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Sat, Oct 18th 2008, 10:52

Patrick Edwin Moran, Wake Forest University, Platinum Contributor (207)

Guardian commentator qwerty99666 asked the basic question: What should the West do now, given that it has behaved heedlessly for the past 7 years?

On every side there are several factions. The interests, and even the existence, of some factions that are in active opposition are furthered by the existence of their counterparts. Authoritarian regimes in the West rise to higher levels of influence as authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world commit atrocities, and vice-versa. Similarly, it appears that political factions anywhere in the world will become more influential as they become more authoritarian, anti-democratic, and willing to use unprincipled force to attain their aims. The same situation can be seen with organisms such as the so-called killer bees that drive out less aggressive populations of honey bees. The more harshly other animals predate against native or long-naturalized populations of honey bees, the more successfully the killer bees will compete against them.

In a world of super-abundant resources, the violent regimes would find fewer advantages against less violent regimes. But it may be that as global warming worsens, as populations increase, as non-renewable resources become more and more depleted, and as humans ruin more and more sources on which renewable resources depend, then benign regimes will become less and less able to compete successfully against violent regimes. If that is indeed to become the future of this world, then it may matter little what any one group does. Perhaps the kindest prospect would be a kind of cultural mercy killing of other groups by one group that might survive with a reduced population in a new world with reduced resources.

If that limit case is not inevitable, then there may be ways to manage the threats offered by the human equivalent of colonies of killer bees.

The opposite limit case would be one in which some nations would be completely passive in the face of attacks and parasitical acts committed against them by other states. For such a condition to actually exist, the aggressive states would have to arrange at least a quasi-symbiotic arrangement with the nations of sheep unless they chose to bleed them into extinction. The aggressive states would thereafter default to the first kind of opposition described above, and would sort themselves out according to which state developed into the most effective fighting machine, the one able to impose its will on all others.

A state that has no serious competition from without tends to break apart due to internal forces. Several regions begin to see themselves as having their own goals to pursue and as having no reason to subordinate themselves to the central government. A tension develops between a central government that must become totalitarian in style to preserve its dominance and one or more regional centers of power that would prefer themselves to be able to function as independent nations.

The normal situation over the course of centuries has been for empires to come and go, for totalitarian regimes to dominate their own citizens and threaten their neighbors, and for subject populations to fight their way free of empires and emperors.

There used to be more inertia in the shifting balances among the nations of the world. The faster information can propagate over the world, the poorer the prospects for long-term domination by one ideology or religion. The greater the ease of travel of armies and commercial interests, the more rapidly are formerly well-isolated nations now subject to shocks from outside.

Given the above empirical generalizations, it seems unlikely that Afghanistan will become an instance of either limit case. Afghanistan, and surrounding nations, will oscillate somewhere between the limit cases of entirely aggressive states and entirely supine states. Internally, Afghanistan will be neither the obedient client state of the U.S., NATO, or any other outside entity, nor will it entirely be dominated by some group such as al Qaida.

So what? All that the above even offers to prove is that Afghanistan will fit somewhere in the mosaic of other nations with greater or lesser degrees of freedom, greater or lesser subordination to other states, etc. If Western nations pulled out and let Afghanistan entirely to itself, it might fall under a century of rule by a religious orthodoxy like the Taliban, it might exhaust itself in civil strife or even wave after wave of "ethnic cleansing," or its people might decide to fool us all and create a government that preserves minority rights, is responsive to the needs of all of its citizens, and thus put the rest of the world to shame.

Three questions present themselves to any outside nations that may take an interest in Afghanistan's future. They might all answer them differently:

(1) What kind of a nation would we like to see Afghanistan develop into? (2) What kind of a Middle-East would we like to see it take its place in? (3) What steps, if any, can we take that might actually influence Afghanistan to develop in the way that would suit us? (One might hope that some of these other nations might even decide these questions on the basis of what they had thoughtfully determined to be most in the interests of the people of Afghanistan.)

Realistically, what are the chances that our having made a huge and not always helpful impact on Afghanistan the proper, most efficient, corrective step will simply be to pack up and leave as abruptly as possible? Having gotten into the current situation through following a course of action that was successful in unseating the Taliban and al Qaida but was based on expediency and soon thereafter allowed to muddle along without proper executive control or even an effective "viceroy" on site, what grounds for hope would there be in a new strategy based on cynicism with regard to the Afghan citizens, expediency with regard to our own short-term interests, and the same general heedlessness that caused those parts of the current problem not already there because of the meddling of the Soviet Union, the arrogance of the Taliban, and the vengeance and power seeking of al Qaida?

At minimum, the West should be asking all of Afghanistan, "What would you like for us to do to make things better?"

Mon, Oct 20th 2008, 18:24

Morgan Sheeran, Armed Forces, Afghan Veteran, blogger, Gold Contributor (106)

Milne reveals a particular political bent in his article by insisting on using certain terms. If in a description, an actor is referred to by another term than the one officially used to denote them, then the writer is most likely attempting to alter perceptions or redefine the actor to suit a particular agenda. Mr. Milne appears to be doing just this in his repeated use of the term, "occupation." He does this again in his use of the terms, "imperial" and "depravity."

The tacit agreement to use terms which favorably describe either the Taliban or to use terms that they generally use in their propaganda or information operations is further indication of the writer's intentions.

With no further information about this particular writer, it is possible to deduce a number of things about his point of view, and it is not balanced. This is, then, an opinion piece written by an individual with an axe to grind and therefore not credible analysis.

That being said, the situation in Afghanistan is finally receiving a good deal of attention in the United States after being the "forgotten war" since the advent of the Iraq Campaign. All eyes have been on Iraq for the greatest portion of the past five years because it was the political bone of contention. Now that the situation in Iraq has calmed measurably, American eyes now turn to Afghanistan with renewed interest to find that the situation there has become more tense.

As a recent veteran of Afghanistan, having worked directly with Afghan National Police in a handful of provinces, and having been involved directly in combat operations where direct air support (both rotary and fixed wing) was utilized, this writer's firsthand observations differ significantly from Mr. Milne's. Mr. Milne, from his desk in England, and viewing this conflict through an already skewed lens; dimly through distance and the fog of war, takes a few quotes from fatigued and frustrated officials and bends them to his will. The result is an inflamatory denunciation of the mission and the United States in particular, with a nationalistic appeal to unburden the UK from the demands of a US puppet master.

Mr. Milne's article attempts to rename an assistance force to a foreign "occupation," and utilizes inflamatory and propagandistic language such as "imperial" to cast the effort in Afghanistan in a poor light and encourage a feeling of dispair regarding the outcome. His assertion that the effort is doomed to failure is not based upon any skilled analysis as either a political scientist or as a military analyst of any credentials whatsoever.

To use this article as the basis of any discussion of the situation in Afghanistan is to begin at a position so far slanted in one direction by its basic assumptions that it is of no value. The article was a disappointing diatribe driven by an ideological viewpoint unfriendly to the US and NATO.