Okay, so that didn’t work, and it’s impossible to imagine that it will work…ever. So, can we give up now?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Yes. It’s way past time to leave.
What do you propose we do there, Booman? The progressives want to leave entirely, I just don’t know what they propose to be done.
I am too pessimistic about our ability to positively effect Afghanistan to offer you and advice other than to get out. The way to sell that is to point to Karzai and say we have no partner. He’s corrupt, he’s involved in narcotics, he’s inept, and he’s ungrateful. Screw him. We can deal with the threat of terrorism from there on an ad hoc basis.
Unless the Afghan forces are able to stand on their own, there’s going to be another bloody civil war. I’m not using this as a reason to stay, I’m just wondering what the plan is when/if we pull-out. We can’t just pull-out without any future plan…that’s why I’m wondering what the plan is on the side of the progressives.
Regarding the drugs…poppy needs to be legalized and sold as a licit substance the way it is in India. That’s a key point to turning the populace against the Taliban.
Here’s another view from the same area:
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/03/2652463/in-afghanistan-us-woos-wary-locals.html#ixzz0kA7EZeBI
What I’d like to see happen is:
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(Al-Jazeera) – A bomb concealed on a bicycle has exploded in a crowded village market in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, killing at least 17 people and injuring 45 others including eight children.
Wednesday’s attack occurred in Babaji, near the town of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand, where farmers had gathered to receive free seeds from government officials.
Farmers ‘killed’
The casualties were all farmers who had gathered in the area to receive free seeds from the government as part of a program to encourage them not to plant opium poppy, Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial government, said.
Lashkar Gah is near Marjah in Helmand province, the focus of a major Nato-led offensive against the Taliban. Marjah is also thought to be the hub of the Taliban-controlled opium trade – which provides them with most of their funding.
Attack occurred as officials tried to persuade Afghan farmers not to grow opium [AFP]≈ Cross-posted from my diary — Kandahar, Governance and Ahmed Wali Karzai ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Perhaps gift cards to Target would be better received. /snark
Iraq was a secular country with the religious element suppressed. Decades of Saddam’s rule left a culture where bribery works. Afghanistan is a fundamentalist Islamic state. The religious element are the founding fathers who drove the atheist Soviets out. It’s a whole different culture.
We went into Afghanistan to (ostensibly) get Osama bin Laden. He’s not there. Let’s leave. The Bush goal of turning the Middle East into Christian Western Democracies is crazier than Timothy Leary’s dope dreams. Is it because Obama was raised Muslim but converted to Christianity that he believes it possible and desirable?
WTF?
How was he raised a Muslim? Where do you get this shit?
His dad was an atheist.
link.
I’ve read that he attended Muslim schools in Indonesia.
Not a Madrassa, just a Muslim school. His step-father was a Muslim, was he not? I’m not buying the Madrassa meme. There is a world of difference between attending a Catholic Elementary school and being home schooled by a Christian Militia member, for instance.
According to CNN (always suspect, can you debunk this?), “Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa”.
Link: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/22/obama.madrassa/
Just the first link I found, this was discussed widely during the campaign.
Was non-denominational in accordance with the Indonesian state philosophy of Pancasila, “Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa.” Any monotheistic faith is cool according to their principles.
It’s OK with me, too. I wasn’t slamming him, just wondering about the childhood influences on his policy. We all have them.
Going to school with a bunch of Muslim and Christian kids in a progressive primary school in a polyglot culture isn’t such a bad thing, really. I’m from New York and it wasn’t quite the same but it was pretty multicultural, even so. Personally, I’m grateful.
Any monotheistic faith is fine according to the Qur’an. Chapters and verses provided on request.
Except maybe Zoroastrianism. And let us not forget the centuries-old dhimmi classification of non-Muslims under sharia. But the subject was a primary school in Jakarta.
Actually, Zoroastrians, while not mentioned in the Qur’an, were added later to the group of “other believers” (my term) to be included with the original three. The Qur’an lists Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans (Saba`i). I don’t recall just when Zoroastrians were added, but it was early in the empire.
Your understanding of the concept of dhimmi is very inaccurate, no doubt as a result of all the rubbish spread around since the Islamophobe community discovered the word. The Arabic word dhimmi means, literally, “protected one”. It comes from the noun dhimma which means protection, care, safeguard, or guarantee. The idea of protected minorities was actually a very progressive idea for the time. Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Zoroastrians qualified as dhimmi by virtue of being “believers”, and had higher status than other minorities. Of course, the treatment of both Muslims and non-Muslims at any time in any place depended largely on the ruler, so the treatment of dhimmi did vary, but the concept and the idea behind it did not.
And by the way, despite all the BS you hear from islamophobes and those who listen to them, the word and idea of dhimmi are archaic and went out of use centuries ago. If you ask 100 Muslims and Arabs about dhimmi you will be lucky if one of them has ever heard of it, and and that is usually because they have had it flung at them by some anti-Islam fanatic.
Islamaphobe. And as for my categorisation of dhimmi status, all I did is mention it. Hard to see how my ‘understanding of the concept of dhimmi is very inaccurate,’ under the circumstances. And while it did confer certain protections it also restricted the rights of the individual, as you must admit, particularly regarding their eligibility to testify in trials involving Muslims.
Granted the dhimmi status, historically, is undeniably more enlightened than the reciprocal European Christian attitude towards Muslims of the same period but there’s also a clear distinction under sharia, which as you point out, was often arbitrarily exercised in time and place. Just sayin’.
I was not suggesting that you are an islamophobe, merely that I suspected you had heard about the dhimmi thing as a result of the fondness of Islamophobes for the term. I apologize if that was not clear. I do not have the impression that you are particularly anti-Islam. I DID have the impression based largely on context and wording that your mention of the Dhimmi thing was negative.
We should not negatively judge other historical periods by our present-day world view except perhaps in the context of noting how humanity has progressed (or regressed in some cases). The concept of dhimmi is all but unthinkable in today’s generally more enlightened point of view, and in fact as I noted before it went out centuries ago in any case. In the world in which it came into being it was an enlightened way of viewing and treating minorities, and it is well to keep that in mind. And it was not enlightened merely by comparison to the European Christian attitude towards Muslims, but the general attitude toward minorities in pretty much every society.
As for there being a “clear distinction under Shari`a, I am not sure specifically what you are referring to, but I do challenge you to cite a religion, particularly a religion that has ruled over others, that does not somewhere in their laws or their doctrine, or their practices consider members of all other religions to be inferior and less worthy, and has not treated them as such at some time during their history. We could start with Halacha, then we could look at the Catholic Church, then various of the other Christian sects, and move on from there. Islam is hardly unique in this or in fact in much of any other regard.
That Islam is unjust, quite the contrary. And you may have noted that I acknowledged that the institutionalisation of dhimmi status was enlightened by comparison to the practice, at least, of European Christendom of the same period.
But my understanding of dhimmi is that is universally established two things, that the jizya was paid as an equal but separate levy to the Muslim taxes and that the testimony of the dhimmi was inadmissible in a legal case concerning an Islamic plaintiff or defendant. Given our own medieval and recent history that seems a reasonable proscription which probably spared non-Muslims a fair bit of trouble in the centuries in question.
There are numerous passages in the Qur’an that speak of the unity of the Abrahamic religions. One of the ones I like very much speaks of the close relationship among the Torah, the Gospels and Qur’an. There is another in which God says that he created the different religions for a good reason, and that as long as a person is living righteously and following the right path it’s all good (my VERY rough paraphrase). Of course, as tolerant as Islam is, Christianity should be the most tolerant of the Abrahamic religions, and look how some manage to interpret the teachings of Jesus. Pretty shocking.
PS The dhimmi classification came into use and went out of use during the Ottoman empire. I am not an expert on religious law, but to the best of my knowledge it is not part of Shari`a, although contrary to what the anti-Islamic scholars seem to think Shari`a is not some immutable and horrific collection of 8th century laws that are set in stone for all eternity and have one and only one interpretation or way of being applied. Shari`a, like all law, is a living organism and is subject to interpretation and argument.
Sigh! Madrasa (NOT madrassa) is simply the Arabic word for school, as in a place where students go to learn. Every kid goes to madrasa on a daily basis where they learn reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history and all the other secular academic subjects that are traditionally taught in schools the world over. A madrasa can be secular, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or whatever. Most madrasas emphasize the secular subjects mentioned above.
The bottom line: There is nothing on earth wrong with a kid going to a madrasa. It is just a school.
Thanks for the definition and the spelling correction.
The MSM takes “Madrasa” (any relation to Madras, India BTW?) to mean “terrorist indoctrination center” and I just assumed that they were correct. Always an unsafe assumption, I know.
No, no relation to Madras, thanks for asking. The word madrasa is formed from the Arabic verbal root drs (dal ra sin), which is study. Daris is student; Dars is lesson, durus lessons; dirasa is study of a subject, or studies (as in college studies); tadris is instruction, all things connected with studying. If you double the middle letter of the root, it becomes darrasa, to cause someone to study, that is to teach; mudarris is teacher, so things connected with teaching will have a double r. See how it works? And madrasa is place for studying, or school.
As for the MSM, they generally just repeat what they are told without thinking much or investigating at all, so for the most part they don’t have a clue what they are talking about, especially when it comes to the ME, Arabs or Muslims.
Oh, and by the way, the pronunciation is not as you always hear it, muhDRAAHsuh. For one thing, the emphasis is on the first, not the second syllable, and for another there is none of that AH sound in this word. The closest I can come to spelling it as it is pronounced would be MEDresuh, or in some dialects closer to MEDreseh.
Obama wants to turn Afghanistan into a Christian Western democracy???? never heard that one before
Obama was never raised Muslim. His father was an avowed atheist by the time he met his mother. Obama, as I understand it, was an atheist, not a Muslim, when he adopted the Christian faith.
Was his step-father not a Muslim? The story says “he acknowledged” being raised Muslim or at least being taught Islam.
I don’t know how religious his step father was. No doubt he was tought about Islam while living in Indonesia, but he was not “raised Muslim”. His mother was a very secular person from what I understand and might have been an atheist herself.
Not to mention that his maternal grandparents did a lot of the raising of Barack.
Yes, I forgot about that.
description of Tal Afar, Iraq as a tremendous success story – a little while later the whole fucking place blew up. We cannot be the world’s policeman.
The world’s policeman? Iraq “blew up” precisely because of you and your actions there.
PS Before the U.S. came in and fucked it up, Tel A`far was a diverse city of mainly Christians and Turkmen (most Turkmen are Shi`as, if it matters to anyone) with a smattering of various other groups mixed in, and everyone living more or less happily side by side with everyone else, minding their own and their neighbors’ business as is standard in the Middle East. It had been this way for a very long time. Until the U.S. came in a fucked it up just as they fucked up just about every other city and community in Iraq.
And yeah, I AM bitter.
What alternative there is to making a deliberate effort to restore security and prosperity to Afghanistan, at least in the short-term. The ‘you broke it, you bought it’ argument remains persuasive on both moral and geopolitical grounds. Regional objectives regarding Pakistan and India, both political and economic, not to mention the long-term potential resolution of the Kashmir dispute, are all founded on a theoretic improvement in the stability of Afghanistan. Pakistan has come a long way from the ‘failed state’ narrative that was fashionable among progressives a year or so ago and that is a significant relief. Of all of the ‘end-game’ scenarios for radical Islamic militancy the acquisition of a ready-made nuclear state is probably the most disastrous for our long-term security. Our Afghanistan policy is deeply intertwined with the objective of avoiding that outcome.
There are a myriad of problems with managing our current policy in Afghanistan, to be sure, which probably explains why Obama has not made an equivocally ‘open ended’ commitment. Yet in the short-term the military has clearly determined that it is worth a shot. Why wouldn’t we take it? We are taking an approach there which is intentionally crafted for the situation; it is not merely a rerun of Iraq. We have provided, arguably, credible military leadership and an appropriate strategy.
Costly? No question. Essential? Worth discussing further. It would seem time for progressives to get a bit more sophisticated in their assessment of international affairs. That’s not to say that an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan is the wrong policy, just that the arguments probably should be more persuasive than they seem at present and premised on geopolitical realities and potential consequences. We are standing on a landmine; of all the possible outcomes outrunning the explosion seems the least realistic.
the job of the US govt is to restore security and prosperity to the USA.
the ‘you broke it, you bought it’ argument remains completely meaningless on geopolitical grounds where morals don’t matter, only interests matter.
as booman talked about not long ago, I can’t see how occupying Afghanistan is worth the expenditure of US military lives and many billions of dollars.
How you can ‘restore security and prosperity to the USA’ solely from within its own borders. If you had said that needs to be done first that’s a different argument. And while I’m inclined to agree that geopolitics and realpolitik are nearly synonymous you still haven’t provided an argument, or even an acknowledgement, of the consequences of an immediate withdrawal of the US military presence in Afghanistan.
Can’t wait to hear Boo’s comment on the newest development .. McNabb to the ‘Skins!!
That sucks.
…we probably won’t have to deal with him — or his brother — much longer.
That Karzai’s tantrum was predicated on gaining control of the electoral commission. The parliament has been empowered by Karzai’s latest brush with Obama into standing on principle. Such as it is. Karzai accused Afghani parliamentarians of being ‘under foreign influence.’ Does that sound credible given his fragile and evolving relationship with the West?
If the Obama administration has chosen their timing for this recent row to coincide with a parliamentary power struggle between the elected representatives and the central government they are doing better than I had hoped. Karzai has the US by the short-hairs, no question, but any shift in power from his centralised authority to the representative body is arguably in our interests. If Obama understands one thing it is politics. And community organising.
“karzai has the US by the short hairs”?
Um… you do realie we’re propping HIM up, not vice versa, right?
We’ve got him right where he wants us.
As usual the blood wogs are simply not up to the task of assisting the empire in achieving its goals in their country. In this case even the designated puppet is falling far short of expectations.
What’s an empire to do? Well, you might try conquering countries with more competent populations for starters. Why not try occupying Europe? At least they appreciate western thinking a bit better than the useless backward natives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of them, such as France, Italy, the UK, Portugal, and Spain have imperial experience, so at least they will get what you are trying to do.
We already do occupy Europe.
Anyway, what I’m about to say isn’t to imply they’re backwards, as most countries reacted the same way; not to mention that there was a time when Afghanistan flourished; a time when it wasn’t constantly mired in civil war and endless occupations.
There was one country that didn’t react this way, however, and that was Japan. What I’m hoping for is a Meiji Restoration of sorts, intertwined with a Marshall Plan. The only problem I see is that Congress isn’t willing to spend the money that it would take to do this, even though they don’t see anything wrong with spending billions on the military. Plus, Obama clearly stated that this wasn’t our goal; I don’t know if he said this to appease the left flank, or if that’s actually the goal. However, I know he knows there isn’t a military solution to this problem…
the Emperor’s Japan and lawless Afghanistan have exactly nothing in common.
Yeah, it’s all the fault of Afghanistan that they’re not responding to invasion, occupation, bombs, raids, torture, and all the other tools of military aggression that the empire has applied. As I said, the bloody wogs are just not up to the task. Better invade more civilized countries next time.
That’s an odd response to my observation.
My point is that Japan was an almost absurdly cohesive society under the Emperor. Afghanistan is the complete opposite. I don’t respect for central authority is a big part of Afghan culture. Do you?
It’s falling apart. Karzai said he would become a Taliban. Let him.
The government of Afghanistan is too corrupt.
NATO should start withdrawing. Obama tried a last effort and it isn’t going to work.
All the red flags are showing.
Japan has nothing to do with Afghanistan. The comparison is silly emtionalism without a scrap of understanding either Japan or Afghanistan.
I want to see what the other NATO countries say and then do.
I hope we just get out and stay out.
You are correct. Unlike Japan, Afghanistan is peopled by a very diverse collection of different nations and tribes whose membership does not follow national boundaries, but extends across them. I have suggested in some conversations that Afghanistan might not be a good fit for the modern western nation-state model, and perhaps trying to force that model on it is a losing battle (literally, unfortunately for the Afghan people), and a big mistake.
Well, really, what you have in Europe is not an occupation anymore. You are not there to impose your will on the people by force of arms, and to decide for them how they shall be governed and by whom as you are in Iraq and Afghanistan, so, it’s really not a good comparison.
You have no business being in Afghanistan, and you have no business and no right to put any kind of Restoration or Plan in process there. It is for Afghans, not Britain, not Russia, and not the United States to decide how they shall govern themselves. You have not benefited Afghanistan or Afghans one bit by blasting and torturing your way into their country, and you would do best for them by exiting and leaving it to them to work things out in a way that suits them. That is even more true, by the way, for Iraq. You broke both countries, now you should leave them to those who live there to make the repairs.