Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

A Myth Named Afghanistan

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American soldiers would often show up at villages in rural areas of Afghanistan to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the locals only to learn that they not only don’t understand what America is, but aren’t even aware that they’re living in a country called Afghanistan.

And don’t especially care.Afghanistan is an imaginary country. Much like Iraq and Syria. These places have history, but the idea of a country is an external concept embraced by local elites who want centralized authority, but resisted by locals in rural areas.

The real Afghanistan is a collection of different ethnic groups and Islamic denominations, where tribe matters far more than nationality.

We “won” Afghanistan by backing an anti-Taliban tribal coalition. The strategy, much like the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, paid off because we provided air and military support to a viable tribal opposition.

The clean and effective victory was then ruined by trying to “modernize” and “democratize” Afghanistan.

We plowed billions into building a modern Afghan army. Just like the effort to build a modern Iraqi army, it was doomed.

The Afghans couldn’t be trusted to fight alongside us or even alongside each other. The only kind of viable military force in a tribal society consists of people who trust each other fighting together using traditional raiding tactics.

The Afghan army collapsed in the face of the Taliban for the same reason that the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of ISIS.

We were trying to get people who don’t think like us or live like us to fight like us.

That was never going to work.

A modern Afghanistan was worse than a client state. It was a Potemkin village of State Department and USAID workers funding female rock bands and American officers trying to get Afghans to act like they’re in a modern western army. All that led to was Afghans feeling insulted and trying to kill Americans.

Afghanistan was a strange dream that Americans had. The Afghans never shared that dream. The moment we announced that we were leaving, the soldiers we had dressed up, abandoned ship. Every Afghan we had spent a fortune paying to participate in our production of a modern Afghanistan fled. The show was over, the paying crowd was leaving, and the Taliban smoothly took over everything.

Everyone except us understood that was going to happen.

The old Brits or Frenchmen who had lived through this same phenomenon in the fifties could have told us about it, but we wouldn’t have listened.

And we still don’t understand.

A tribal opposition to the Taliban will likely emerge. And we will likely fund them. That opposition may succeed in dividing the country. The warlords in the Taliban coalition and the opposition coalition will move back and forth as they did during our part of the Afghanistan war.

It’s become fashionable to call Afghanistan an “endless war”. But it’s not our endless war. It’s the endless war of the tribes, clans and families that make up much of the Muslim world. We didn’t begin the “endless war” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or anywhere else.

It was foolish of us to believe that we could end it.

The difficult realities are those no one wants to hear.

There was never a solution to Afghanistan. Nation-building was never going to work And the odds are that after we’ve withdrawn, Islamic terrorists are going to set up shop and begin the cycle all over again.

Americans think in terms of solutions. Or at least we used to.

But cultural problems can’t be solved. The War On Poverty failed for the same reasons that the War on Drugs failed. And for the same reason that our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan ultimately failed.

The Founding Fathers understood that we could solve our own problems. We couldn’t solve those of Europe. We still can’t.

But the flip side of the reality is that isolation only gets us so far in a world in which terrorists can hijack planes and fly them into buildings.

Or get their hands on nuclear weapons.

More than ever we think in binary and polar terms. All either one thing or another. Reality doesn’t work that way.

We need to avoid being drawn into more nation-building folly, but there will come times when we’ll need to militarily intervene to protect our interests.

Those interventions should be short and decisive. They should set a clear goal of destroying the enemy without then being drawn into a futile program of stabilizing and constructing a new system that we approve of on the rubble of the enemy.

That’s foolish and doomed.

The temptation to stabilize a source of instability is geopolitically rational, but doomed by culture. The nation-builders were right that failing to stabilize Iraq or Afghanistan meant that we would get dragged back in. It already happened in Iraq, the odds of it happening at some point in Afghanistan are pretty good.

But that means we’ll have to learn to live with an Israeli model of occasional brief interventions with low casualties rather than extended engagements. We are done with trying to replicate WW2 or Vietnam all over again. Or at least we should be.

This model doesn’t really fix anything. It isn’t any kind of solution. And as terrorists get closer to accessing more dangerous weapons, building their own drones and rockets, obtaining chemical, biological or nuclear materials through the same pipeline from North Korea to Pakistan to Iran, there may be a hell of a price to pay.

There were better decisions that we could have and should have made before and after September 11.

We didn’t make them. And that means we are where we are. Our enemies are getting more dangerous just as we’re getting weaker.

Everyone needs to adapt to a new reality horizon and work with the situation as it is. But that probably won’t happen. Instead the debate will go back to being between the same old failed intervention model or the equally failed model of insisting that if we ignore the problem, it’ll go away.

It won’t.

The basic crisis is simple enough.

Islamic terrorist insurgencies are expanding. Demographics mean that there will increasingly be more of them than there are of us and they will seek, as the Nazis did, Lebensraum or Breathing Room, through migration or immigration, colonization or conquest. Either way there will be enemies without and within whose organization and capabilities will continue to increase even as ours decay.

A sane country would have responded to 9/11 by cutting off their sources of funding and weapons with brief and decisive campaigns targeting oil-rich states and the North Korea-Pakistan-Iran weapons pipeline.

Instead we spent our time chasing the terrorists and trying to rebuild their societies.

Wars that could have been won became unwinnable exercises in suicidal sociology. That choice may mark one of the turning points of our decline. And it came from a political culture that was unable to deal with real problems, only with ideological abstractions, run by men who thought entirely in terms of the ideas that they had absorbed in the past, and with no room left for questioning those ideas.

The only real lesson of Afghanistan is that we need to step out of the boxes and echo chambers and start seeing the world as it is, and evaluating problems and solutions the way we would tackle a broken chair or a toilet, not in ideological, but in practical terms.

If we can’t learn that lesson, then we can always debate the sex of all the angels can dance on the heads of a pin while the Turks besiege our walls. History offers ample lessons for societies that can’t learn from the past, the present, or the future.

We ought to learn them before the barbarians aren’t just in Kabul, but on our own borders.

Comments

  1. Afghanistan is a land filled with tribes constantly warring with each other? Okay, that somehow sounds familiar. How do we civilize a land filled with barbarians? Maybe we should read up on the Spanish Conquistadors in Central and South America and study the Indian Wars in the early settlement days of North America. It’s all ancient history now but there might be something useful to be found there.

    • BTW, the recent 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec Empire to Hernan Cortes has me currently reading the book written by one of the men with Cortes at the time, Bernal Diaz del Castillo. The book is called the “The True History of the Conquest of New Spain” and it’s fascinating reading. I highly recommend it. It would make an epic movie.

      • Before we think we can emulate the Conquistadores in pacifying the Islamic world, please consider:

        1. Cortez had only 600 Spaniards on a good day. However, lots of Indians, especially the Tlaxcaltec, were happy to join the fight against the Mexica. Cortez’ 600 Spaniards had thousands of Indians marching with them.

        2. The MIddle East shares the same set of immunities as the ret of the civilized world. The Indigenes of the Americas were not wiped out by steel and cannon, but by the smallpox bacilli, which the Spaniards themselves did not understand.

        • Well, I haven’t finished the book yet but so far ALL the natives met by Cortes started out fighting against him but he still defeated them and was able to get them to come around to being peaceful towards him with many becoming allies. He showed no respect towards their gods or their culture either. I haven’t gotten to the fall of Tenochtitlan (pop. 200,000) yet so I’m not sure if that happened before or after the smallpox took its toll – besides, would the disease not have affected the natives helping Cortes as much as the ones fighting against him? I still think it was a remarkable accomplishment by Cortes that is hard to believe.

      • CES—Thanks for the book title.
        Been looking for a good read.
        Ordered it from the library tonight.

        • I hope you find it interesting. As I am reading each chapter I keep thinking about how brave those men with Cortes must have been and how the story seems like fiction – but it’s not.

    • Colonel Gadaffi was right when he said that the only way to hold these countries together is by being the biggest baddest most scary warlord that no lesser warlord dares defy.

    • I would give up every WOKE SOLDIER, Who WENT-NATIVE IN AFGHANISTAN, for just a FEW CONQUISTADORS, with their mind-set of “Killing the Enemy is the only way to win a war.”
      After 9/11, GW went stark raving mad with our Soldiers being GOOD-WILL AMBASSADORS & Gave us the DEFEATEST POLICY OF “WIN THE HEARTS & MINDS OF THE ENEMY.”
      He brought the Muslim Terrorists into MAINSTREAM AMERICA. & OBAMA & BIDEN CONTINUED THAT DEADLY GAME.
      NOW WE NEED THOSE CONQUISTADORS!

  3. An excellent essay by Daniel Greenfield. It is replete with the same wisdom that America’s sixth President, John Quincy Adams, asserted, to wit, that America is a free and democratic country and definitely wishes the entire world well, infused with freedom and democracy, but America is not going to go about “converting” the entire world to our beliefs. If the rest of the world wishes to adopt these noble aspects all the better because they are superior aspects for any polity, but it is not America’s job, nor in America’s interest (most of the time) to carry our “message” abroad. So opined John Quincy Adams whom I paraphrased here.

    Yes, JQA lived in a time when America was not yet a “world player,” but by around 1900 America was—by default of its enormous successes forced into a major player role. But for America, WWI would almost certainly not have resulted in German defeat, as the German Imperial Staff itself admitted (e.g., Ludendorff). Certainly, minus America in WWII, the “results” would have been far different. Ditto for Korea (South Korea is a prosperous and relatively free nation first and foremost because of America and one knows this or should know it), sadly not in Vietnam (a battle lost in a war America won—the Cold War), and on and on because most of the world doesn’t work and doesn’t get that four things are necessary for a polity to operate optimally, those being democracy, capitalism, a decent legal system and a proper moral foundation. Communism failed in all four. Nazism in at least three (capitalism still remained in butchered form after the Night of the Long Knives {1934} though this is lost on all those who continue to assert that Nazism was a Leftist phenomenon). Islam is at least wretched in three of these four, usually all four.

    And now to today. Western Civilization is easily, no contest, the greatest civilization of all time. It invented democracy, philosophy, the scientific method, the exploration of women’s rights like no other civilization ever did, the capacity to apologize for past wrongdoings as no other civilization has, the most extraordinary technological achievements of all time, etc. But all this adds up to nothing if pride and resolution don’t exist in the West. Accurate knowledge too, for instance knowledge that many belief systems, secular or religious, are inimical to the best that the West has put forward to the benefit of all mankind if only mankind will take cognizance of this.

    Mankind has yet to do so, whether in seemingly permanently dysfunctional Latin America, so many societies in Africa and Asia, and most certainly in the most desultory, depressing, dysfunctional and destructive portion of mankind, i.e., the forever backward, ungrateful, parasitic, repressive Islamic sphere of mankind.

    Time the West recognizes realities once again. Oh yes, it used to, but the enormous destruction which Leftism has wrought, coupled with the timidity of so many conservatives, has led to an era in man’s history which is the first era of absurdity. This has got to change or the darkest of dark ages will quite possibly descend upon all the Earth.

      • Western Civilization (which is based on Judeo- Christian principles) almost completely in European countries and to a large extent in North America. That is why many European countries like UK and Germany are turniing into shit-hole countries.

        • Rarely, you have always seemed fine with far left hatred of the west. This actually is quite harmful–unless, of course, one seeks the destruction of the civilized west.

      • The Left, Rarely, has ruined everything it has touched. This would include education, patriotism, any understanding that it is only through strength true peace is achieved (Horace: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—If you wish for peace, prepare for war), sports (examples being the NFL, MLB and the NBA), gender, bathrooms, the Boy Scouts, pronouns, the innocence of childhood by teaching children way too much about sexual matters, and freedom in general by way of the Orwellian distinction between free speech and hate speech as exists on virtually all college campuses in America where the Left is most in control.

        Is this enough or do you need more examples?

        • No agenda JL.
          It just seems to me that some people are prepared to blame everything that goes wrong on some “leftist”(??) idea. And, of course, “leftist” means “Communist”. If they don’t like it then it must be “leftist” and, therefore, Communist.
          For the record, I am against many of the changes and alterations Wellington refers to above (that is, much of the far left agenda). At the same time we should, in my opinion, be sensitive to those people and groups who have been badly treated in the past, and continue to be.
          There are serious problems with all this idiocy of pronouns, with the gay community supporting islam which seeks to kill them, etc. There are, however, many changes in thought and action that are long overdue.

        • BTW. I don’t hate the west or the USA.
          Although I favour Freedom but your Freedom to wave your arms about ends at my nose.

  4. “before the barbarians aren’t just in Kabul, but on our own borders.”

    A song by Lone Star, “I’m Already There.” It’s a great song, with fine meaning. In fact, diane sawyer had it played on her show with a live audience composed of a bunch of the family members of people murdered on 9/11 only days after the mass murders took place. (She even proudly announced that some of those present with her were mozlums.)

    Those mozlum terrorists who have arrived on the Southern border could taunt Americans with the name of that song. They are “already there,” and inside the border too.

  5. Um, Afghanistan will never become a first-world country. We have poured too many resources, too many American soldiers lives lost in this Lost Cause Known As Afghanistan (TM Pending).

    The bottom line is this:

    We need to shut our borders and disallow them from coming in under the guise of “Refugees”.

    All those young Afghan men you saw boarding that USA plane in the news today?

    Yeah well they need to stay there and learn how to fight for their own country.

    Leave the USA out of it.

    • Yup. “Leave the USA out of it”? I don’t remember the USA having been invited into it in the first place. Kindly refresh my memory.

      • Rarely, there was no reason for us to stay 20 years and try and civilize Afghanistan. But your idea that it was fine for Afghanistan to allow Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base from which to wage violent Jihad–chiefly 9/11–against us is not something I accept.

        • gi.
          You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Trying to impose its concept of democracy on countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is such an attempt. To repeat it seemingly endlessly, however noble the intent, borders on insanity. Of course 9/11 couldn’t go unanswered. Seems as if we agree.

  6. A Myth Named Afghanistan
    …………….

    Yes–this was never really a country in any real sense.

    • Very true. Like I mentioned yesterday, there wasn’t a country called Afghanistan before 1700: it was always a part of either Iranic or Turkic empires. As far as the Afghan people go, the term ‘Afghan’ is synonymous w/ Pashtun, who are the only tribes (aside from the Hazaras) native to Afghanistan. The Tajiks are Iranic people w/ ties to both Tajikistan and Iran (for people of Herat), and the Turkmen & Uzbeks are Turkic people more tied to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan

      That’s one of the reasons why Pakistan has always been nervous about Afghanistan, since the latter doesn’t recognize the Durand Line, and so they fear that an Afghan government will claim Pakistani areas like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and areas of Waziristan and Balochistan. I wouldn’t worry about Pakistan-Taliban relations being the same this time: the Taliban is a lot more powerful and a lot less willing to be anyone’s stooge, particularly Pakistan’s

  7. It’s a very good article. It is amazing that the Administration wasn’t aware of this situation from the beginning. Can we assume that there was no one with a measurable IQ in a position to influence policy? I suppose that we might recall IKE’s warning to be wary of the military-industrial complex who have certainly done well from the Afghan Adventure.

    • There are people of high IQ within the Biden maladroitism. Unfortunately they are the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators within the National Security Council and State Department.

  8. What a waste of American tax dollars, Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no way we would convert these countries to a democracy. Our intelligence agency are either totally incompetent or our military and political leaders are not listening, sadly we will probably never know who is at fault. The tax payer can’t fire these people but we can vote the politicians out of office and hope new political leaders can change the system. Trump tried to make changes and the agencies and system drove him out of office. Not a great looking future for American citizens.

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