Where America has gone and stayed, peace has come

POST: Conservatism And Afghanistan, By Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 08 Sep 2009

Disagree with Sullivan here: where America has gone and stayed, peace has come, not just to the country but to the region.

Now we're lured/forced by events to make similar efforts in parts of the world heretofore largely ignored or only temporarily/cynically addressed in the past.

Order will be applied to the region because the neighbors and the world have little choice but to address its shortcomings. That will take decades, but making it an American affair is foolish. We will simply have to accept the kindness of "strangers" more, especially those for whom this is the "front yard." The outcomes we will settle for will be sub-par by our standards, but the connectivity--also largely created and maintained by others--will come, and with the connectivity will follow the desired social change and associated political change.

But nothing can be imposed from the outside when the culture/economic/political gap is this large. We can't short-circuit history here, only speed it up. And we have to realize that while we may play bodyguard early on, globalization's advance will come through others and ultimately be defended by the same.

Again, if you can only stand for an American-style outcome, we never should have come. Both Left and Right tend to be childish in this regard--in the sense of Lenin's critique of those who wish for magical change. We have no need to match bin Laden's infantile thinking in this regard.

There are more than enough incentives to subdue this place, making it safe for women to act more like we believe they should be free to act and making it very dangerous--even deadly--for men who would have it otherwise. But we are being totally unrealistic on the incentives here--as well as the people most likely to respond to them in a manner we could eventually come to recognize as practical success.

The problem with Americans is that they hate to admit they can't do everything by themselves. And so we continue with this useless all-or-nothing debate.

We're not leaving. But we're also not going to be in charge of outcomes.

Remember those two realities and this will all go down a lot easier.

Comments

[stuart abrams]

Europeans like Sullivan are trapped in an ideological box created by their own legacy of imperialism. We hear this all the time: the English or the Russians couldn't conquer Afghanistan, what makes us think we could do it? We heard the same thing about Vietnam: the French couldn't win, so we can't either. Of course, that was the root of the problem of our Vietnam misadventure - we bought into the idea that our role there was to replace the French, and in that role, we were indeed doomed to failure. Same thing here - if we think that we want to do the same things in Afghanistan that Russia and England tried to do - i.e., conquer it and make it part of our "empire" - we will be no more successful than they were. If we have a different concept of what we are doing there - trying to make this place safe for globalization - we can indeed "succeed". In many ways, we are trying to do the opposite of what England and Russia wanted to do, as we are left with the responsibility of cleaning up one of the biggest messes left by European imperialists - fake states like Afghanistan that were created and designed to serve the interests of the colonial empires. This scenario is going to be repeated many times over the next century, primarily in Central Asia and Africa.

[Tom Barnett]

Well stated. We look to Daddy Europe way too often for cues, and it always baffles me, given that our entire existence is owed to the fact that we rejected Europe in the first place by coming here, and then made it official by throwing off the chains of colonialism. We only did the latter because we were convinced--rightly so, it turns out--that we could do them one better.

And yet still, all this time later, we take our historical cues from them.

[Scott A. Akers]

Maybe if we listened to Tariq Ali of Pakistan, and make peace in Afghanistan a global issue, uniting Russia, China, India, Iran as well as Pakistan and the US,, then maybe we can enable the Afghans, who are as diverse and heterogeneous as America itself, to fine their own peace and prosperity, instead of trying to impose a homogenous solution from outside. Listen to what Louis Dupree tried to tell us, instead of Bible Thumping Red Necks who own stock in Halliburton.