(no subject)
Excerpts from the chapter "@afghangov.org" in the book The Places in Between by Rory Stewart:
"Most of the (foreign) policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them...to speak of a people 'who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government.'
But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcase?
Hazara such as Ali hated the idea of centralized government because they associated it with the subjugation by other ethnic groups and suffering under the Taliban.
Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas.
...The head of a major food agency added privately, "Villagers are not interested in human rights. They are like poor people all over the world. All they think about is where their next meal is coming from."
The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went much deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about his next meal...If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan."
Now, that's the problem in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and similar nations around the world. (My dad may say, that's because Muslims are in all those nations, but he and many other judgmental people fail to recognize that every culture has had these troubles. Some have already sorted this out, and others are still have them.)
Here's the reason for that problem from the same section of the same book written by the same fellow:
"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated a fiscal revenue because if they didn't, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.
Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan."
You read all that in a lj post? You're brave, but you're probably in want of a proposed solution. Well, I don't dare toss out a solution for post-invasion areas such as Afganistan and Iraq after ranting about know-it-alls because I haven't really followed post-invasion strategies, but I've paid a lot of attention to and studied how our government's dealt with foreign threats. Based on what I've learned, in the future, when threatened by a group such as Al-Qaeda, we ought to thoroughly eliminate them ("forgiving" them would just anger many Americans and allow the said group to continue growing) with localized, high-efficiency strikes (sounds like politik talk don't?) and get the hell out of there. Let the people war amongst themselves! Let them mass-murder each other! Conditions won't change until the people care to change them. There's no way we can "reform" an entire country without large amounts of resources and, as Mr. Stewart pointed out, a lifetime of work. Iraq and Afghanistan are going to need them both, but we handled Somalia well.
We had nothing directly to do with the United Islamic Courts' elimination, but we took advantage of the chaos to eliminate some terrorist suspects on the run with minimal impact.
"Most of the (foreign) policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them...to speak of a people 'who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government.'
But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcase?
Hazara such as Ali hated the idea of centralized government because they associated it with the subjugation by other ethnic groups and suffering under the Taliban.
Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas.
...The head of a major food agency added privately, "Villagers are not interested in human rights. They are like poor people all over the world. All they think about is where their next meal is coming from."
The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went much deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about his next meal...If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan."
Now, that's the problem in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and similar nations around the world. (My dad may say, that's because Muslims are in all those nations, but he and many other judgmental people fail to recognize that every culture has had these troubles. Some have already sorted this out, and others are still have them.)
Here's the reason for that problem from the same section of the same book written by the same fellow:
"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated a fiscal revenue because if they didn't, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.
Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan."
You read all that in a lj post? You're brave, but you're probably in want of a proposed solution. Well, I don't dare toss out a solution for post-invasion areas such as Afganistan and Iraq after ranting about know-it-alls because I haven't really followed post-invasion strategies, but I've paid a lot of attention to and studied how our government's dealt with foreign threats. Based on what I've learned, in the future, when threatened by a group such as Al-Qaeda, we ought to thoroughly eliminate them ("forgiving" them would just anger many Americans and allow the said group to continue growing) with localized, high-efficiency strikes (sounds like politik talk don't?) and get the hell out of there. Let the people war amongst themselves! Let them mass-murder each other! Conditions won't change until the people care to change them. There's no way we can "reform" an entire country without large amounts of resources and, as Mr. Stewart pointed out, a lifetime of work. Iraq and Afghanistan are going to need them both, but we handled Somalia well.
We had nothing directly to do with the United Islamic Courts' elimination, but we took advantage of the chaos to eliminate some terrorist suspects on the run with minimal impact.