Paying the price for a flawed perspective of Afghan ethos

Chris Reed, Tribune News Service

In 1983, Harvard-educated psychiatrist turned Carter administration bureaucrat turned conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote a remarkably prescient column for Time magazine about “the mirror-image fallacy” — the presumption of so many American policymakers and Americans in general that the leaders and residents of other nations shared our values.

“If people everywhere, from Savannah to Sevastopol, share the same hopes and dreams and fears and love of children ... they should get along. And if they don’t then there must be some misunderstanding, some misperception, some problem of communication,” Krauthammer wrote.

“If the whole world is like me, then certain conflicts become incomprehensible; the very notion of intractability becomes paradoxical. The more virulent pronouncements of Third World countries are dismissed as mere rhetoric. The more alien the sentiment, the less seriously it is taken. Diplomatic fiascoes follow. ... [The US] might have spared itself [from debacles in Islamic nations] if it had not in the first place imagined that underneath those kaffiyehs are folks just like us, sharing our aims and views.”

America’s 20-year Afghanistan debacle is as precise a confirmation of Krauthammer’s insight as is humanly possible.

Yes, of course, President George W. Bush was going to exact retribution for the Taliban’s decision to allow Osama bin Laden to plan his 9/11 attacks in Afghanistan. But Bush’s commitment to not just punishing the Taliban but to taming and remaking Afghanistan was remarkable in its refusal to consider deeply relevant history.

Afghanistan — a remote, landlocked, mountainous, impoverished nation in west Asia — is built on tightly bound “kinship networks” in which extended families fiercely protect their own interests. A 2012 study found that in some provinces, a majority of marriages were “consanguineous” — among related men and women. The health risks are disregarded because of a desire by families to have first cousins marry so as to retain wealth and solidarity. This is one of many reasons why Afghanistan has never come close to having an effective central government. “Kinship networks” would perceive such a government as threatening.

Yet First World superpowers somehow have repeatedly convinced themselves that they could impose order on a distant, staggeringly different nation. In the 19th century, the British empire — then by far the most powerful force in global affairs — tried and failed twice to establish control of Afghanistan. In 1979, fearful that a new Afghan leader might switch his loyalties from Moscow to Washington, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Though it was then at the height of its global influence, the Soviet Union had no more success than the British in dealing with the 14 tribes of Afghanistan.

In 2019, The Washington Post posted “The Afghanistan Papers,” an extraordinary investigation that showed the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations were fully aware of how corrupt Kabul was and how little credibility the central government there had. In early 2002, six months after the war began, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld privately warned the White House that disaster loomed if the US couldn’t establish a strong central government.

But Bush listened to Vice President Dick Cheney, not to Rumsfeld or his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and somehow thought Afghanistan just needed nudging to become a bastion of American values. Call this what it is: the greatest, most grotesque policy screw-up in modern US history.

Afghanistan has been around for more than 2,500 years. As three global superpowers discovered, its values are entrenched.