Among the follies of our foreign
policy is the belief that the United States is serving its national interests
by continuing its failing attempts to guarantee a democratic solution in a
culture so primitive, so alien to our Western mores that it defies the
boundaries of our collective imagination.
Cultures take centuries to
change. Cultures imbued by
theocracy take even longer.
Afghanistan is such a place.
One only need compare the history of
our own country to realize that the political and cultural forces militating against
change are so embedded in the Afghan people that we are faced with a Sisyphean
task so overwhelming, so impossible, that our efforts, no matter how noble, are
doomed to ignominious failure.
As an historical analogy, the
American Civil War ran roughly four years from Ft. Sumter to Appomattox, but
actually continued for another 150 years thereafter. Vestiges linger even yet.
Those states that seceded from the Union did so not only because they wanted to
keep their slaves, but also because they were culturally different from their Northern brethren. Southern agrarian, slave-holding society
bore a religious ethos, based upon inequality of the races, not only upon economic
disparity between it and their northern countrymen. Southerners believed that white men had the God-given right
to hold slaves. The morality of holding slaves was never
really open to debate among Southerners.
Holding slaves was the droit de
seigneur. The South would fight to the death, and did, to uphold its principles. Northern culture was an anathema
to it, a base, industrial, immoral society inhabited by crude, irreligious, and
yes, heathen Yankees devoid of any pretense or genuineness of refinement, a
threat to southern paradigms, virtues and ways of life. Margaret Mitchell wrote about it; we
all viewed it in the 1939 classic film of her novel, the name of which does not
here need repeating.
Evidence of those deeply held
beliefs could not and did not change overnight, despite the posting of Federal
troops in Charleston, Atlanta, and New Orleans after open hostilities had ended
and after Lee surrendered. Nor was
the imposition by the radical US Congress of black legislatures in the south
which lasted only as long as Federal troops remained stationed there to
override the deeply held beliefs of the populace. The sad history of reconstruction, of Jim Crow laws, of
lynching, of black post-bellum economic servitude and segregation bears
wretched testimony to the excruciatingly slow pace of cultural change. Yes, the south is different now, but it
was not so different in 1960, a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. And
this in a country with a Constitution founded on democratic principles authored
by the founding fathers of all of America, many of whom were southerners.
Cultural differences in Europe now,
for a further example, threaten to destroy the Euro, pitting hard working
Germanic culture against profligate Greek culture. Germans do not wish to pay for Greek irresponsibility, but
are forced to do so because the Greeks are their customers. This problem is almost intractable and
Greece may very well be printing Drachmas again, rather than surrender to
Germanic austerity. And this is a
problem between culturally different democracies, a minor problem compared to
the problems we face with Islamists and the Taliban, religious zealots all.
Space here does not allow a full
history lesson, but the British were among the many nations interfering
unsuccessfully in Afghan politics, the Brits using a divide and rule strategy
between Afghani Pashtuns and Baloch territories. Later, Afghanistan experimented with reform in the 1920s
including the banishing of the burqa and establishing co-educational schools,
alienating religious leaders. All
reforms were abandoned in 1929 when a new leader Mohammed Zahir Shah became king
in 1933, ruling until 1973. After
that, the United States financed the Mujahadeen religious warriors against the
Soviets, who had invaded in 1979.
After the Soviet defeat, (after
killing 1 million Afghans), the Taliban assumed control of the country, ultimately
creating an Islamofascist nightmare, women subjugated, religious police, and a
culture that precluded the development of any modernity.
Now we delusionally expect that this
primitive, Islamist, women-stoning society that executes women for adultery, is
to grasp liberty and equality for all?
A society that throws acid on the faces of women who dare to go to
school to seek an education? A
society that has a caste of theocrats that superstitiously believes in
practices such as honor killings is going to find its Thomas Jefferson in an
abbreviated epiphany under beneficent American auspices?
The politicians in Washington are
dithering over a decision to abandon that place, a decision that should have
been made long ago.
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