On the Mix Tape, II

So I've been away for a while. Truth be told, I've been despairing quite a bit lately -- this idiotic mosque "controversy," Iraq's decline and the utter failure of its government to arrest it, what appears at the moment to be an Afghanistan effort circling the drain, and on and on. It's been a tough August. Thank God for Michael Franti and Spearhead to help arrest my blues.

Can We Finally Put This One to Bed?

Christian Caryl has been reading Tom Barfield's great new book.

I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Barfield back in December. There are few people who know more about Afghanistan than he does.

The Great Unknown

Time Magazine's recent gruesome and heartbreaking cover purports to describe the kind of thing that will happen to Afghan women (and by connection, any other Afghan) if the United States pulls out of Afghanistan. The argument of course is that without the U.S. military propping up them up, the Afghan government will collapse in a matter of weeks, leaving the average citizen subject to Taliban retribution once they return to power.

I'm not so sure, nor should anyone else be. This argument has been made before. In 1988, after the Soviets signed the Geneva Accords and promised a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, nearly every Afghanistan watcher predicted that the Afghan government's collapse was inevitable. The mujahideen would topple it in weeks and sweep into power. Scholars, journalists, intelligence experts -- just about everyone, including Afghanistan's President Mohammed Najibullah -- thought the government was finished.

But it wasn't. As the Soviets were departing, the mujahideen staged the most widespread (and for the mujahideen, coordinated) offensive of the war. The situation was especially difficult in the East, but ultimately, government forces, made up of the regular army, national police forces, and militias, turned back the mujahideen offensive. The country was far from under its control, but there was no government collapse.

How did they survive? In the mid and late 1980s, the Afghan government got much more serious about providing its military and police forces with better training. The impending Soviet pullout also stiffened the backs of many, especially in the military, who realized that the Islamic fundamentalism that fired the most powerful mujahideen groups -- and the foreign fighters who made up their most committed members -- ran the risk of replacing one foreign system for another. Finally, and most importantly, the USSR gave the Afghans billions in military and economic aid. The military aid included the Soviets' most advanced armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launch systems, and even the venerable Scud missile. For the next two years, the Afghan government and the militia allies, backed by billions of rubles in Soviet aid, fought the mujahideen to a standstill.

No, the government did not collapse, though it looked for all intents and purposes like it should have. One of the ironies of the Cold War's end is that the regime installed by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan outlasted the Soviet government itself. It was only when Gorbachev canceled Soviet aid to Afghanistan that the problems began. Najibullah's government fell in April 1992, four months after Gorbachev's did, and almost three years after the last General Boris Gromov became the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan.

Fast forward to July 2010. Just this month, the United States and an international group of donors has pledged long-term aid to the Karzai government with the expectation that Afghanistan will be a rentier state for years to come. Military aid of course will continue.

I'm terrified for the Afghan people when we do finally leave, but the truth is that their fate is wholly unknown. For Time Magazine to make this claim ignores the lessons of history in Afghanistan itself. It's nothing more than an exercise of grandiose American hubris and a shameful manipulation of American opinion.

Risk and Reward, Afghan Style

Ricks is happy about GEN Petraeus' idea of creating local self-defense forces in Afghanistan. The great benefit of this strategy, as Ricks points out, is that it will give the U.S. some leverage over Karzai, which we badly need. The great risk of this strategy, which Ricks doesn't point out, is that local self-defense forces in Afghanistan have a way of ignoring or rebelling against central governments they don't like. Civil war can be the result.

In 1986, at the peak of the Soviet-Afghan War, Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah began recruiting local militias to deal with the mujahideen. He offered them land, money, political influence, local autonomy, and guns in exchange for local security. This strategy worked very well as long Najibullah could keep the inducements coming. When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, it enabled him to survive a massive mujahideen offensive and stay in power another three years (one of the ironies of this war is that the Afghan government outlived the Soviet government by four months). One of Mikhail Gorbachev's last acts as Soviet leader, however, was to cancel economic and military aid Afghanistan in December 1991. Najibullah and his rentier state no longer had any way of providing local security forces with what were in effect bribes to fight on its side. And now those groups were heavily armed.

Afghanistan quickly fragmented into nothing more than a state full of armed bands, very few of whom had any loyalty to the state. The civil war that followed was an ugly affair and eventually led to the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban.

I've been convinced that we'll be sending billions in economic and military aid to Afghanistan for a very long time after we're gone. We'll have no choice. Petraeus seems to be easing us in that direction, whether he realizes it or not.

Iraq War First Drafts

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of the best early books on the Iraq War; books like George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate (an outstanding book on the failures of U.S. occupation policy in Iraq from 2003-2004), Tom Ricks’ Fiasco (a similar, if slightly less detailed book), and Evan Wright’s controversial but no less fascinating book Generation Kill, about his experience embedded in the 1^st Recon Battalion in 2003. Nate Fick’s fabulous One Bullet Away (focusing on his training in Marine OCS and his experience as part of the 1^st Recon Battalion in the 2003 invasion) is a little different, written as it is by a combat veteran, but it is every it as compelling, if not more so. Even though none of these writers are professional historians (we should be so lucky), the outlines of future historiography on the early period Iraq War have clearly been set. In essence, the failures of the first 3 years of the Iraq war boil down to a failure of imagination (Packer), and of strategic leadership (Ricks), combined with the almost miraculous efforts of 20-something majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, and privates who were struggling to make something out of nothing in an alien land and alien culture. We haven’t seen as much on Afghanistan yet, but we will, starting with Sebastian Junger’s engrossing War, about those brave Battle Company soldiers out on the very tip of the spear in the Korengal Valley.

These people are our generation's Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, and Stanley Karnow.

Godwin's Law and the Usefulness of the Nazis

Greenwald beats me to the punch in a piece that takes on neocons for getting pissy when their opponents pull out Godwin's Law.

The money quote is at the end of the piece, itself quoting from Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert, the American prison psychologist at Nuremberg who recounted an interview with Hermann Goering on April 18, 1946, in Goering's cell:

"Why, of course, the people don’t want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Greenwald: Anyone demanding that comparisons not be made between our own political culture and that is doing nothing less than attempting to conceal the truth of how things work.

I'd expand on this point to include the issue of torture. It's worth remembering that "Enhanced interrogation techniques," implemented by the Bush Administration and championed by neoconservative intellectuals, was a term also used by... you guessed it.

One of the things I find so fascinating about this is the propensity of neoconservative intellectuals to rely on the Nazi example to make the argument for going to war with everyone from the Taliban to Iraq to Iran. One of the core historical arguments they make is that we fail to understand armed fascism if we elect to not militarily confront said thugs. "Look at the Nazis. Look what happens when we don't confront them," they say. Then many (not all of them, but many of them) conveniently forget about the Nazis when they advocate practices, such as "enhanced interrogation," that are direct descendants of armed fascism. The cognitive dissonance is infuriating, especially because the liberal interventionist in me once saw some merit in the original argument.

On the Mix Tape

Mumford and Sons came together back in 2007 with the idea that they could make music that matters without taking themselves too seriously. Word up, my bruthas!