America’s Iraq illusions have been transferred to Afghanistan

Back from a trip to Afghanistan, David Brooks takes what he imagines to be a different take than anyone’s taken before on Afghanistan and Iraq. In reality it is the same take that the supporters of Bush’s Iraq policy took even before the surge. And that is, notwithstanding his due “skepticism” of the possibilities of our success, he is “infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here.” Even more, “this energetic and ambitious response—amid economic crisis and war weariness—says something profound about America’s DNA.”

Thus, despite his skepticism, his dominant and closing note is optimism. Why? Because he has been won over by the competence and dedication of our people working there. But this is exactly the mindset of the opinion makers who cheered our nation-building endeavor in Iraq between 2003 and 2007, even as Iraq was heading, year after year, into worse and worse chaos. No matter how bad things were actually going, the competence and optimism of the mid-level U.S. personnel in Iraq made journalists and other observers believe in both the goodness and the viability of our democratization policy.

This attitude turns reality on its head. The criterion of whether our policy in Afghanistan can succeed is not the energy and dedication of our people, but the nature of Afghanistan.

The Western elite’s blindness is predictable. It stands to reason that the same people who are addicted to non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism would also believe in non-Islam theories of Islamic reform. Just as they interpret Islamic extremism through Western filters, and so fail to understand it, they envision the possibility of Islamic reform through Western filters, and so construct Islamic moderate utopias in the air.

Thus Brooks says that “the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.” (I note in passing the obscenity of “sending our daughters into danger” and seeing that as a normal thing to do.) He then gives seven reasons why our effort can succeed. Two of the seven concern the readiness of Afghanistan itself: that its leadership is improving, and that the country is not in the chaos that Iraq was in. Note, however, that it is not Brooks who is making these arguments; it is the Americans he spoke to in Afghanistan who made these arguments. It is the confidence of their statements, i.e., it is the can-do spirit of Americans, not the realities of Afghanistan, that fill Brooks with optimism.

So, once again, belief in our policy is an index of our belief in ourselves, not of an understanding of the realities of Afghanistan. As happened in Iraq, we get caught up in our little projects, in our efforts to “win the confidence of locals,” to fix infrastructure, to train local police, and then we extrapolate from our success in these discrete projects to a belief in the likelihood of the success of the overall project of reforming and re-building a Muslim country. We judge the viability of our Islamic nation building efforts on the basis of the quality of the builders, namely ourselves, not on the basis of the building materials with which the builders are building, namely Islamic society.

It’s like being so impressed by one’s skill at making a snowman that one assumes the snowman will last forever. But of course spring will come and the snowman will melt. That’s the nature of snow. Optimists about the U.S. reconstruction of Islamic countries are not considering the nature of Islam.

Finally, the dramatic improvement in Iraq’s security situation since 2007, no matter how tenuous it may turn out to be, supports my point. The improvement was the result of two factors: (1) the surge, which was not about the competence, intelligence, idealism, virtue, and good deserts of the U.S. forces in Iraq, but about the U.S. forces doing something different from what they previously had been doing, something that objectively increased security in Iraq; and (2) the Sunni awakening, which also involved a change in Iraq’s objective reality, namely that the Sunnis, completely unexpected by us, turned against al Qaeda. At the same time, while these two changes greatly reduced sectarian violence and weakened al Qaeda, they have not altered Iraq’s deeper realities, that it is a Muslim country and a profoundly divided country, and thus inherently incapable of becoming a self-governing country and an ally of the West.

Here is Brooks’s article.

The Winnable War
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 26, 2009

I came to Afghanistan skeptical of American efforts to transform this country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth. It is an infinitely complex and fractured society. It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.

Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the “recipients” of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful.

Every element of my skepticism was reinforced during a six-day tour of the country. Yet the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.

In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.

That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.

Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.

Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.

In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.

Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.

Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.

Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.

Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.

I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:

After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.

Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response—amid economic crisis and war weariness—says something profound about America’s DNA.

[end of Brooks article]

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Gintas writes:

John C. Calhoun wrote:

We make a great mistake, sir, when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government. We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged in a very respectable quarter, that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake. None but people advanced to a very high state of moral and intellectual improvement are capable, in a civilized state, of maintaining free government; and amongst those who are so purified, very few, indeed, have had the good fortune of forming a constitution capable of endurance. It is a remarkable fact in the history of man, that scarcely ever have free popular institutions been formed by wisdom alone that have endured.

Compared with Calhoun’s robust oratory, Brooks is a form of torture (a Canadian Niceness Death):

In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want.

What kind of readership can take this kind of pablum without a violent reaction?

James P. writes:

McCain, too, is transferring his Iraq illusions to Afghanistan. Not as tough as Iraq, pshaw. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, has never been a real country and is infinitely more fragile and violent. The idea that we can fix something as broken as Afghanistan is astonishingly naive. The idea that we should even want to do so is astonishingly stupid.

WASHINGTON (CNN)—While President Obama has insisted that securing Afghanistan against a rise in terrorist groups is a top security priority, Sen. John McCain said Tuesday that the problems in that country are not as thorny as those in Iraq. “It’s [Afghanistan’s] not as tough as Iraq, and don’t let anyone tell you that it is, because when we started the [2007] surge, Iraq was virtually in a state of collapse,” McCain said during a speech at The Foreign Policy Initiative.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 01, 2009 04:33 PM | Send