etc., but need a do-over at this point, from strictly empirical criteria. In most measures, Afghanistan's government rates worst in the world right now, roughly even with that of Somalia.

A new provisional government would not be terribly strict or controlling in most aspects. For instance, poppy cultivation should be legalized and freely allowed. Given the choice between losing the war, the country, and the war on drugs, or just the war on drugs, the latter is the better choice. Likewise, if local communities choose to install tribal elders as their representatives, (through local elections with secret ballots), that is fine as well. Land reform should be encouraged, buying out large landholders and assuring individuals of right of tenure. Credit reform is needed as well, encouraging microlending and other modern instruments for farmers on all scales. The point is to make citizen service, efficiency, and non-corruption the focus of government, all sheltered under an umbrella of security that assures citizens that the Taliban won't be coming back unless it is their free choice. This is best done from the ground up with civic processes starting at the grass roots.

That is the lesson I take from Vietnam- that politics is critically important. Terrorism/insurgency has no pull or point to it without a political background, which in most cases is a government that is incompetent, uncaring, and corrupt. Winning hearts and minds is not just a figure of speech, but the essential element to giving Afghanistan hope. The current government has demonstrated its inability to provide that hope. While foreigners automatically have many liabilities in winning local hearts and minds, and in running the upper levels of the Afghan government, it would be difficult to do a worse job than our chosen government is doing right now. Whatever we do militarily, it will not have any point without a better solution to the core political problem.

• George Packer on Holbrook and Afghanistan.
• Frank Rich on Obama's choice in Afghanistan.
• Vietnam- read A Bright and Shining lie, by Sheehan, among many others.
• Cohen on individualism in America.
• Apparently, we are a Christian nation, after all!
• Is the Vatican a state? If so, shouldn't the Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama be as well? And others?
• Another bubble in its infancy.
• Lie about climate change? Who would ever do such a thing?
• On death and philosophy