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One of the world’s top Shi’ite clerical leaders, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, has died:
“His career as an interpreter of Islamic jurisprudence and Shiite intellectual culture spanned more than half a century and touched on every aspect of public and private life for the millions of Shiite Muslims who considered him their ‘marja’, or ‘object of emulation’, a title bestowed upon only those clerics who have attained the highest level of scholarship and influence.
“But despite these varied religious and intellectual accomplishments, he is best remembered for his fierce resistance to the 1978-2000 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, as well as his role as the first major Muslim cleric of any sect to use religious justification for suicide bombing operations…
“Willingness to discard prior religious precedent…often endeared him to his community of followers far more than his support for military action against Israel, and turned him into one of the most liberal intellectuals in the Muslim world.
“In an interview four years ago, Fadlallah described much of what is considered Sharia as ‘nothing more than outdated Arabic tribal traditions that both pre-date and contradict the teachings of the prophets but are continued by falsely linking them to Islamic tradition’.
“It was this mentality that led him to challenge many tenets commonly associated with Islam that involve family law, divorce, women’s rights and even sex outside of marriage.
“He often granted divorces to women who could prove abuse or neglect by their husbands and would do so without consulting or even informing the husband or his family, as in his view their opinion was irrelevant once the tenets of marriage were broken by abuse or infidelity…
“This liberalism towards women led him to argue that not only would it be permissible for women to lead prayers in mosques for mixed audiences but that God had actually commanded that women should be allowed into the highest ranks of Shiite Islam as ayatollahs.”
Good pieces on his life and role have been written by Mohamad Bazzi and Juan Cole. Despite living in Lebanon, he was not that close to Hizbullah, but was deeply involved with the leaders of Iraq’s Da’wa Party, as well as its offshoots in the Gulf, particularly Bahrain, and the Bahraini cleric ‘Abdullah al-Ghurayfi is one possibility to rise to the head of his network.
I apologize to Jim Henley in advance for excerpting so much of this post, but it is simply too good to apply the pruning shears liberally enough to bring my use to within acceptable norms of blog excerpting. To provide some context, Henley is riffing off Gene Callahan’s response to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that warns of the potential negative consequences of lifting the travel ban to Cuba.
Across a whole range of problems there’s a class of responses I’ll dub the “low road” and another class I’ll call the “high road.” Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; “dominance”-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals).
I don’t presently care to argue that there is never any “need” to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases – torture – I have a much easier time saying “Never go there.” But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.
Nine years into the invasion of Afghanistan we have to agree that pulling out after a decade is just too soon. Back in 2001, the Taliban’s failure to turn over Osama bin Laden within a couple of weeks showed the hopelessness of diplomacy. When torture “works” at all it takes weeks and months, just like more classic rapport-building methods of interrogation. And it involves more false positives. Plus, oh I forgot to mention, it is deeply evil. But even though classic interrogation methods produce statistically better results, we live in fear that there may be some time somewhere that torture might get an answer that classic interrogation missed, so of course we must continually torture for that possible moment’s sake. As Gene points out, O’Grady judges the European and Canadian liberation of travel to Cuba a failure because Cuba has not become a neoliberal paradise in the decade since, while leaving aside the fact that Cuba hasn’t become a neoliberal paradise after 50 years of American cold-war against the country.
Compare also the standard neocon “U SUCK LOL” directed against nonviolent resistance – Hitler would totally have just killed Gandhi hahaha! We accept that successful violent resistance might take years or decades to achieve victory – Mao, Castro – and that guerrilla movements might suffer casualties to ranks and leaders but keep on. But we can’t imagine that nonviolent resistances might achieve the same. The war on drugs will surely work at some point – we’ve only been at it for 90-odd years, trillions of dollars and countless deaths and humiliations. But should anyone anywhere decriminalize anything, a single death or inconvenience in the first week would condemn the entire effort. It takes time to get an animal to do what you want with positive reinforcement. It takes time to get an animal to do what you want with negative reinforcement. But taking the former time is simpering weakness while taking the latter is manly resolve.
This analysis is so right in so many ways it’s hard to know where to begin listing the examples and exploring the ramifications.
With respect to the point made about the relative allotments of patience afforded to each category of approach, I recall countless arguments with Iraq war supporters about the alleged necessity of the invasion based on the fraying of the sanctions and inspections regime. What I found quite astonishing was that, almost uniformly, proponents of this line of reasoning argued that a massive military campaign designed to decapitate a regime and rebuild the entire political/economic structure of a nation, involving massive societal and cultural changes as imposed from the outside by a country with little cultural/linguistic/religious/historical affinity with the target nation, would somehow be easier than…convincing the relevant UN member nations to reinforce a weapons inspection regime/smarten sanctions. The former: cakewalk. The latter: Pipe dreams.
Riiight.
Another obvious quarry to probe (or, rather, further the excavation begun by Henley) is how this dynamic dominates our counterterrorism approach. While we have been occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for almost a decade in each instance, there has been a massive spike in terrorist attacks against Western and US interests around the globe (including and especially within Iraq and Afghanistan themselves), but few blame these results on the attendant military actions, or at least claim that more time is needed for the respective occupations to settle the situation down.
However, if we had withdrawn from either locale at some earlier date (say, a mere five years into each conflict), even if the overall number of attacks went down, is there any doubt that there would be a rush to blame our “retreat” as the cause for any subsequent attacks (especially if one occurred in the US itself) - and that these attacks would be seen as incontrovertible evidence of the failure of anything but the perpetual war approach?
The familiar “appeasement” meme would proliferate despite the simple and obvious rebuttal that the occupations themselves have provided impetus for terrorist attacks – notably, the Times Square Bomber was motivated by a desire for vengeance for US missile strikes in Pakistan, and Maj. Nidal Hasan was motivated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you think I’m being unduly cynical, consider that the mere mention of withdrawal from either theater even now (after almost a decade in each) is seen as evidence of a lack of resolve, will embolden the “terrorists” (even setting forth an aspirational contingent timeline gives them succor!) and will, like the ahistorical reading of the Vietnam denouement, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Such rhetoric resonates politically, and the knowledge of its political efficacy is, at the very least, in the back of the minds of many policymakers that might favor a more expedited withdrawal based on a more simple cost-benefit analysis. Bill Clinton was on to something when he noted that “when people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right.”
In that sense, from my tiny little corner of the blogosphere, I’ve been trying to emphasize that this perception of “strength” itself is misguided, and that the misapprehension of what is “strong” lies behind much of the preference for, and indulgence of, the “low road” to use Henley’s terminology. From a post in 2004:
In a recent post, I briefly discussed the phenomenon that Americans tend to view violence as a manifestation of strength. This of course is almost the opposite of what is true – violence is the act of a desperate, threatened and frightened being, believing that no other recourse exists. It is also one of the least effective means of achieving the desired outcome. Violence begets violence, a cycle of revenge, and a poisonous atmosphere not conducive to the resolution of conflicts. As an example, compare the approaches of leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the recently infirmed Yasser Arafat. It is hard to argue with the comparative results.
In foreign policy terms, this concept is translated into the belief that being “strong” on issues of national security means possessing a hawkish willingness to use the military over “weaker” diplomatic options. Again, this interpretation is misguided and exclusionary of the vast amount of evidence detailing the enormous successes of diplomacy. Despite all the public bluster and macho image, the “strongest” thing that Reagan ever did was agree to engage Mikhail Gorbachev in a paradigm shifting series of summits and normalization of relations that, eventually, culminated in the end of the Cold War.
A policy’s “strength” should be measured by its ability to deliver the desired results at the least cost, regardless of how many things explode in the process, and what the eventual body count is. And a leader is strong, or not, based on their support for such wise and effective policies, not, again, on their willingness to unleash the dogs of war on every passer by.
Ironically, this overwhelming tendency to identify “strength” with violent means - and with those most willing to employ such means in the broadest array of scenarios, with the lowest threshold of provocation – is prevalent amongst people that ostensibly revere Jesus Christ, whose message about what true strength and power are seems to be in direct contradiction to the operative presumptions.
Will Bunch is highly quotable in discussing the recent report that shows just how thoroughly “toilet trained” the media has been in its on again, off again – contingent – willingness to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture:
On the one hand, waterboarding is torture.
On the other hand….
I’m sorry — there is no other hand. Waterboarding is torture, period. It’s been that way for decades — it was torture when we went after Japanese war criminals who used the ancient and inhumane interrogation tactic, it was torture when Pol Pot and some of the worst dictators known to mankind used it against their own people, and it was torture to the U.S. military which once punished soldiers who adopted the grim practice.
And waterboarding was described as “torture,” almost without fail, in America’s newspapers.
Until 2004, after the arrival of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their criminal notions of “enhanced interrogations.” For four years — in what would have to be the bizarro-world version of “speaking truth to power,” waterboarding was almost never torture on U.S. newsprint. Then waterboarding-as-torture nearly made a mild comeback in journo-world, until perpetrators like Cheney and Inquirer op-ed columnist John Yoo began the big pushback, when American newspapers bravely turned their tails and fled.
From the early 1930′s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
The report also notes that waterboarding had constantly been referred to as torture by newspapers when other nations did it, but when the United States did it in the 2000s, it was, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, not illegal. The study proves scientifically something we’ve been talking about here at Attytood since Day One, about the tragic consequences of the elevation of an unnatural notion of objectivity in which newspapers abandoned any core human values — even when it comes to something as clear cut as torture — to give equal moral weight to both sides of an not-so-debatable issue (not to mention treating scientific issues like climate changes in the same zombie-like manner).
Never before in my adult life have I been so ashamed of my profession, journalism.
There’s already some good analysis of the report out there from the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer, who writes:
As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo’s formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the “think” part of the equation so they could be “fair” to both groups.
The irony that Serwer notes — and I completely agree — is that in claiming they were working so hard not to take “a side,” the journalists who wouldn’t call waterboarding “torture” were absolutely taking a side and handing a victory to the Bush administration, which convinced newspapers to stop unambiguously describing this crime as they had done for decades prior to 2004. It’s a tactic that has continued to this day. It’s the reason why Cheney– who’d been nearly invisible when he was in power — and Yoo were suddenly all over the place beginning on Jan. 21, 2009, because they were desperately trying to keep framing this debate as the newspapers had, that their torture tactics were a public, political disagreement, and not a war crime.
And tragically, they succeeded. They were America’s leaders, they tortured, and they got away with it. And newspapers and other journalists drove the getaway car.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
Not only did our major establishment media outlets completely abdicate their ethical obligation to speak truth to power (or, in this case, merely call a spade a spade), and instead willingly adopted Orwellian euphemisms designed to soften the edges of vile criminal behavior, but our leading newspapers regularly give valuable column space to the architects of the criminal policies, as well as their dedicated advocates, apologists and dissemblers, such as John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg.
Not content to merely drive the getaway car, the establishment media has seen fit to put up some of the war criminals – and their cheerleaders – in plush flop houses with a regular stipened.
On the other hand, Dave Weigel used some intemperate language to describe Matt Drudge on an ostensibly private email list, and that was simply too much for the august Washington Post to tolerate.
Andrew Bacevich makes an extremely important point about some of the costs associated with perpetuating long term war(s), and how such a military posture erodes democratic institutions
Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms. [...]
After Vietnam, the United States abandoned its citizen army tradition, oblivious to the consequences. In its place, it opted for what the Founders once called a “standing army” — a force consisting of long-serving career professionals.
For a time, the creation of this so-called all-volunteer force, only tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke. Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats took turns putting them to work. The result, once the Cold War ended, was greater willingness to intervene abroad. As Americans followed news reports of U.S. troops going into action everywhere from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, they found little to complain about: The costs appeared negligible. Their role was simply to cheer.
This happy arrangement now shows signs of unraveling, a victim of what the Pentagon has all too appropriately been calling its Long War.
The Long War is not America’s war. It belongs exclusively to “the troops,” lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy.
To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end…
Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants — along with the conviction that “Team America,” as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption — suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.
To imagine that replacing McChrystal with Gen. David H. Petraeus will fix the problem is wishful thinking. To put it mildly, Petraeus is no simple soldier. He is a highly skilled political operator, whose name appears on Republican wish lists as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. Far more significant, the views cultivated within Team America are shared elsewhere.
The day the McChrystal story broke, an active-duty soldier who has served multiple combat tours offered me his perspective on the unfolding spectacle. The dismissive attitude expressed by Team America, he wrote, “has really become a pandemic in the Army.” Among his peers, a belief that “it is OK to condescend to civilian leaders” has become common, ranking officers permitting or even endorsing “a culture of contempt” for those not in uniform. Once the previously forbidden becomes acceptable, it soon becomes the norm.
“Pretty soon you have an entire organization believing that their leader is the ‘Savior’ and that everyone else is stupid and incompetent, or not committed to victory.” In this soldier’s view, things are likely to get worse before they get better. “Senior officers who condone this kind of behavior and allow this to continue and fester,” he concluded, “create generation after generation of officers like themselves — but they’re generally so arrogant that they think everyone needs to be just like them anyway.” [...]
During Vietnam, the United States military cracked from the bottom up. The damage took decades to repair. In the seemingly endless wars of the post-Sept. 11 era, a military that has demonstrated remarkable durability now shows signs of coming undone at the top. The officer corps is losing its bearings. [...]
The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly “at” war, with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course — and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse — the damage to the army and to American democracy will be severe.
All that, and this particular Bacevich piece doesn’t even touch on the interplay of perpetual war and the steady erosion of civil liberties, a deterioration that can prove difficult to halt, let alone reverse, even after the state of war has passed.
On the contrary, the newer less protective civil liberties standards tend to creep into the domestic law enforcement arena, bringing a bit of the war front to the home front.
“On one side are hard-liners within the Iranian establishment, most prominently President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who appears ready to punish Azad University for its alleged support for opposition candidates in the 2009 presidential election. Supporting Ahmadinejad is the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution (SCCR), whose resolution to alter the Azad University’s charter, replace its current head of Azad University, and change its governing board was recently approved by the president.
“On the other side are the conservatives within the same establishment, mainly former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who co-founded the university in 1982 and now the heads its board of trustees. Also supporting the conservatives are parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, and Abdollah Jasbi, the university head who is up for replacement and is a close Rafsanjani ally.
“Matters came to a head on June 19 when the university’s board secured a temporary injunction that prevented the SCCR from enforcing its revision of the university’s charter.
“The next day, a bill was rushed through the 270-member parliament that effectively circumvented the government takeover of Azad, by allowing universities to endow their properties to the public.Azad University’s board had previously decided to endow the properties of the university, which has 357 branches and satellite campuses throughout the country.
“The legislative move was quickly met with demonstrations outside parliament by Ahmadinejad loyalists.
“In the wake of the heated protests, 100 legislators made a counter move by voting for emergency discussion of legislation that would support the SCCR’s authority in the matter. This, in turn, could result in a bill that would effectively overturn the endowment bill passed on June 20. The counter move led to an uproar in parliament, with legislators exchanging insults.”
This is cast as a dispute showing fissures within Iran’s governing establishment, but again it rather shows how it is wrong to cast Iran as under the control of a unitary establishment. None of the figures named as opposed to Ahmadinejad’s move were ever his allies. Rafsanjani was a strong supporter of Mousavi in the 2009 presidential election, which may mean that Jasbi was, as well, lendence credence to assertions that the institution favored reformist candidates.
Larijani, meanwhile, is a much more traditional conservative than Ahmadinejad, who has taken steps to ameliorate the violence with which the latter’s allies suppressed demonstrations last summer. His stance here may be ideological or faction-based, but he definitely has no interest in seeing the Iranian military establishment linked to Ahmadinejad gain control of one of the world’s largest universities.
William Dalrymple has written a rather insightful article on our current predicament in Afghanistan, leavened with a historical recounting of Britain’s own 19th century experience with conflict in that part of the world.
This is a pretty fair summation of the score:
The reality of our present Afghan entanglement is that we took sides in a complex civil war, which has been running since the 1970s, siding with the north against the south, town against country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban – and they have very good reason for doing so – the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.
This anecdote is quite telling:
The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about the current government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity has helped give an opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban.
As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and ten police hostages taken.
After the jirga was over, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. “Last month,” he said, “some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, ‘Why do you hate us?’ I replied, ‘Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.’”
What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, ‘If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?’ In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.” [...]
Now as then, the problem is not hatred of the west, so much as a dislike of foreign troops swaggering around and making themselves odious to the very people they are meant to be helping. On the return journey, as we crawled back up the passes towards Kabul, we got stuck behind a US military convoy of eight Humvees and two armoured personnel carriers in full camouflage, all travelling at less than 20 miles per hour. Despite the slow speed, the troops refused to let any Afghan drivers overtake them, for fear of suicide bombers, and they fired warning shots at any who attempted to do so. By the time we reached the top of the pass two hours later, there were 300 cars and trucks backed up behind the convoy, each one full of Afghans furious at being ordered around in their own country by a group of foreigners. Every day, small incidents of arrogance and insensitivity such as this make the anger grow.
There has always been an absolute refusal by the Afghans to be ruled by foreigners, or to accept any government perceived as being imposed on the country from abroad. Now as then, the puppet ruler installed by the west has proved inadequate to the job. Too weak, unpopular and corrupt to provide security or development, he has been forced to turn on his puppeteers in order to retain even a vestige of legitimacy in the eyes of his people. Recently, Karzai has accused the US, the UK and the UN of orchestrating a fraud in last year’s elections, described Nato forces as “an army of occupation”, and even threatened to join the Taliban if Washington kept putting pressure on him. [emphasis added]
Dalrymple’s advice going forward isn’t all that bad either:
The only answer is to negotiate a political solution while we still have enough power to do so, which in some form or other involves talking to the Taliban. This is a course that Karzai, to his credit, is keen to pursue; he made it clear that his peace jirga at the start of this month was open to any Taliban leader willing to lay down arms, and that jobs and monetary incentives would be available to former Taliban who changed their allegiance and joined the government. It is still unclear whether the new Tory government supports this course; Barack Obama certainly opposes it. In this, he is supported by the notably undiplomatic US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, described by one senior British diplomat as “a bull who brings his own china shop wherever he goes”.
There is something else we can still do before we pull out: leave some basic infrastructure behind, a goal we notably failed to achieve in the past nine years. Yet William Hague and Liam Fox oppose this policy – as Fox notoriously said in his 21 May interview with the Times, which infuriated his Afghan hosts: “We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country.” The Tories could do much worse than consult their own newly elected backbencher Rory Stewart. He knows much more about Afghanistan than either Fox or Hague. As Stewart wrote shortly before he entered politics, targeted aid projects that employ Afghans can do a great deal of good, “and we should focus on meeting the Afghan government’s request for more investment in agriculture, irrigation, energy and roads”.
And then get out of Afghanistan and off to see a dentist.
Shadi Hamid offers a partial defense of General McChrystal, prasing, in particular, McChrystal’s emphasis on population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine, and the restrained rules of engagement that go along therewith:
…If we’re going to fight a war, we should probably fight it under someone who’s sensitive to the loss of innocent life. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it also has the added benefit of making sense. It’s difficult (for me at least) to envision “winning” a war in which we start killing a lot more Afghans. That would be a recruiting paradise for the Taliban, would further undermine whatever legitimacy the American presence still has among Afghans, and make it more difficult to peel off Taliban to our side. And as McChrystal has said, you kill one civilian, you create 10 new enemies.
But Hamid assumes far too much. First of all, why is it a given that “we’re going to fight a war”? Once you box us in to that paradigm, sure, COIN is attractive in certain ways, but there should be a third option between fighting a COIN war and a non-COIN war, and that option should be: not fighting any war. Full stop.
Contrary to the operational presumption underlying Hamid’s piece, it is not self-evident that we need to be fighting a war in Afghanistan at this point. There are few, if any compelling reasons that would justify the astronomical costs involved – especially since COIN proponents argue that a 10-15 year timeline is required (that would be 10-15 tacked on to the 8+ years already invested).
Hamid continues:
Now, it’s fair to make the argument that, despite what McChrystal says, we’re killing a lot of civilians anyway.
Well, yeah, that kind of gives away a good chunk of the show, doesn’t it? COIN looks a lot better on paper and in theory than in practice. Especially when the virtues of restraint are extolled by McChrystal – whose record with JSOC in Iraq was far from a model of sensitivity to civilian casualties. See, also, ongoing night raids in Afghanistan, civilian detention and torture at black sites, as well as Bagram, and wide use of air strikes (that McChrystal bemoans but does not reduce sufficiently). On the other hand, McChrystal says the right things, so it’s a wash. Or something.
More from Shadi:
But what troubles me is when critics of the war, particularly progressives, come very close to suggesting McChrystal should let the military loose and ride up the body count. As Andrew Exum writes, “In a weird way, Hastings is making the argument to readers of Rolling Stone (Rolling Stone!) that counterinsurgency sucks because it doesn’t allow our soldiers to kill enough people.” Counterinsurgency might suck, but it doesn’t suck because of that.
Shadi never does mention any of those progressive critics, and what exactly it would mean to “come very close” to arguing that we should “ride the body count” but if they exist, I would still insist that option C is more attractive.
As for why counterinsurgency might suck, I would make the point that even COIN’s most avid proponents insist that it is a time intensive, resource taxing enterprise that takes decades to even bring about a chance at success. Which is why McChrystal’s claim to be able to get’r'done in Afghanistan in 18 months was, on its face, entirely unrealistic.
Even after spending decades in the fight, COIN theorists agree that the fate of the mission will ultimately rely entirely on several factors outside of our control: the strength and legitimacy of the applicable government and its ability to garner the respect and support of a majority of the population in question, the existence or lack thereof of proto-institutions capable of being built up to levels that could solidify gains made in winning the allegiance of the population, no support/safe haven provided to insurgent groups from neighboring powers, hostility in the indigenous population to protracted foreign occupation, etc.
Given those realities, Afghanistan is, in fact, one of the worst places in the world to even attempt COIN, with several of those intractable obstacles present – factors that are fundamental to the putative “winning” COIN formula.
But since Hamid is right that a more unrestrained war effort would not only fail to succeed in its own right, but would also result in greater civilian slaughter, again, I’ll take option C.
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