Cranking Up A (Too) Rapid Pull Out From Afghanistan

Reportedly the Obama administration is ginning up a public relations effort oriented at justifying a very rapid withdrawal of significant combat forces from Afghanistan.  Jerking out a giant posse of grunts from the Land Of Karzai will not only meet with widespread approval within the war weary American public, it will be greeted with hosannas on the part of Obama's base, particularly the congressional contingent where a very other worldly congresswoman has demanded that fifty thousand trigger pullers be brought back to CONUS ASAP.

The thought of a faster withdrawal will not only fit with the recently revealed conversations between the US and representatives of Mullah Omar but also with the latest expression of distaste for the presence of the "foreign forces" delivered by Hamid Karzai.  The US should be talking with Taliban.  The participation of this group in a comprehensive peace agreement is fundamental.  Given that Mullah Omar has long repented of his ill-advised extension of "Muslim hospitality" to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, there is strong reason to conclude that the old leadership of the group is ready to exchange the politics of the AK-47 for a less robust means of acquiring and exercising power.

Karzai is comfortable with Taliban as he and they share language and cultural ties as well as religion.  Taliban without the al-Qaeda dimension is no threat to Pushtu dominance.  The other ethnic and cultural groups which make up the Afghan mosaic are not so sure.  And, considering the memories of Taliban's repressive regime, there is no reason for women to support any role for Taliban in the future.  However, it is probable that Mullah Omar and his generational colleagues learned some key lessons in the limits of theocracy and may well be less objectionable in their attitudes and actions regarding women, education, and popular culture.  In any event, the US is well advised to abandon the hopelessly misguided Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Neocon Ninny notion of creating a modern Western style nation-state in Afghanistan.

The necessity of a political solution including Taliban is recognized and has been so for years by all observers well oriented in time and place.  The administration's new add-on in justifying a rapid and steep draw down in US combat forces centers on the effectiveness to date of our efforts to destroy al-Qaeda's organizational integrity and efficiency.  There is no doubt but the Predator strikes in the FATA along with special forces operations including but not limited to the Great Abbottabad Raid have severely degraded al-Qaeda's upper and mid-level management.  The organization has been disrupted severely.

This does not mean al-Qaeda no longer exists.  It does.  Nor does it mean that al-Qaeda no longer represents a threat to the US or other civilized states.  It does.  Rather, the point of the administration's argument is simply that al-Qaeda in Afghanistan no longer is central to the panoply of threats presented by assorted advocates of violent political Islam.  This is true.

It is also far less relevant than the administration would have any of us believe.

There are two ramifications of an overly rapid, overly steep withdrawal which the administration does not credit.  The first is the recuperative power of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan given the ready availability of support from Pakistan and the unwillingness of the Pakistani military or intelligence service to block that support.  The second is the power of history.

The US must not cut and run in a way which will allow the advocates of violent political Islam and their supporters or apologists to write a narrative in which the centerpiece is the assertion that the Mighty Warriors of the One True Faith defeated the infidel crusaders.  It was the willingness and ability of Osama bin Laden and others to claim victory over the Soviet forces which provided the original legitimacy for al-Qaeda and other similar groups--including the Taliban of Mullah Omar.

The Islamist version of history is not only specious, it is a total fabrication giving credit to Arab fighters which was and is totally undeserved.  Insofar as anyone defeated the Red Army, it was the Afghans--and the support they received from the US.  Afghan courage, blood, and endurance along with American technology defeated the Soviets--as much as they were defeated by external pressures.  The down and dirty truth was that the Soviets were not defeated.  They simply gave up.  This loss of political will was the made-in-the-Kremlin equivalent of the American self-inflicted defeat in Vietnam.  In a very real sense, the Afghan fighters simply had to keep on fighting, refuse to admit defeat until the Soviets packed it in.  This, of course, is the basic cause of any insurgent's success right on back to the patriot "victory" in the American War of Independence.

The Arab hijacking of reality in the according-to-Osama interpretation of history was a work of fiction which prevailed simply because nobody challenged it at the time.  The cause driven bin Laden invented a tale and kept telling it to all who would listen until one fine day it was taken, at least in the Arabian Peninsula, as the gospel truth.  The tale-telling sheik told his tale of faith and fighting so well and so often that the money and recruits flowed in.  Osama's version of history may not have been a Big Lie as Dr Goebbels understood the term, but it turned out to be a Great Lie, the greatest lie of the last decades of the Twentieth Century.

The bin Laden approach to creative fiction as history recommends itself to any and all advocates of violent political Islam today--and into the future.  If the American forces are withdrawn hastily and in too great a number, the next bin Laden will claim that the infidels were militarily defeated by the Holy Fighters Of The Koran.

It will not be a true and accurate history to be sure.  That does not and will not matter.  It will be the history that many Muslims will want to believe.  It will be history as they deeply wish it to have been.  There is no Islamic concept of history as we in the West understand the concept.  Rather, all history is in Muslim eyes a record of great men doing great deeds on behalf of the faith and in the pure name of the faith.  Thus the defeat of the infidel crusaders by the followers of Islam, the followers of the "martyred" Great and Learned Osama bin Laden will be believed eagerly and fervently by many future recruits to the cause of violent political Islam.

This powerful ground truth is not and will not be accepted by the Deep Thinkers in and around the Oval.  Yet it exists as a reality, a reality as potent and long lasting in effect as the American deficit and the war weariness of We the People.  In the contest between a work of fiction, a myth on the one hand, and mere facts, mind numbing statistics, the aggregate of countless after action reports, the first will defeat the second--particularly when the myth meets the needs of people who perceive themselves to have been exploited, marginalized, trivialized even though they are the members of a community promised global dominance by the deity and his prophet.

Wars are ultimately won and lost not on the physical battlefield but on the ineffable terrain of the human mind. It is this foundation truth that gave the Osama bin Laden fictional history of how the Arab true believers defeated the Red Army its power and persistence.  It is this foundation truth which will give some future myth maker vast potency when he creates the fiction holding the infidel Americans were defeated by the blood, courage, and conviction of the Men of Islam.

Contrary to a prevalent American belief, history does matter.  It matters far, far more than money and elections--even the reelection of Barack Obama.

Obama Or His "Senior Aide" Just Don't Get It

On NBC's Evening News it was reported that a "senior aide" characterised the two hour one-on-one meeting between President Obama and Vladimir Putin as having been dominated by "a fifty minute soliloquy" on the part of Putin. The (conveniently) unnamed aide opined that this lecture on the history of US-Russian relations was a "sort of throwback to the Soviet era leaders."

With interpretations like that floating in the air of the White House it is no wonder that the President made the ill-advised and flatly wrong statement that Putin "had one foot in the Cold War past." Further, it is this sort of utter disregard for the power of history in Russian thinking that serves to gut the President's highly accurate view of Putin (per CBS interview) as being "very tough, very smart, and very unsentimental."

There can be no doubt about Putin's personal attributes of toughness, intelligence, and lack of sentimentality. A man did not rise to the top ranks of KGB by being weak, stupid, or laden with warm fuzziness. Nor can a person accomplish what Putin did in his one man show of pulling Russia out of the wreckage of the immediate post-Soviet years without immense reserves of emotional and intellectual strength, complete dedication to a goal and the way of achieving that goal, and an absence of ruth.

It deserves mentioning that Putin is a highly emotional man, indeed it is the power of his emotional commitment to the Russian nation and its future which has fueled both his post-Cold War career and his strong and pervasive connection with the Russian people. Equally important to understanding both Putin's successes to date and predicting his courses of action in the future is recognising that he, like many--even most--Russians has a potent sense of history and an intuitive appreciation of its constraining force.

Vladimir Putin, as well as many in the upper reaches of the Russian government and intelligence services, is aware that history is irrelevant to most Americans. He is attuned to the fact that Americans of Mr Obama's vintage, age, and background in academia and the law are particularly ignorant of the force of history as an inducement and constraint operating on future policies and actions. Putin probably suspects that the American president and many of his policy circle are not only ignorant of history and its inherent power but are out-and-out indifferent to the reality that the past conditions and informs the future.

With that as context, the lecture by "Professor" Putin was clearly intended to show the American just what the sources of Russian conduct in the critical issues facing both Russia and the United States actually are. Far from being some sort of "throwback" to the days of the Cold War and shoe-pounding Soviet leaders, the "soliloquy" was forward-looking and a sincere attempt to educate the American interlocutor in the facts of history-as-life.

It is ironic to say the least that the Russian Prime Minister has a better understanding of the brilliance of the containment policy developed sixty plus years ago by George Kennan than does the American president. The containment policy which ultimately was the single greatest contributor to the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the product of a profoundly insightful historical mind and imagination. Working from the continuities of Russian cultural, social, and political history, Kennan concluded that an emphasis upon the containment of the empire would assure that its internal inefficiencies would sap its strength while the never-ending garrison state mentality required would erode the faith in Marxism-Leninism held by leaders and followers alike.

The past was not simply prologue in Kennan's understanding. History had a power of inertia much greater than the physical force most associate with the word. By compelling the Kremlin and those who existed under its sway to continue to exist confined to the world defined by their own past and the expectations or fears that past had created, the future would see the crumbling of the empire.

And, so affairs developed over the next forty or so years. The end was, as they say, "history."

Academics and others equally, willfully disconnected from any sense of the past in the US saw the end of the Cold War as (to use the title of a monograph popular in the early Nineties) "The End of History." Russians were not so out-to-lunch. Russians saw history at work in the outcome of the Cold War. They looked at the years of the Soviet Union not as some sort of evil foreign body pressed upon the Russian soul but as a small part of an unending process. The process being that of the evolution and development of Russia and its people.

Putin sees the Soviet period and its ending as just part of the unfolding reality of the Russian nation. As a Russian nationalist he sees the Soviets, their successes and failures, as grist for the mill of the future. He sees the years of Communism including those of his earlier life as educational materials to be employed along with all the other lessons of history to provide the basis for a better Russia in the future.

In his lecture Putin might have been serving warning on the American president. Unlike academics and other "progressives" in the US and Western Europe, Putin and Russians generally place no trust whatsoever in either the good intentions of other nations or international institutions.

Russia's government is the sole judge of what Russia's national and strategic interests might be. Russia's government has the responsibility to pursue, protect, and enlarge those interests. Period.

Russia will pursue its interests in conjunction with other nations when doing so best serves Russian needs. It will use or cooperate with international institutions when doing such is the most effective way to protect or achieve national interest. Period.

Vladimir Putin does not accept the common (among the rarefied atmosphere of academia and "progressive" circles) that the nation-state is not only obsolete but also a blight upon the common human future. Putin is not alone in this perspective.

The primacy of the nation-state as well as the power of the past on the future are features of a world-view which is common throughout the world. The Men of the Forbidden City see matters that way. So does Dear Leader. It is the way life is seen in Israel. Ditto for most of the countries in the world.

Only in portions of the Western European and American elites is the nation-state eschewed. Only within the American elite (OK, and in the hoi polloi as well) is the power of the past ignored.

Putin's history lesson is not surprising. It was needed. How much it was needed is seen in the "senior aide's" response. For the future of US-Russian relations and the impact of these on the affairs of the world generally it is hoped that President Obama listened up and listened tight.