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Afghanistan has long humbled the ambitions of foreigners,
but Kipling offers one account of quick and decisive victory. In “The Man Who
Would Be King,” two ambitious Englishmen conquer Afghanistan by feigning
insanity. The unruly mountain tribes find no quarrel with harmless lunatics, so
the two make it all the way to remote “Kafiristan,” where they are taken for
Gods. “If you could think us a little more mad,” say the unlikely victors, “we
would be more pleased.”
More and more, the US strategy in Afghanistan seems to be
channeling Kipling. Few Afghans doubt that corrupt Afghan officials are largely
to blame for billions of aid dollars yielding so little in sustainable gains
(Kandaharis are still lucky to have six hours of electricity a day). But what
puzzles them is how the US could look at such an outcome after $100 billion
in nonmilitary assistance since 2002, or five times the annual GDP (which consists mostly of foreign aid), and say, as Special Representative James Dobbins did in
July, “I believe Afghanistan may actually be the most successful international
effort at reconstruction in a conflict or post-conflict country over the last
quarter century.”
To be sure, most of that $100 billion went to project
security, and much of the waste owes to the Taliban’s sabotaging of the very
infrastructure projects that we are told will assuage their core grievances.
But here again, Afghans wonder not so much why their security forces have
suffered record casualties this year while wielding errant RPGs and growing
increasingly reliant on the ISAF air support that is fading into the 2014
horizon. Rather, they wonder how the US could spend $57 billion since 2002 on
training the Afghan National Security Forces, and somehow be so satisfied with
the result as to have the Assistant US Defense Secretary recently praise the “rapid,
remarkable development of the Afghan National Security Forces.”
And so the conspiracy theories abound. A 2011 NATO “Red Team” report
on ANSF perceptions of ISAF found that most ANSF respondents were suspicious of
the US for providing massive aid to Pakistan knowing that Pakistan in turn aids
the Taliban. “There is no explanation or excuse for such a stupid policy,” said
one respondent. Even Afghan leaders, increasingly substituting populism for
patronage as foreign dollars dry up, are leveraging this narrative. Last November, Herat warlord-turned-Energy Czar
Ismael Khan blamed “foreign conspiracies” for Afghanistan’s instability. In June,
Vice President Marshal Fahim threatened to “take my weapon and go the
mountains” if the 2014 elections bring more politicians with US links. And President Hamid Karzai himself questioned
US intentions in his June Doha speech:
“If there is an increasing view among the youth in the Muslim world that
radicalism is actively promoted by the West, the question is why and for what
purpose?”
Perhaps Americans, troubled as they are by the recently
revealed scope of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, can identify with
the mistrust of Afghans, whose country is in many ways a proving ground for the
vast American surveillance state’s capabilities. Consider the paranoiac effect, for example,
of the US Army’s recently revamped “Inform and Influence Activities” (IIA)
Field Manual, which is as much a précis of ISAF’s Afghanistan strategy as the
Counterinsurgency Manual was for Iraq. Previously
known as “Psychological Operations,” IIA gives ISAF the green light to convince
Afghans they have won, without getting caught up in actually winning.
Unfortunately, when Afghan officials launched
an information campaign on the dangers of immigration last month in order to
convince the rising number of asylum seekers to stay in Afghanistan (the
leading country of origin for global refugees last year), most Afghans opted
for their lying eyes. “The situation in the country forces people to flee
despite the risks,” said one teen. It
was a manifestation of the manual’s own caveat: “if actions and messages are
inconsistent, friendly forces lose credibility.”
Indeed, the messages and actions of the US in Afghanistan
drifted so far apart last year that it was not Mullah Omar whose downfall the
FBI precipitated via email hacking, but rather ISAF Commander John Allen and
CIA Director David Petraeus, all at the whim of an FBI agent investigating “cyber-harassment”
(it remains unclear whether the agent, who sent shirtless pictures to the
“victim,” Jill Kelley, has been reprimanded). Yet meanwhile, one of the FBI’s
main recommendations in its assessment
of Major Nidal Hasan’s 2009 “workplace violence” attack at Fort Hood was to “guard
against the inappropriate use of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion
as a basis for investigative activity.”
Ironically, where consistency between message and action is
concerned, the Taliban’s friends have demonstrated much greater coherence than the
aloof surveillance state. “He’s not insane,” said Major Hasan’s lawyer of his
client, who calmly gave Army officials a power point presentation on the
justification for his actions (to defend fellow Muslims in the Taliban from
attack) before carrying them out. Or as another US soldier, Naser Jason Abdo,
put it after stating his allegiance to Mullah Omar’s jihad and attempting to
repeat the Fort Hood attack in 2010: “I wasn’t insane or post traumatic.”
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| The band considers my Bruce Springsteen request... "Got a wife and kids in Kandahar Jack" |
Yet the US government, which has declared neither Hasan nor
Abdo a “terrorist” due to the isolated nature of their attacks, conducts the
War on Terror with far less coherence. And nowhere is the paradox more
amplified than in Afghanistan itself, where Afghans wonder what use all the terrorist
surveillance is when ISAF prefers talking to the Taliban over labeling it a
terrorist group. ISAF even struggles to comprehend the cause of the Taliban’s “insider
attacks,” with Gen. Allen once suggesting it could simply be the “strain” of
Ramadan.
“In the end, all relationships
rest on trust,” said Joint
Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey in his recent re-nomination hearing. Indeed, in the end even Kipling’s English conquerors
fall, precisely when they betray their hosts’ trust. Many have noted that
Afghanistan will never become a decentralized Jeffersonian democracy, but who
knew it could so quickly become an Orwellian surveillance state? If we are done trying to "win" in Afghanistan, sanity requires us to give Afghans a shot at the former by unambiguously dismantling the latter.
