“There is no military solution to the problems of Afghanistan. Only a political solution will give good results.”
That is what I have been hearing for
some time now.
What have our few remaining troops
been doing in Afghanistan these past few months? We have been continuing to facilitate
violence. We have been using all of our famed technological skill in helping
Afghan soldiers kill and destroy the Taliban. Why should we continue to do
this?
The Afghan military, trained and
supported for these many years by our courageous military, just “melted away.”
Were they cowards?
I don’t think so. I think they used
the departure of U.S. forces as the occasion to make their own low-level
political solutions to their country’s problems.
The Afghan government fighters
probably joined their military for the same reasons that our young people join
our military: it seemed like the most promising way for them to make their way
forward in a world that did not offer them many other alternatives. They took
orders from leaders who had only their own welfare in mind. The war was a place
to make lots of money. Billions of dollars were sloshing around. Those leaders
had every incentive to keep the war going. More billions would come. Once the
U.S. pulled out, they could flee the country with their billions.
It is true that our presence in the
country opened up opportunities for many people, especially women. Hopefully
those gains will not be totally lost. But the gains were being propped up by
fruitless violence.
If anyone outside the Taliban knows
what is going on in Taliban circles, it has to be Afghan people. Are the
Taliban a totally foreign invasion, spawned in Pakistan for Pakistani political
purposes? Or are they partly Afghan citizens disillusioned with their
government’s unwillingness to promote a truly political solution to the
country’s problems? We can hope they are the latter.
If the Taliban turn out to be just
another organization grounded in violence, the Afghan people face a grim
future. But if the Taliban have some grounding in the Afghan population, the
removal of U.S. support of violence might open the way for more nonviolence.
One policy mistake that the U.S. is
likely to make is the same mistake that we have made for the last hundred-plus
years in Haiti: make sure the country’s new government gets no outside support.
If we do that, we will contribute to the creation of another failed state. Or
we will create another Cuba. China and Russia will move in with support that is
not likely to promote the kind of society we wish for everyone.
Surely one of these days we will
learn that the technology of killing and destroying is not the cure-all that
our STEM-focused culture finds so tempting. There is much profit to be made in
inventing and producing new forms of violence. It takes just two things to keep
the system going: a military-industrial complex geared to inventing and
producing more clever ways to kill people or to defend our people against being
killed by other people. This trend keeps going in spite of evidence that our
technology can be frustrated by the simplest of technologies (e.g. improvised
explosive devices). It also requires a public that accepts, without question,
the principle that anything that threatens our country’s existence requires
unlimited financial support. Anything in the budget is negotiable except
defense.
And then there are our nuclear
weapons. We are still spending billions to “upgrade” our nuclear weaponry, with
the knowledge that coming generations will have to spend billions more to get
rid of what we create. In the meantime, one error and humankind could be
destroyed.
