In a recent column I mentioned the unlearned lessons in Iraq in relation to Shiite-Sunni history. A reader reminded me that the Kurds (Sunni) were not mentioned; he was correct and I pointed out in my reply the challenge of writing about such complex subjects in the allotted word allowance. As the following shows, I have not learned the danger of biting off more than I can chew.
With the terrible anniversary of September 11 just behind us, I have not heard or read much about why that attack occurred. Granted, it was planned by a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists who believed (and still do) in the concept of jihad. If one reads the Qu’ran on jihad it goes far beyond the limited idea of “holy war” and includes a personal, internal, individual, spiritual struggle for self-improvement, moral cleansing, and intellectual effort. Those points, to which we all can aspire, were certainly not present in the minds of the terrorists on that awful day.
In modern times there have been few incidences of where religion and politics, when joined together, have wreaked such havoc. The majority of Muslims stand with the rest of the world against the narrow view of the terrorists but the radical fundamentalists are not deterred. Their sense of righteous martyrdom has not lessened in the least in their “holy war.”
No one with an ounce of sanity condones what they have done and continue to do, but in their own minds, they are justified. How can that be? Certainly there are no simple answers; there are many and they are complex. I won’t attempt to address them here except for one: How our foreign policy is often misperceived by those to whom it is applied.
We Americans have a strong belief that we know what is right. This is particularly dangerous in situations about which we have incomplete information. That covers a broad swath of recent history. The Palestinian/Israeli wars, The Korean conflict, The Vietnam war, The Middle East in general, the Balkan wars and now, especially, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In each case we have taken a stand against totalitarianism and stood for human rights; of that, we can be justly proud. It was not hard to understand the reasons for our actions in the World Wars but today is a vastly different world. No spot of the globe is as much as a day away from where we sit. To think we can understand all the forces at play in such a different environment is the height of chutzpah. When we come in with our well-intentioned but incompletely thought out actions we find ourselves enmeshed in endless complications. That doesn’t mean we should have looked the other way; isolationism died when the world became so much smaller. The free world should always stand against tyranny as we have done in Afghanistan.
The difficulty in so many of these situations has been that our expectations are unrealistic because we don’t understand the people we are trying to help. We are not alone in this. In 1980 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan (at the invitation of the communist government in place there) to put down civil strife. It quickly became apparent to them they could never win a military victory and after nine years of frustration they finally withdrew. We are in a similar position. Afghanistan has never had, and probably never will, a stable central government in a model we understand. It has been a tribal society ruled by warlords for centuries and will continue so. The westerners who have lived and served among them describe the individual Afghanis as an extremely giving people but with limited interest or understanding of our goals. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are more than willing to wait us out, just as they did the Soviets.
The only hope and it is a slim one, is to help build an infrastructure that will support the country and bring them into some semblance of modernity that appeals to them. Allowing them to live their lives without the threat from their own people would be a marked improvement. This can’t be done by trying to defeat the terrorists militarily. Whether it can be done at all is a daunting question for a nation whose only real power is held by radical fundamentalists and whose only economic success has been in the growing and exporting of opium. There will always be those in the world who interpret our foreign policy as a threat to their own agenda. The job in Afghanistan is finding those who will stand up to the terrorists and determine, with our assistance, their own destiny.
By Hayden Hollingsworth [email protected]
