Let's start with the big story in today's New York Times––that means above the
fold on the right of the front page. There we see the article by Neil
MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad under the title:
“Jihadists Taking a Growing Role in Syrian Revolt.” If you did not get
that straight, the first subtitle spells it out for you:” Radical Forces in Fray.” And if you still didn't get the idea, the second
subtitle provides details: “Fighters Adopt Islamist Agenda that Attracts
Foreign Financing.”
At this point you really don't have to read the article if
you’ve been paying attention at all to what's been happening during the past
year. I have, but I read it anyway. It basically says that what has happened is
what I predicted in my commentary here many, many months ago: the longer
something like this goes on, the more radical elements tend to get control of
it on all sides.
This is perhaps not common “common sense” for most people,
but it is for historians and historically tutored observers of political
affairs. It simply reflects the undeniable truth that in episodes of political
violence, whether full-scale civil wars or something short of that, liberals
and moderates don't get very far. Reasonable people get marginalized in
situations like that, if they don't get shot. This is reasonably common as
common sense goes, and so I certainly don't claim that I was the only one to make
this observation many months ago. A lot of people did, and a lot of people have
been proven right.
At the time, I recall one commentator arguing with me,
saying that the Syrian opposition was radical from the very start. This is
simply not true, unless by radical he meant anyone who happens to be a Muslim;
unfortunately, there are many Americans who conflate all sorts of things that
are far more wisely distinguished from one another. No, it was not true then,
but it is increasingly true now. Time always has a price, whether in diplomacy
or in most anything else. It's not good to be impulsive, of course, but the
passage of time is not always one's friend. In Syria, the passage of time has
narrowed American options even as it has raised the stakes of any bold policy
initiative.
Several articles in the paper also demonstrate how the
crisis in Syria is spreading, and with what effects. Just a few days ago the New York Times ran a piece on Syrian
refugees in Jordan. It came accompanied by a photograph of a six-year-old
killed by a Syrian bullet, about to be buried in his grave. The gist of the
story was that Jordanian authorities are rigidly controlling the activities of
Syrian refugees in the country. They are not allowing these refugees to
organize in any way so as to project influence back into Syria. And they’re
trying to keep Palestinians out. The same day or just a day before or after a
very similar article appeared describing the limits that the Turkish government
has placed on Syrian refugees in that country. And now today we get to articles
to sort of round out the geography. On page A4 of today's New York Times is an article called “Syrian Refugees are Stung by
Hostile Reception in Iraq: Held Under Guard and Unable to Leave.” Not to be
outdone, the Washington Post, on page
A12 today, titles an article “Lebanese Concerned Syrian Conflict Will Spark
Internal Strife.” If there were Syrian refugees in Israel--there
aren't––there'd be an article about that, too.
Again, it's hard to compile a longer list of blinding
flashes of the obvious (BFOs), and yes,
again, though I hate to say it, all this has been presaged in my commentary
over the months. Of course the Jordanian and Turkish governments are not going
to let refugees from Syria use their territory as a staging ground for
anti-regime activities, even if they sympathize with the ultimate goal of
getting rid of Assad and his thugs and murderers. This is because Middle
Eastern governments don't like freelancers. They don't want to be dragged into
conflicts they are not prepared for and have not willed themselves, and they
don’t want to commit to an outcome that might not come out as hoped for. There
is nothing particularly Middle Eastern about this. As far as I know, no
responsible government would act much differently. If there is a certain accent
of brutality involved here from time to time, well, that is par for the course
in this region.
Of course, the situation in Iraq is not the same as it is in
Jordan and Turkey. The Iraqi government is dominated by Shi’a these days, and
it has sympathized all along, not necessarily with Bashar al-Assad himself, but
with the non-Sunni elements running the country. The reason is simple: The rise
of a Sunni-dominated government in Damascus could very well touch off newly
energetic Sunni opposition to Prime Minister Maliki’s little Shi’a sandbox. The
more Islamist in nature that government might be, the worse for the current
rulers in Baghdad. There is nothing like a little religious fanaticism to create
a really noisome opposition.
As the Times article
suggested, there may be foreign money as well as foreign fighters involved in
all this. That Saudi princes finance Wahabbi-like Sunni fanaticism in and
beyond the region is well-known, and the government looks the other way most of
the time. What is not so well known is what the Qatari government and some of
its tag-along princes are up to.
The Qatari government has for some years now played the role
of Peck's bad boy in the region. It shoves bamboo shoots under assorted
fingernails sometimes, it seems, just for the entertainment value, especially
if it happens to annoy the Saudis. It also plays both arsonist and fireman from
time to time, as can be seen by the regime's sponsorship of Al Jazeera. In the
case of Libya, if one can remember back that far, the Qataris were very active
in funding revolutionary mayhem against the Qadaffi regime. No one should be
surprised to learn that they are partly behind what is going on in Syria,
helping the most radical elements as best they can. Why do they do this? In part, just because
they can. Qatar is really a teeny little country. It has the collective
equivalent of a Napoleonic complex. But the motive is also part of a
recognition that to play one must pay. If the Qataris want a say in their
discussions with other Gulf states, they need to demonstrate that they have a
dog in the fight. So they buy one.
We have a tolerable working relationship with the Qatari
regime elite. After all, we have lots of military stuff on the ground in their
country, so it pays us to pay attention to them and talk them up. One can
therefore only wonder what gets said in private when the Qataris do bad things
like this, as I am assuming they are. Well, I know what some of these things used
to be that got said because I used to have access to the cable traffic. And the
answer is, very generally speaking, not a lot. We look the other way most of
the time, and when we don’t look the other way the Qataris make al sorts of
noises and then essentially ignore us, because they know we need them as much
or more than they need us. So it goes.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention a subject that both
the New York Times and the Washington Post take up, and that is of
course the report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction, the agency charged with documenting how American reconstruction
funds are being used. This, and not anything about jihadists in Syria, is above
the fold on the right, front page, in today's Washington Post. The report says that basically all the highly
touted infrastructure projects we promised the Afghans are way behind schedule,
and will never be finished by the time the vast bulk of American combat
soldiers leave at the end of, if not sooner than, 2014. It goes further,
arguing that the gap between expectations raised and results unfulfilled could
actually prove counterproductive.
Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t like to hear things like
this, and so it's pretty mad at the folks who put together this report and then
made it public. That's understandable. When you work in the government, at
whatever level, it is your job to make the policy work, and so you naturally
tend to get pissed off when somebody rains on your parade––especially if it's
another government operation or agency. But there's no question that the
Special Inspector General is correct, unless of course he is essentially
irrelevant.
I mean by “irrelevant” that the prospective failure of the
U.S. mission in Afghanistan, and by mission I mean the misnamed nation-building
mission (it's really a state-building mission), has got to be one of the most
over-determined realities of my lifetime. It is frankly disgusting to me that
our political leaders, now of both major parties, have sacrificed so much blood
and treasure--and the blood of America's best, at that--over this idiotic
escapade.
Let me make the basics as clear as I can possibly make them.
The Afghan National Army will never be able to substitute for American arms in
fighting off the Taliban, not because they don't know how to shoot a gun––the
whole idea training Afghans to use weapons was hilarious from the very start,
on the order of teaching a snake to suck eggs––but because most of them they
have little to no loyalty to the Afghan regime. And why should they? It is not
because the regime is corrupt, but because it is a highly over-centralized
artifact, devised by outsiders, that does not fit with the social and
historical realities of the country. It is corrupt because it is a bad fit for
the country, not the other way around.
As for building a democratic Afghanistan, this was a wilder
fantasy still. In order to have a democracy as we understand it, you first have
to have at least the semblance of a modern state, more or less as Max Weber
defined it. Afghanistan has never had such a state, it does not have such a
state now, and one is nowhere in prospect. The country has not moved beyond the
patrimonial and decentralized tribal system of its forebears. That system has
been savaged by war and occupation, but nothing has replaced it and that is the
tragedy, really, of Afghan reality. It cannot go back readily to what
stabilized its governance before, but it cannot go forward either because the
remnants of old ways prevent it.
The infrastructure improvement program was designed to
complement a reformed, if not a really democratic, government and a capable
Afghan army and police force. The government cannot be reformed within the
current structural framework of government; any government that would replace
the present one would end up being more or less as corrupt and incompetent as
the one we have now. And the army and police force cannot be capable in the
sense of supporting that government. So the failure of the infrastructure
program is in most respects beside the point.
But I simply have to note another rather obvious matter: The
U.S. Federal government cannot arrange itself to effectively build
infrastructure properly in the United States, so how the hell did it ever expect
to do so in Afghanistan?
We have spent something on the order of $90 billion dollars
over the past decade on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. Since 2008
we’ve become sort of jaded by large numbers, so that $90 billion doesn't seem
so large anymore. But trust me: It's a very large number. Yet I’d pony up three
times that much if by doing so I could redeem the lives of those American and
allied soldiers lost and maimed, but of course I can't redeem a single one of
them.
In the end I fear we will have bought approximately nothing
with our money. It's not worth my time to get into a discussion as to whether
our efforts have been counterproductive or just plain futile. After all, what
really is the difference at this point? The simple truth is that we got ourselves
committed to a project we could not pull off in a place we don't understand and
have never really tried to understand. (Does this sound familiar? Does
Afghanistan rhyme at least a little with Vietnam?) Everything else is a detail,
including the Special Inspector's report, today’s front-page news.
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