On Saturday, a post appeared over at The Corpus Callosum discussing an article that appeared in the Guardian concerning the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The main point behind the Guardian article is that the senior NATO commander in Afghanistan is very worried about the situation there, calling it "close to anarchy." The point to the Corpus Callosum article was a bit harder for me to grasp, and I might have misunderstood it, but it seemed to be that the problems in Afghanistan somehow provide a reason that we should pull out of Iraq - the logic seemed to be that we know Afghanistan is doing better than Iraq, so if Afghanistan is near anarchy then we can't be doing any good in Iraq and should leave.
That chain of logic suffers from at least one major flaw: the assumption that the situation in Iraq is actually worse than the situation in Afghanistan. Neither situation is good, but they are very different kinds of "bad," and they are bad for very different reasons. I'm not sure that the two can really be compared to each other, and even if they can I think it might be a toss-up as to which is worse.
The main difference between the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan stems from the basic nature of the problem in each country. In Iraq, the problem is one of reconstruction (nation rebuilding), while the situation in Afghanistan is really one of nation-building. Iraq, prior to the US invasion, had a reasonably good national infrastructure (albeit one that was somewhat degraded by years of sanctions). Afghanistan did not have that pre-existing foundation. In fact, in many ways the country had - has - less in the way of infrastructure than many other countries had centuries ago. For a good example of this, let's look at the medical infrastructure in Afghanistan.
I picked the medical infrastructure of Afghanistan as an example because I know more about the medical situation there than I do about the rest of the situation. My wife, an army physician, was deployed in Afghanistan from July, 2004 through April, 2005. While there, she learned quite a bit about the medical situation in the country. In this post, I'm going to draw heavily from her experiences and pictures.
The situation in rural Afghanistan is somewhat different from the situation in some of the more urban areas. Neither has good medical facilities available, but the situation is far worse in the villages. This is true for the male residents, but it is even more the case for the women. The reason that my wife is such a tourist attraction for the village boys in this picture is largely the result of the novelty of the situation from their perspective - a woman wearing a uniform, being treated as a superior by some of the men there.
The novelty of this situation was downright frightening for many of the youngest children there, as you can see in this next picture. Not only was she the one of the first women they'd seen in a uniform, and not only was she a foreigner, the things that she was doing were also completely unfamiliar. They had quite simply never been to the doctor before. In many cases, that was also true for their mothers. This wasn't the result of the males in their villages being callous or cruel, or because the men did not care about the women. If that were the case, my wife would not have been permitted to treat them, either. The problem is that women were not allowed, under the Taliban, to be treated by male physicians. Women were also not allowed under the Taliban to be educated beyond the most basic levels. The result is a classic Catch-22. Women can only be treated by female doctors, and there are no (or virtually no) female doctors.
This was the case in the cities, also. The picture below was taken during one of the breaks during a class my wife taught in Kandahar. The class was held at a local hospital; the students were all doctors there. My wife was teaching a basic course on emergency obstetrics. A video she showed early in the day provided these doctors with their first-ever view of childbirth.
I know that I've gone on at some length about all of this stuff, and that this post is starting to look a bit like a (slightly unusual) family vacation slideshow, but there is a point to this beyond me being proud of my wife. In Iraq, medical care is bad. The US invasion and prior UN sanctions made it difficult to provide decent medical care there. However, there was once a good medical infrastructure in place in Iraq, and the need now is to repair and rebuild that preexisting system. In Afghanistan, there has never been a good, solid medical infrastructure in place. The choice that the occupying forces are faced with there is whether to build one largely from scratch, or to leave the country without having tried to establish one. I've focused on the medical situation, but the same is true when it comes to roads, to sewers, to education, to whatever. You name it, they don't got it.
The problems that we are facing in Iraq right now stem from several sources. Leading the pack is the sheer incompetence involved in post-invasion policy. Failing to send enough troops to prevent looting, failing to rapidly restore damaged physical infrastructure, failing to provide significant economic development (i.e. jobs), failing to... that list could go on for pages, and all of those failures are involved in the current situation. Adding to the problems there, you have the sectarian violence driven by a long history of difficulties between the Suni minority and the Shiite majority. Add a general dislike for Americans, driven both by our past history in the region and our occupation of their country, and we're off to the races.
Our response in Afghanistan has been better, but hardly flawless. It, too, is marred by low troop levels and a very slow construction and development effort. The complicating factors there, however, are much different. The Taliban continues to exist, having returned to its roots as a resistance group, and continues to fight against occupation forces. They have much more experience at this than most of the insurgent groups in Iraq, and have the advantage of being able to operate from terrain that is much less hospitable to western military forces. There is essentially no central government at all in Afghanistan, and the country is for all intensive purposes a number of very loosely linked semi-autonomous regions. Iraq was ruled, prior to the US invasion, by a strong central government - a dictator. The Taliban was able to enforce their Islamic law on most of the country, but they were not anywhere near as strong a central force as Saddam was. There is really no modern history of anything like a functional national governmetn in Afghanistan, greatly complicating the process of stabilizing the country. Added to this mix, we have the regional warlords, who are able to maintain their position through the use of force, and are unwilling to accept central rule, and we have the poppy crop, with all its economic consequences. All in all, a very different mix of circumstances.
Which is worse? Personally, I wouldn't want to pick. Neither is a garden area, and both are quite violent. Fewer foreign troops may have died in Afghanistan than Iraq, but there are also many fewer foreign troops in Afghanistan to begin with - until recently, the troop levels were about a tenth of what they are in Iraq and even now the numbers are less than a quarter of those in Iraq. I don't think the situations in the two countries are comparible, but if I had to pick, I'd say that Afghanistan might just be in worse shape.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that the situation in Iraq is good, and I am in favor of a continued American presence in Iraq only because I think that pulling out and leaving the country in worse shape than it was when we arrived would be immoral. If we cannot fix the problems ourselves, and it is likely that we cannot, we need to find someone who can and start that process before we pull out. Aside from that single moral issue, I can think of no good reason for us to stay, and many good reasons for us to leave. The violence in Afghanistan, however, is not one of them.
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You are correct, of course, that it is not valid to look at the situation in one country, and use that as the basis for an argument about what should be done in a different country.
There are really two ideas that I was trying to develop in that post. In retrospect, I see that I ended up mixing them up and not really developing either one.
Just looking at the situation in Iraq, I would say that I used to hold the same view as you: we have a moral obligation to fix it, since we are the ones who broke it.
However, I can't agree that that means we should stay. I view the situation very much like I view an ill-advised surgical procedure. I suppose that, ideally, if a surgeon gets into a situation that he or she cannot fix, it would be ideal to find a more senior or more specialized surgeon who can come in and finish the job correctly. But what if no such person exists? I used to think that we should get the UN to put together a force to come in and take over, but now I don't think that is possible.
I absolutely hate the idea of us pulling out and leaving things to get even worse in Iraq, but I do not think that our continued presence there is helping. I especially do not think that it helps to try to enforce a preconceived idea of how the country "should" look, when the reconstruction is finished. We seem to have the idea that the area should continue to exists as a single country, with a strong central government. The thing is, it may not be possible for a central government to hold the country together, without resorting to the kind of iron-fisted totalitarian rule that held it together under Saddam.
If that is the case, and I suspect it is, then for us to stay, would mean that we would have to be complicit in establishing a ruthless totalitarian regime.
I'll be the first to admit that I do not really know, and cannot really know, that that is the case. But if it is true, then we are faced with a choice between two extremely unpleasant options. Either we pull out now, abrogating a very serious responsibility; or we stay, and participate in the perpetuation of evil. If something awful is going to happen, I would rather that we let nature take its course. It is somewhat analogous to the choice between letting a patient die of cancer, or directly causing the death by surgical complications.
I hate to think that we are really helpless. I want to think that there is something we could do to make things better. I am sure that people such as your wife do make things better, on an individual, local level. What I doubt is that we have the ability to do enough good on a local level, to have all those good things add up to something good on a national level. The problem is not that persons such as your wife cannot do anything beneficial; quite to the contrary, they can make a huge difference. But it is my hypothesis, that the insurgencies will actively seek to prevent any larger good from developing out of the individual acts of beneficence.
I do think that as long as we are in Iraq, and Afghanistan, it is extremely important for individuals to go over and try to make things better. I applaud that spirit. Those kinds of contributions are going to be essential to any kind of positive outcome. And it is entirely possible that those contributions will continue to provide a lasting benefit, even if the overall outcome is poor. That is, even if the country falls apart, at least some individuals will be better off than they would have been otherwise.
I think that if I were a neutral third party, and looked at your argument and mine, I would tend to favor your argument, because you have access to more direct observational data than I do. From a scientific point of view, that would mean that you are more likely to be correct than I. But somehow, I have difficulty accepting that. I still think we should put out of Iraq now, and perhaps Afghanistan as well.
Neocons (referred to in the first Bush administration as "the crazies") started both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. Misguided do-gooders (including bleeding-heart liberals, a tribe to which I ascribe) will do what they can, on an interpersonal level, to set things right, but they cannot repair either situation. In fact, in a small way, they are enabling the neocons, to the extent that they are able to lessen the suffering in the afflicted regions, and thereby mitigate the impact of this disastrous and childish policy.
Kurt Vonnegut, in one of his books, mentioned as an entertaining aside that, in the future, "the United States had been balkanized as a threat to world peace". Recent worldwide surveys support the notion that this great experiment in Democracy, which we call home, is indeed regarded by majorities in many countries as the greatest national threat to worldwide peace on the planet.
So, do we as American political liberals indirectly lend support to an unjust and wrongheaded policy, by attempting to lessen the evil consequences of that policy, or do we act in a way contrary to our natural tendencies (to lessen suffering where we find it), and thereby avoid helping other human beings who are hurting? And on a national level, do we support continued US presence in these afflicted countries? We've now arrived at a situation, pushed forward vigorously by the astute airheads in the Bush administration, where nothing we do, on either a personal or moral level, is without negative consequences.
According to this UN report, Afghanistan produces 87% of the world's illicit opium. I had just read that in this book, but I found it so hard to believe that I had to find something that confirmed it.
According to the author of the book, we were careful not to disturb the opium production during our incursion there after 9/11.
The book also claims that the $7B the opium generates helps fund our enemies.
This is just wrong.