What Exactly Are We Doing In Afghanistan?

'We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?' - Zabiullah Mujahedd (Taliban spokesman)

The Afghan Taliban think that they have time, as well as god, on their side. This would be far easier to dismiss if it wasn't for the fact that we seem to agree with them (about the time, not god). Of course we don't say this directly, but all the talk of deadlines has exactly the same effect. This isn't the same as admitting defeat, the idea is that one more push can buy us one last chance to change the trajectory the future, and so for now the war goes on. The message however is clear, the weight of history is against us and thus we have to be 'realistic'. But is there far more danger in this than we realise? We only have to look back at what is usually taken as proof of the intractability of the Afghan problem - the Soviet occupation - to see one suggestion in this direction. 


'Afghanistan didn't just defeat the Soviet army. It reached out and corrupted and corroded the Soviet Union's faith in itself. Above all it destroyed what was left of the dream that communism was the future universal model for the world. The fascinating question now is whether Afghanistan is beginning to do the same to us in the West. Bit by bit, as we accept torture, corruption and rigged democracy, is our faith in the universalism of our European idea of democracy beginning to falter? And with it our power.' - Adam Curtis

In terms of domestic politics this is almost impossible to evaluate. Even though it is true that the majority of people on both sides of the pond think that the war is going badly, and is being mismanaged by political leaders, there are so many other factors that affect people's faith in their government it is extremely difficult to know if this precisely is what has undermined our faith in our political institutions of late. But it does highlight the extent to which we do appear to have given up on transplanting our idea of the best political institutions to Afghanistan. The crucial question now is, why?

There are, to my mind, three answers to this. Firstly we can simply deny that we have in fact done so, all our realism in this case means is that we have rejected the naive idea that any radical transformation like the one we are trying to effect can happen overnight. Even the deadlines reflect only the recognition that the process cannot be completed by ISAF and NATO but only once Afghan security is handled entirely by forces under the control of a sovereign Afghan authority - this is part of democratic accountability and nationhood.

I find this very problematic. Sovereignty and central government control, even when democratically accountable, does not mean that the positive (so we see it) values of freedom, meritocracy, and maximum possible individual self-determination will flourish. We have surely learned by now that democracy and western values are not identical, even if they are often coextensive. And so, as so often seems to happen, we have a Catch 22 situation. If we are to justify pulling out as part of the process of transformation then we need to appeal to the popular sovereignty issue, but when we do this we give up our only way of ensuring that our other transformative aims are achieved - which was the only way we could justify pulling out in the first place.

Secondly we could answer that we have indeed taken a pragmatic decision to abandon the aim of a pure liberal-democratic Afghanistan. This was only ever a secondary aim anyway, the primary aim was national security and reprisal for the 9/11 attacks. An illiberal democratic government is still preferable to the old 1990's Taliban regime, even if the modern Taliban have to be cut into a post war settlement. So long as Afghanistan doesn't provide haven for terrorism or export too much opium then the country's domestic arrangements are not for us to dictate. It would be both arrogant and futile to try to tell Afghan's how to live, it is simply not sensible to rule out a solution that comes from inside of Afghan culture because it doesn't accord with how we would ideally want it. This seems to be about what the current paradigm is, and what was behind Liam Fox's poorly judged recent comments.

Again though I find this problematic. The national security benefits of the war are extremely spurious. We heard Eliza Manningham-Buller (former head of MI5) state fairly unequivocally at the Iraq inquiry that that war, which was admittedly even more unpopular, greatly increased radicalisation of British Muslims. I think it is reasonable to assume that Afghanistan is not much different, especially given it's proximity to the geographic origin of a large portion of Britain's Muslims in Pakistan. At this point someone usually quotes that statistic about how many of the terrorist plots against Britain had a connection to the Afghan-Pakistan tribal areas. However they rarely ever stop to wonder whether this is only because of the the destabilising and motivating effect of the war, as seems more likely to me - I'll go into why in another post. As for the second point, that we are simply not in principle able to bring about substantive change, why? Are Afghans somehow psychologically or biologically unable to adopt non-traditional lifestyles? This seems unlikely, we managed it (more or less). Moreover it is even more patronising than imposing change on them, thereby voiding the moral argument at the very least.

Third, and I think this is the honest truth, we find ourselves on the current unambitious course because we are fighting for, and over, nothing - simply because we can't think of a good reason to leave. The problem we face is that in spite of our inability to find a reason to fully justify continued fighting, like a really strong belief in liberal-democratic regime change (A Bush Doctrine), this does not seem to be an adequate reason for a pull out, like a really strong anti-interventionism (A Ron Paul Doctrine). In other words what we have found is that while staying in and pulling out might seem like two options in the same decision they are in fact two separate possible events that must be independently argued for, or more precisely that can be independently argued against. Thus when we find ourselves unable to make a convincing case for either we end up muddling through. In the mean time we deploy any old argument, national security, education, Pakistani stability, women's rights, Iran, until at some point in the future, when it feels like the right time, we can make a convincing argument to ourselves to justify leaving.

When we leave finally leave Afghanistan i suspect that the war will not be over. The war will in fact go on but with the key distinction that only Afghans, and maybe the odd aid worker, are being killed. As the Afghan government continues to fight the Taliban we will begin to see the war as just another global conflict - terrible and tragic yes, but also contained and manageable, something that does not demand that it is addressed directly (as our intimate involvement does now). What follows from that is impossible for me, with my limited knowledge, to predict - but what is certain is that we will not really care. The issue of Afghanistan in popular thought will simply be finished without a conclusion to the real questions ever being reached - hence we will learn nothing.

Why Should We Want Srong Individuals?

I posted yesterday about how pathetic we seem to feel individuals are that they need such optimal conditions to bloom. Of course the biggest underlying assumption was that we should feel that strong individualism is something that we want to preserve. Then I remembered something I had written about this before, something about Alighiero Boetti. Boetti was part of the artistic avant-garde movement that emerged during 1960s radicalism in Italy. If he was right then I was wrong to worry about the sheepishness of modern individualism - it might actually be a good thing.

Boetti felt that self-expression, far from being in opposition to capitalism, was actually driving it forward by its obsession with creation. My personal favourite way of thinking about his argument is by looking at ‘the American dream’ – and it’s relevant to Boetti because his work really starts to get going from the time when it was turning a little sour in the mid to late 1960s. The dream is a lifestyle full of individualism, which for lack of a better definition right now means a life of free choices from as wide a range as possible. Your Job, your relationships, where you live, how you live and ultimately (perhaps a little grandiose) the kind of person you want to be are all theoretically, but also importantly under law, down to Individuals. The American dream is also one full of objects. Left off that last list are your choice of house, car, furniture, clothes, pet, TV, newspaper and all the other half-utilitarian half-symbolic fixtures of a modern life are all down to yours truly.

Radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s is defined by the emphatic rejection of the latter list. Their idea, rarely significantly changed since then, is that any objects bought and sold in the market are not in fact about the individual needs and desires of those who buy them but are actually about the profit of the few who sell them. Capitalism, on this view, is in fact held up by the ideological domination of politics, education, work and family relationships and ultimately the psychological life of citizens. One slogan of the New Left at that time that I think expresses this nicely, ‘There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed’. That really is another story (a totally fascinating one) but the point is that Boetti went much further.

The real problem, so he thought, lay in the requirement, both social and psychological, to choose anything at all. This is because in the self expression that comes from those choices we are holding ourselves and others up to unrealistic standards of the degree of control and insight in our creations. In other words we believe that the world really can be shaped by the plans of inspired individuals. The upshot of this is that not only do the objects that were previously thought to free us become grotesque limitations, as the new left thought, but so do our attempts to control and shape our own lives. Living your life to some kind of narrative, to have a plan, to ‘know what you want from life’ is in fact a prison.

I’m perfectly willing to admit that I have no idea how to live a life like that, even if I wanted to, and it was perhaps for that reason that Boetti was a conceptual artist and not a philosopher. A major tool of his experiments was chance and randomness. He would send letters to his friends with deliberately wrong addresses using random combinations of stamps which would circle the postal system and occasionally return- at which point he would exhibit them. Even stranger though was where he eventually found a society that he thought expressed his thesis best – Afghanistan. He set up a Hotel there in 1971.

Afghanistan was a country free of created objects...

"Afghan homes, for example, are empty: no furniture therefore no objects commonly placed on furniture. There are only a few carpets and mattresses on which people lie down, drink, smoke and eat. I also like the fact that Afghans wear the same clothes at day and at night. Nothing has been added to the landscape. Rocks are moved and used to build cube houses. The resistance with which Afghans oppose our civilisation has always amazed me." - Alighiero Boetti

Leaving aside that the situation he found was at least in part due to simply poverty, the idea that something about the Afghan way of life is intrinsically resistant to grand inspired political narratives and large scale transformative schemes, for the same reason as their rejection of conventional object creation, certainly puts a new spin on the ‘progress’ we are attempting to bring to that country now.

At any rate Afghanistan had a hand in the creation of his series of works called ‘Mappa’. Mappa were a series of embroidered maps of the world. The landmass of each country was covered by that countries current flag. The significance of this was that although he commissioned the work all of its features were, in actuality, totally beyond his control. The work was carried out by multiple afghan craftswomen and the design was down in essence to the geopolitics that formed the shape and colour (because of the flags) of the landmasses (which in turn are a feature of geology).

"For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." - Alighiero e Boetti, 1974