Ironically, one of the architects of the Great Effort In Afghanistan, Robert Blackwell, has come to an antipodal conclusion. Reportedly, he has told the London based International Institute of Strategic Studies that the US led effort has come such a cropper that the only viable option now is to partition Afghanistan. Taliban should be left alone in the Pushtun dominated areas while the US and its partners limit their efforts to securing some sort of rump state in the rest of the geographic expression, those areas where Pushto is not the primary language.
The reason for this volte-face on the part of Mr Blackwell is one commented upon quite frequently by the Geek. He now rues the mission leap decreed by his bosses which shifted the goal from that of a limited punitive expedition directed at destroying al-Qaeda and the upper layers of Taliban to one of displacing Taliban with the mythical democratic etc. new regime. As a consequence of this change in mission, the Islamist insurgents were given time, a place, and motivation to recreate themselves and come back bigger and badder than ever.
Leaving aside such bagatelles as Mr Blackwell's role in the shift or the under-resourcing of the Afghan effort in favor of the main event over in Iraq, there are more important considerations which can be adduced to support the Blackwell Thesis that the US is losing (or already has lost) the war in Afghanistan. These more important considerations also serve to undercut fatally the unjustifiably optimistic view taken by Mr Zakaria.
Several often overlooked or quite underestimated factors combine to point in the direction of an American failure in our ongoing conflict with the advocates of political Islam both armed and unarmed. Oh, this gloomy prognostication should not be taken to mean that in the future We the People will be banging our heads on the floors of mosques five times a day or putting women in garbage sacks. But, it does mean the US will be limited, perhaps quite severely, in its ability to operate diplomatically in a wide area of the world.
And, it means that We the People will have to live with the limitations of fear and the mechanisms of security put in place to assuage our anxiety for many, many years to come, essentially in perpetuity. It means the "war on terror" will prove to be not the "long war" but the "forever war."
One of the key factors at work to our collective disadvantage was alluded to by Victor Davis Hanson albeit in an unnecessarily indirect way. The thrust of Dr Hanson's point as the Geek understands it is that the motivation, the evil, if you will, has been denatured from the attacks of 9/11, making the events as disconnected from human authorship and motives as would be the random strike of a meteor. The net effect of this deracination is to strip the progenitors of the attacks as well as their consequences from the human context.
That result is as wrong as grilled watermelon.
The subtext of the neutering of the attacks of 9/11 as well as the resultant US actions constitutes a set of phenomena permeating contemporary American values. Bluntly put, this set revolves around the major message of the American Left over the past forty years--the US is inherently evil, intrinsically mean spirited, reflexively imperialistic, arrogant, self-serving, self-seeking, and, all in all, a thoroughly unpleasant member of the global neighborhood. Beyond that, Americans, We the People, are afflicted with every "ism" listed in the catalogue of misery. We are a completely unpleasant bunch of chauvinists, sexists, xenophobes, religious bigots, and fanatical "clingers."
As a result, the American people are encouraged to back away from the challenges to us, our values, and way of life by our own self-appointed political, media, and academic elites. We are and have been told repeatedly that our values and way of life are not exceptional, that they are no better (but might be worse) than the values of other societies and cultures. There is no message from those who purport to mold and lead public opinion that we are unique, that we possess qualities and values which have provided institutions worthy of both envy and emulation.
As has been true throughout the West, the US has experienced not simply a crisis of confidence, a crisis of faith, but a meltdown of belief in ourselves and our worth which has extended for the best part of three generations. Absent the buoyant self-assurance of earlier generations, we have been unwilling or unable to both articulate what we stand for, why we stand for it, why it worth believing and standing for, and not simply defend against all comers but advance against all odds.
From the closing years of the Vietnam War forward the loss of faith in ourselves and the unique past which served to make us an equally unique people and nation in the present has become evermore pervasive and structured into the rituals of passage from the child to the adult. The early and complete capture of academia by the aging New Lefters nearly forty years ago has resulted in a transformation of the formal mechanisms of inculturalization (and most of the informal ones as well) from one which both reinforced and celebrated American exceptionalism to one which denied and deprecated it.
Our faiths both religious and civic have evaporated over the years. The education reinforced evaporative process has left us rather hollow, and certainly confused about the value of our values, the worth of our institutions, the deservingness of our nation, even the status of our country in the world. It is hard as hell to fight a war when you have little if any idea as to why you are fighting and what difference it might make if you win or lose.
This opens the door to the folks on the other side of the hill. The Muslims. Or, to err on the side of accuracy, the proponents of political Islam, particularly those who advocate the necessity or desirability of armed, violent political Islam.
Unlike the faiths, both religious and civic in the West, in the US, the faith of the Muslim is alive, vivid, vigorous, full-bloomed. In a very real and critical sense, Islam has recaptured the militancy of its youth during the past thirty to fifty years. While the faiths of the West have aged, aged quite ungracefully, the faith of Islam has regained its full vigor of centuries ago.
Islam, it must be understood, is not simply a religious confession. It is that. It is a faith. But it is much more. Islam is a way of life and of living. It is a complete, total system encompassing all aspects of the human condition. It is law. It is government. It is a system of economic philosophy. It is a community. It is a way of war. There is no part of life too small to elude its all inclusive embrace.
The basics of Islam, the Five Pillars, are both easy to understand and not overly onerous to execute. There is no complex liturgy, no complicated doctrine to parse and accept even if not understood. In effect, Islam provides emotional engagement, a strong sense of community, an equally strong and appealing sense of purpose, even destiny. It provides a commonsensical, real world based system for governing relations, solving disputes, maintaining harmony.
So far, so good. And, it gets better. Islam is multifaceted. Not only is there no central clerical establishment, there are actually two foundation forms of Islam.
No, not Shia and Sunni. Rather there is an "official" Islam, the Islam of the clerics, the scholars of jurisprudence, the Ulema. There is also an "unofficial" Islam, the Islam of people, particularly people organized in the semi-secret brotherhoods, the tarika.
For centuries the tarika have been the primary instrument of missionary activity, humanitarian efforts, community organization, and a multitude of other matters. These brotherhoods give Islam a flexibility, a vitality, a capacity to expand unequalled in other religions and unrivalled by government entities.
Today, the brotherhoods are alive and well as the shock troops of Islam both political and otherwise. The prototype Muslim Brotherhood has given rise to a near tsunami of derivatives, offshoots, descendants which cover the globe and do all manner of activities both laudable and (to us) potentially threatening. The capacities of the brotherhoods have been consistently underestimated by decision makers here and elsewhere to our profound disadvantage.
There is another area which has been underappreciated in the US. It is the one factor which ties together disparate elements in the recent history of Muslim majority countries so as to explain why there has been the sudden expansion of not only militant Islam but the advocates of political Islam, again, particularly those who espouse violent political Islam.
That factor is the educational systems of majority Muslim countries. The essential contextual matter is the expansion of the number of genuinely independent majority Muslim states at the end of World War II--four--to the nearly sixty of today. With independence came the new educational systems which universally emphasized a heady combination of nationalism and Islam.
Particularly since the late Fifties, the expansion of educational systems indoctrinating students in the glories of Islam and the evils of the West has been critical. By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the somewhat later perceived triumph of armed Muslim believers over the Red Army, the educational systems of many, even most, Muslim majority states were producing large numbers of graduates who may have been deficient in their proficiency in secular subjects but were most knowledgeable in Islamic belief, values, and history as well as in the purported lacks, weaknesses, and "sins" of the West.
Against the backdrop of this form of indoctrination oriented education, the youth of Muslim countries soaked up the perceived victories of their co-religionists in Iran (against the Great Satan, the US) and Afghanistan (against the atheistic Soviet Union) with the result they were good to go in jihad. All that was needed was a "brotherhood" ready, willing, and able to provide the leadership, training, and strategic goal.
This was the role of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and the numerous others in Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, across North Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, and even in Europe. The troops were there, produced by the madrassas and state operated systems alike. The "brotherhoods" were there. The motive was there--cleansing the Arab Peninsula of the "infidel" Americans and the Arab Mideast of the "Zionist entity."
The decentralized nature of "official" Islam is both complemented and potentiated by the assorted brotherhoods. Simultaneously, the educational systems of Muslim majority states continue to churn out fully indoctrinated graduates who are eager to defend and advance the One True Faith, to die (and kill) for the faith.
In short, Muslim strengths mirror our weaknesses.
They are confident. We are not.
They are educated to believe in the high value of their faith, their beliefs. We are educated to doubt, to distrust, to eschew the beliefs and values upon which our society, our polity, our culture are predicated.
They have a broad set of flexible, informal, self-organizing brotherhoods. We rely upon remote, rigid, tinted with arrogance official bureaucracies.
They see the future as theirs, ordained by Allah. We see our best days as being well in our past.
When these more basic considerations are given their proper priority, the conclusions are simple and not particularly enjoyable. It really doesn't matter if we "triumph" in Afghanistan. Nor will merely surrendering a part of that place to the violent political Islamists of Taliban buy us any peace.
Nor does it really matter if every last member of al-Qaeda is killed. We will be no "safer."
Not unless and until we regain the confidence, the faith which we have so heedlessly and unnecessarily tossed away these past two generations, can we hope to wage effective war with the violent political Islamists. And, not unless and until we can see the decay of the current high level of Muslim certainty that the future belongs to the Slaves of Allah can we have any hope of being safe at home and potent abroad.
Looks like some very grim decades ahead.
ADMIN NOTE: The Geek invites, welcomes and will post all on topic comments but due to having been attacked by spam comments he has had to take precautions for which he apologizes.
No comments:
Post a Comment