What Robert McFarlane Still Doesn’t Know About Afghanistan
Just about a month ago, a small but significant meeting took place in Washington that should have garnered more attention. The Afghanistan Advocacy Group, a coalition of Afghan Americans and Americans founded to enrich communication between concerned citizens and U.S. and Afghan policymakers, invited the foreign policy advisers of major presidential contenders to discuss their candidates’ positions on security and development in the war-torn country. Advisers for McCain, Huckabee, and Obama accepted the invitation, but among the newcomers, it was a familiar face that stood out most.
Anybody who remembers the 1980s couldn’t miss Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Iran-Contra celeb extraordinaire, who spoke on behalf of the McCain campaign. McFarlane was like a soft-spoken elephant in the room asking to be let back into the china shop (or the South Asia shop in the this case). Since he served as National Security adviser to Ronald Reagan during the salad days of radical Islamic terrorism, McFarlane even knew personally some of the men who were attacked in the infamous Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon.
All of the participants including McFarlane at least agreed on certain basic points, mainly the idea that what is most needed in Afghanistan is ongoing and increased military support and an integrated plan to bring political and economic stability. But watching the videos of the event, one hears a familiar narrative of Cold War triumphalism from the McCain camp that isn’t altogether unproblematic: America was right to support the Afghans against the Soviets, our only crime was withdrawal. McFarlane talks about his “sense of debt and betrayal, by our country, of Afghanistan” and says that, “we withdrew, ignoring the scale of loss and sacrifice this country had experienced on our behalf.” This is fair enough on many counts. Debt, betrayal, and sacrifice have been the lot of the Afghan people in their battle against communism. But where American involvement is concerned, unpacking the words “on our behalf” and “this country” reveals a great deal of messy complexity under the gloss.
The war that was waged against communism in Afghanistan has a long history that extends beyond what was done “on our behalf.” It started as a rebellion of Afghans against Afghans — against the Khalq party led by Nur Muhammad Taraki, a careless zealot who thought that Afghan society would be as enamored of Marxist orthodoxy as he was. Later, it was a battle against invading Soviets who hoped that the Khalqi regime would become a permanent Soviet satellite in the region. The Afghan resistance considered it a holy duty to resist foreign invaders, the struggle was deemed a jihad by many who fought, and its fighters were the mujahideen.
Most Afghan Muslims followed the Hanafi tradition in Islam which is the oldest, most liberal, and places the most emphasis on reason. But as foreign money filtered into the war, different investors demanded different kinds of repayment. When the Reagan administration asked King Fahd to bring Saudi money into the fight, it helped bring Wahhabi extremism into the equation.
Wahhabi Arabs filtered into Afghanistan, bringing with them a rigid tradition of Islam and adding an element to the struggle beyond that of Afghans protecting their sovereignty from the bloodstained boot-heels of Soviet totalitarianism. They used the Afghan land as a testing ground, and it was there that the extremist movement now referred to by some as globalized Islamofacism developed its international character.
While there were some Afghans who had an affinity for extremism, most of the Afghan mujahideen fighters were not easily disposed to foreign Wahhabi presence or ideology. The tactics of the Arabs were known to be exceptionally brutal and their ideas often clashed with Afghan culture and common Afghan understandings of the Koran. One could no longer say that the mujahideen strictly represented “this country” of Afghanistan in its fight against tyranny. The mujahideen had become a patchwork of Afghan national resistance and ideological elements, the latter of which were as foreign to peace and national liberation as they were to the Afghan people themselves. It should be at least mildly disturbing that McFarlane’s years of first-hand experience with Islamic extremism has not yet taught him to speak more specifically.
Leaving aside for a moment his shady comments about Afghan history and American involvement in it, McFarlane says of the present that Afghanistan policy under McCain will offer “more resources, more troops, better command and control,” than what we’ve seen in recent years and that they intend to “go after the narcotics problem.” But that “problem” wouldn’t need be thought of as such if old-fangled conservatives could stop thinking in terms of Reagan’s War on Drugs and, as Christopher Hitchens has suggested, notice the gaping market demand for pharmaceutical painkillers that could be produced legally with Afghan opium.
McFarlane cites a major failure in Afghanistan strategy as the reliance on its weak central government and proposes “channeling our assistance down to tribal leaders, down to village chiefs where there is a measure of pluralism.” When he uses words like “tribal leaders,” “village chiefs,” and “pluralism,” he might take care to explain why we should trust that they aren’t as slipshod as his usage of other terms — why, in other words we should not also see the word “warlord” when he says “village chief,” and how the pluralism to which he refers will be different from the “pluralism” that we saw among competing parties of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s.
If a new approach is what’s needed in Afghanistan — as most on both sides of the partisan divide seem to agree — it’s hard to see how McCain is offering anything markedly different from the disastrous policies of the last two decades. If American efforts are intended to purge the region of what the Wahhabis brought to the Afghan war, it hardly seems sensible to ask the person who helped bring those elements for advice. Especially when he doesn’t show any signs of having developed the ability to distinguish a national liberation movement from the fascistic forces that co-opted it.
It looks more probable each day that John McCain will be competing with Barack Obama for the presidency, a contest where McCain will undoubtedly assert experience as a primary virtue which he possesses and which Obama, unarguably, does not. AAG’s summit on Afghanistan gives one the impression that, if this is the brand of experience he plans to bring to the War on Terror, perhaps McCain should find a different selling point.
Josh Strawn is a musician and writer in New York. His band is <a href=”http://www.listofblack.com”Blacklist.
Yep, we’ll be spinning our wills in Afghanistan, just like we’re spinning our wheels in Iraq, unless and until we’re willing to follow this crap back to its source:
http://www.asecondlookatthesaudis.com
Dear Mr. Strawn,
Informative piece, but you are assuming that Mr. McFarlane does not have the same 20/20 hindsight that you do. The only way to make no mistakes is to do nothing. Hopefully Bud’s hindsight is as good as yours.
Bill,
I am with you. The source of the problem is a newly powerful ideology, radical Islam, in the form of Saudi Arabia funded Wahabi Islam, which has spent over $100 Billion proselytizing in the Muslim world since the early ’80′s. In that part of the world $100 Billion buys lots of maddrasas and mosques and pays lots of teachers and preachers.
How do we fight this successfully? $100 Billion to the Mormons? $100 Billion for Satellite dishes so they can have access to endless Bay Watch, Three is Company, Sex in the City, Boston Legal? Time for creative solutions.
“Time for creative solutions.”
40 Valium tablets are cheap.
It’s time we root out all the old corrupt and foolish and deceptive “advisors” and “experts” on the Middle East and Islam, and begin facing reality.
These people have led us down the path of calamity for three decades — and they still have the ear of our politicians. Until we face the fact that Islam is a supremacist war doctrine, until we face the fact that Islam uses terror to gain advantage, to gain territory, to drive and murder “infidels” before their jackboot, and to consolidate power over its adherents, we will get nowhere.
We’ve spent a trillion dollars fighting the so-called “war on terror” — and we’ve toppled two fascist Islamic regimes and replaced them with two slightly less fascist Islamic regimes.
It is only a matter of time, and a few more Saudi or UAE or Kuwaiti or Iranian billions to flow into more mosques and madrassa before those slightly less fascist slamic regimes revert to the slightly more fascistic regimes of yore.
Islam is the enemy.
Mr. Doodslag,
You have visited my pieces before on PJM with this tripe and it makes me wonder if you feel some compelling need to sully up my work by attaching to it your unsupportable, ignorant and bigoted diatribes against Islam. One may–and indeed SHOULD–call superstition in any guise, Islamic or otherwise, the enemy. And one may call Islamism the enemy. But calling Islam the enemy is muddy-headed nonsense. When folks like you do this, you are as wrong as the Muslims who take offense when Islamism is denigrated for the repulsive ideology it is.
Do you really mean to mount an unqualified attack on the religion of the noble men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who fight on our side for peace and justice against the fascists who oppress them? Islam is a motivating force for them as well and they interpret its warlike suras, as the original Afghan mujahideen did, as calls to fight against tyrants. Calls to war shouldn’t really be problematic unless one is a pacifist or ashamed of our revolutionary history.
Plenty of American soldiers pray to a God with the name name as the drooling Serbian mobs do. The sole difference is that Americans think that God means by his own warlike injunctions, that people like Osama bin-Laden should be vanquished and shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the lives of peace-loving Muslims any longer. The Serbs believe that He means for them to exterminate innocents and burn embassies in the name of their mythological and divinely blessed “history.”
Muslim scholars centuries before the European enlightenment had inventively interpreted the Qu’ran as a book that suggested that the afterlife–a highly superstitious idea–referred instead to the passage from ignorance into Enlightenment. History unfortunately didn’t shine well on those men, and they lost their battle of ideas. But they were Muslim nonetheless and their culture and ideas distinctly Islamic, if inspired in part by Greek philosophers. To imagine that the crusade to stamp out ignorance and superstition couldn’t be or has never been a cause of Islam is to ignore the historical record.
Islam is a motivating force for them as well and they interpret its warlike suras, as the original Afghan mujahideen did, as calls to fight against tyrants. Calls to war shouldn’t really be problematic unless one is a pacifist or ashamed of our revolutionary history.
Talk about “tripe”. Equating our revolutionary humanist enlightenment American revolution with the likes motives and tactics of the mujahideen is grotesque.
as the drooling Serbian mobs do.”
Talk about “ignorant and bigoted diatribes”
you are as wrong as the Muslims who take offense when Islamism is denigrated for the repulsive ideology it is.”
Sounds like you and me are pretty much on the same page viz. Islam — so why call me all kinds of mean names?
Also, you ignore my main thrust which is that we’ve simply replaced hideous Islamic tyrannies for slightly less (for the time being) fascistic Islamic regimes. How much time before these so-called “peace-loving Muslims” revert to type and begin funding their own sundry Jihads to terrify and spread Islam? Afghanistan has little avenue for the same kinds of massive revenues that Iraq presents, yet their narco-dollars are going to fund Jihad both within and without Afghanistan — the local governement does very little to stop it. In addition, Islamic Sharia forms the core of the new Afghanistani Constitution — and already there have been troubling signs that “apostates” or those who “insult Islam” do so at risk for their lives. This is a country WE installed, and self desribed “Islamic Republic”. Their “friendship” with us, such as it is, is only temporary. When we leave, the open hatred contempt and double dealing will only intensify, and Afghanistan will revert to a terror center. I guess you’re choosing to remain willfully ignorant of the trajectory of Sharia in Afghanistan, or you wouldn’t make such weak and credulous arguments.
Further, please don’t trot out desiccated old silliness like the “Muslim scholars centuries before the European enlightenment” were all fuzzy and brilliant and so much better than us when we were living in caves… Who cares what the Muslims did, or more accurately, what Marxist prevaricators and their Islamist triumphal apologist friends propagandize that the Muslims did, 800 years ago? The Muslims themselves all admit that the so-called (and much overrated) “gates of itjihad” were slammed resoundingly shut forever.
I don’t mean to be rude, but it is you,, Mr. Strawn, who is spouting a bunch of swill.
Gates of ijtihad slammed shut? Islamists are reformers, not traditionalists! Radicalism without ijtihad is unthinkable. You think Hassan al-Banna and the many other ideologues like him, wasn’t a revolutionary who, by way of itjihad, radically interpreted the Qu’ran to his liking?
Yes, I DO think history matters, even if 800 years. 200 years ago, our founders chopped up the Bible until it hardly existed anymore and said there could be no religious test for public office. Today, you couldn’t think of running for office without proving your religious cred to the country. Good ideas, both from the Euro Enlightnement and the Islamic one, get buried and lost and it isn’t for all of Europe, America, or the Enlightenment to bear the blame for what the idiotic religious elements have wrought in our own time and country any more than all Muslims must now be told by experts like you that their religion is “the problem” to the exclusion of so many more pressing and potent factors.
We do NOT share the same position on Islam, as you continue insisting on conflating the religion with politico-religious ideologies and superstition. I know non-superstitious Muslims and I know Muslims who are anti-Islamism.
I don’t take full credit for the originality of my argument in this regard, although I do have far more knowledge than you know of how things are transpiring in Afghanistan. But Martin Amis makes many of the same distinctions I do with regard to Islam vs. Islamism, and I dare say that Stephen Schwartz knows more than the both of us combined about Marxist prevaricators and reformism in Islam.
As for the history of Islam, I can only say that I didn’t miss the work of Attar, Khayyam, Averroes and Avicenna, as you seem to have. Not calling you mean names, but perhaps suggesting you beef up your bookshelf.
As for calling the Serbian mobs droolers being bigoted, we also saw similar drooling Islamic mobs burning Danish embassies. It’s hardly bigoted of me to refer to either as such. The problem is not with saying that Serbians or Muslims can be drooling scoundrels. The problem is with suggesting that something about them as people is inherently scoundrelesque or that they couldn’t help but be drooling, riotous slugs.
Our primary difference is in my insistence on separating out the scoundrels from the noble ones. If you believe, as I think you do, that the mobs of Islamofascists who deter democracy in Iraq deserve to be eliminated, then you would do well to remember that the Iraqis and Kurds who we fight alongside also venerate the same God.
The bigotry of your reply is in its implication that something in the Arab or Muslim bloodstream will forever doom them to backsliding into the Dark Ages, whereas the Euro-Christians did not. I’m afraid that in the portion of Iraq known as Kurdistan, while elements such as the PKK unfortunately continue to thrive, the region is in many other ways an exemplar of progressivism. The Iraqi Kurds are not Christians, atheists, or Hindus–they are Sunni Muslims.
Just call it Islamism, DOOD. It’s three more letters but three billion times more precise and less ignorant. Words and history matter.
Thank you for your posts, Josh. I couldn’t have asked for better evidence or fodder for the impeachment of your bankrupt ideas.
You retail the absurd idea that Jihad begins with al Banna? Then what about the billion slaves of Islam suffering under the jackboot today — the same numbers that were born under Islam’s horrible star before al Banna ever darkened the earth? They were once Jews, Christians, animists, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, et al. Islam slaughtered its way into their domains within the first centuries of it terrible birth through Jihad — which was then, remained, and will always remain Islam’s form of warfare to spread and preserve Islam. You are a leftist tool asserting that violent Jihad is an invention of Al Banna.
Further, you reveal your gaping ignorance of Islam by asserting that I am the one “insisting on conflating the religion with politico-religious ideologies and superstition.” Perhaps Erdogan of Turkey might know more about the topic that you? In 2007 the famously “secular” Islamic leader (oxymoron rich, isn’t it?) quipped: “The term “moderate Islam” is ugly and offensive — Islam is Islam”.
Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi has also famously weighed in asserting that there is no separation whatsoever between the exertion of the religious Islamic impulse, and the legalistic, and governmental impulse. No separation. None. Doubt what I say? Remember, this is one of the foremost experts on Islam in the West — speaking at a Muslim forum — and this account is on an Islamic website. Read it and weep:
“No Separation Between Religion and Politics
The prominent Sheikh Al-Qaradawi told the lecture that religion and politics are compatible and cannot be separated.
He said that those who advocate separation between religion and politics use religion to best serve their interests, but when it runs counter to their personal gains, they just ignore it.
On Islam’s position of establishing religious parties, he said, “There is nothing wrong in establishing religious-oriented parties-and this applies to Christians too-provided that all parties respect the law and the constitution.”
http://www.iumsonline.net/english/articles/2004/09/article02.shtml
So you appear to be the one conflating and confusing issues. The successful separation of Church and State is something came about in the Christian West. It’s something that has never existed successfully in the Islamic world. And to compound your foolishness, you’ve utterly confused the capacity of the American nation — the same nation you denigrate above, which has perfected the separation of Church and State, from the Islamic nation which has never done so, and may never do so. There have been halting dalliances into this realm with the forays of Attaturk in the early 20th Century, but we see how well that’s working out in Turkey.
It’s quite funny to observe how it’s always the flim-flam Muslims and their leftist abettors in the West always asserting that the “religion” of Islam is somehow (magically) separate from the “political” Islam. Tell that to the 8 dead seminary students killed in Israel yesterday. Which branch of Hamas claimed the evil deed? The “religious”, or the “political”?
And then there’s this:
“Good ideas, both from the Euro Enlightnement and the Islamic one, get buried and lost and it isn’t for all of Europe, America, or the Enlightenment to bear the blame for what the idiotic religious elements have wrought in our own time” — Josh Strawn
Again, talk about conflation! When the Christians begin rampaging at the drop of a hat, when their priests begin calling from their pulpits for the beheadings of the Jews and rival Christian sects, when their priests begin running entire countries, when their parishioners conduct over 10,000 separate terrorist attacks in a 6 year time horizong, attacks all targeting innocent unbelievers in their libraries, innocents in their nursery schools, innocents sleeping in their beds — and when they constantly cite passages from their Christian or Jewish bibles for all the murder they’re conducting, when the “idiotic religious elements” of the West begin acting as the Muslims have been doing all along — come back and we’ll talk.
“But calling Islam the enemy is muddy-headed nonsense. ”
Evidence please! All the facts point to Islam being the enemy. Where is your evidence that it’s not?
4700+ terrorist events carried out against America or American interests between 1980 and 2000 and most of them were by
a.) Boy Scouts
b.) 7th Day Adventists
c.) Muslims
d.) none of the above
Anyone who thinks Msulims are not to blame is in the position of blaming Pearl Harbor on the pilots of those Jap Planes.
Morooons try to pass off the war Islam has been waging against America since 1979 when the Embassy in Tehran was overran as the actions of a few wild-eyed radicals. Every time Muslims hold victory parades celebrating suicide bombings or the murder of non-muslim children, it puts the lie to that theory.
I could win the war on terror in a month. Every time there is an Islamic terror attack, select 2 Mosques at random and bomb them that next Friday during second prayer.
The Mullahs want Jihad, give them Jihad. Nothing like a 2,000 Lb JDAM during Prayers to get that message across. We would have to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions to do this, but that would be a good thing in and of itself.
If that doesn’t work, we nuke mecca.
The Afghans have shown a propensity for some of the extreme elements of Islam. The rule of the Taliban was not imposed primarily by force. That’s something we are going to have to deal with. Spouting “we are the world” phraseology will not substitute for that.
One huge stumbling block to our winning over the Afghan of the countryside will be how we deal with the opium crop. There is no legal replacement that equal the rewards of opium with the amount of work needed to produce it.
What we should do is throw out the drug warriors and get real. We need opium for many legal and medical uses. We should set up an choice like the Columbian’s did. “Oro o plomo”? Gold or Lead?
Sell us your opium crop at a fair price. (and make sure that it is a fair price.) We will give you other assistance and protect you.
But, if you insist on selling your opium on the black market or to the Taliban, we will burn your crop and provide you with only a bare subsistence.
That is a language that the average Afghan understands. Once we remove the opium funding for the Taliban we can move on from there. We co-opt them like in Iraq and give them something to lose if the Taliban comes back.
It doesn’t really matter what we do with the opium. We can use it or burn it, or dump it in the ocean. In the long run it is cheaper than the “erad” tactics we have tried before.
Remember, strategy is your goal, tactics are the way you work toward that goal. Stop thinking tactically and start thinking strategically.
Josh,
You waste breath on ignorant bigots like Doodslag and John “more rubble, less trouble” Samford.
They can’t distinguish the difference between the ocean and the sky, much less between Islam and Islamism.
You’ll get more intelligent comment out of a toilet bowl.
It’s really quite astounding to see the vulgar name calling by the author of this post and his mindless sycophants in this thread. Rather than responding to a single point I made above, ad hominem and breathless ranting has been the result. I guess that is all they can do, since they clearly are lacking in the idea department.
One wonders what PajamasMedia is thinking?