Afghanistan: Obama's quagmire?

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A friend traveled through Afghanistan in the early 1970s: she described a quiet, gentle, hospitable people.

However the Afghans are no strangers to foreign interventions and react violently to intruders. The Pashtuns, who have lived there for about 20,000 years, have survived, outlived, and overcome the incursions of Alexander the Great and the Mongols under Genghis Khan. They simply let these conquerors pass over them, and the Mongols eventually converted to Islam. They successfully overthrew the Mogul empire in the region and resisted the British Empire's attempts to rule them.

Violence continues to pockmark the country. In the late 1970s the Russians dragged the first twentieth-century harrow of horror through the land, bombing and killing them in the hope of “liberating” them from their traditional government. To stop the Soviets, the U.S. and other governments financed and prepared the Pashtun Mujahideen (and Bin Laden) in resistance techniques. Some of these opposition forces later became what is now known as the Taliban. A civil war ensued between these latter fanatics and the other Pashtun warlords, and this struggle continues still today.

And again the Western powers are intervening. For the West these Taliban were dangerous, out-of-control rebels, like the movie character Rambo who used his military expertise against the homeland: he returned home and turned his knives and bombs against the little U.S. town of "Hope". That is, warriors trained by the Occident began to use their knowledge and weapons against their former commanders.

Now Barack Obama thinks he can win a military confrontation there. I greatly fear he will end up like Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam: in spite of his ambition to make the world a better place he was mired in brutality and finally defeated by a bunch of irregular fighters who knew how to resist high-tech warfare. His political career ended in disgrace.

There are other dangers, too. Franz Schurmann, emeritus professor at U.C. Berkeley and author of "The Mongols of Afghanistan" (Mouton, 1962) says that,

“many, if not most, rural Pashtuns are long distance migrants. They are called Koochis -- a Turkish word meaning people who migrate long distances back and forth…. If America starts a massive attack on Afghanistan to punish and overthrow the Taliban, chances are that armed Koochis will start a massive, long-distance migration south into Pakistan. This alone could easily destabilize the entire subcontinent much as what the great conqueror Babur and his armies did when they moved south from Afghanistan to found the great Mogul Dynasty in India in the 1500s.”

What’s the other option? My answer is: don’t fight. Instead of soldiers, send in thousands of civil servants, school teachers, doctors, engineers and agricultural experts. Elevate the people’s prosperity.

Of course, this tactic also has its difficulties because Obama would risk destroying a viable and fecund culture with its own ecological techniques for coexisting with nature. But that’s another story.

At any rate, I close with the words of Desmond Tutu: "Peace does not come from the barrel of a gun but is achieved when cultural differences are respected and the fundamental rights of all are recognised and upheld."