WORLD NOVEMBER 19, 2011
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“The lion doesn’t like it if a foreigner intrudes into his house. The lion doesn’t like it if a stranger enters his house. The lion doesn’t want his children to be taken away by someone else in the night, the lion won’t let it happen.” Thus spoke Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday to the loya jirga, his country’s traditional council of elders and notables. He warmed up to the theme and the image. “They should not interfere in the lion’s house: just guard the four sides of the forest. They are training our police. Their assistance is good for Afghanistan.”
Dependence and hucksterism have rarely spoken with such confidence. The “they” in this astounding piece of oratory are of course the American backers of this most brazen of “allies” and clients. American and NATO forces bleed in that hopeless land, Al Qaeda fighters who pulled our soldiers into the Hindu Kush are mostly gone by now. Yemen, with a treacherous coastline and a proximity to the oil wealth of the Arabian Peninsula, is a more hospitable place for the brigades of terror. There is nothing of value in Afghanistan, America’s longest war has lost the rationale it had a decade ago, no American fortune hunters with shovels and pickaxes are on their way in search of gold in the bleak Afghan hills. Yet Karzai, a brazen and ungrateful client, speaks with unbounded confidence. He offers us the most peculiar of gifts—the right to stay on indefinitely, shore up his regime, and pour our scarce treasure for his family and retainers. That Afghan lion doesn’t make its own kills.
American policy has emboldened Karzai. Great wealth came to his impoverished country, and the opportunities for banditry have fed into a culture of dependence and corruption. Truth be known, neither the Karzai regime, nor the Taliban warlords, want the Americans out of Afghanistan. The treasure we pour into that country sustains the ruling cabal and the Taliban alike. We are the straight man at the bazaar, the stranger fleeced by the locals. The protection money we pay for our convoys wends its way into the pockets of the Taliban. Long ago, Afghan society had lost the ability to provide for its own people: There is no economic life to speak of, the pillars are the drug trade and the foreign handouts. It is in the interest of the Afghans that their country be seen as a dangerous land. Were we to head for the exits, the Afghans are certain to block our way with reminders that Al Qaeda is there, or could make a quick return. This is an odd kind of nationalism, one that wants to keep a foreign military presence—and deride it at the same time.
Our predicament in Afghanistan is self-inflicted. We drove up the strategic rent of Afghan real estate. President George W. Bush flattered and indulged Karzai aplenty; the Obama administration’s surge in Afghanistan added to the Afghan president’s insolence. Afghanistan became the good war of necessity, a rebuke to that bad war of choice in Iraq. Iraq had been the “stupid” war, so Afghanistan must be, by default, the “smart” war. We could never discipline Karzai, nor ask of him the minimum of public decorum. He could belittle our sacrifices and get away with it. “They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done. We are grateful to the Iranians for this,” Karzai said last year in a typically audacious way. The big money came from the Western democracies; Iran was next door and could buy influence with a small amount of baksheesh. After all, the Iranians have bazaars of their own and they can price things at or near what they are worth. Bags of cash, the reports from Afghanistan confirm, are hauled out of Kabul to Dubai, and there are eight flights a day to the casino and tax haven that Dubai has become.
So we are to remain on that Kabul hook. We are to do so without a serious debate, and our electoral calendar being what it is, we are not to take up the question and the costs of Afghanistan in the run-up to our presidential contest. Karzai will be what he has been—unrepentant and unreformed. A cable from Kabul, in 2009, by then U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry remains unchallenged in the truth it spoke about the Afghan burden—and Hamid Karzai. “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner,” Ambassador Eikenberry wrote. “He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.”
Say what you will about Hamid Karzai, the man knows what he wants. The ways of Karzai are of course no mystery to our leaders. In Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, the president asks, and answers, the central question: “Why should Karzai change?” Why indeed? Mr. Obama laid out the consequences. The Afghan ruler had no incentives for reform, and the “U.S. would be stuck tending to the country for him.”
Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
13 comments
Some people and some places are cursed. Put them together and you have a combo guaranteed to bring down empires. Instead of "Go ask Alice," try "Go ask Breznev."
- skahn
November 19, 2011 at 12:13am
Hamid Karzai is the hereditary tribal leader of the Popalzai Durrani Pashtuns, which makes him the direct male descendant of Afghanistan's founding father...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Durrani Erase the Durand Line, create Pashtunistan (google the map), and leave them alone. The Khyber Pass stopped being the pathway of empire to the diamond "Mines of Golkonda" since before the Anglo-Second Afghan War. One would think Americans had finally figured out how to NOT get suckered after P.T. Barnum.
- K2K
November 19, 2011 at 1:09am
The argument makes sense as to why we should get out and the contentions of those that claim we should stay make sense too. I guess we should return to the Bush Doctrine to solve problems. You imagine the facts that are important to what you want to do; trumpet them to the public through leaked and unleaked false statements; warn of a mushroom cloud, and then proceed. When someone points this out, there will always be someone else to talk over them while they speak and drown out any conclusions to be drawn. Of course, it is harder to get out of Afghanistan than it is to scare people into believing that we should stay.
- Nusholtz
November 19, 2011 at 7:35am
My understanding of Obama's plan is to withdraw the roughly 33,000 surge troops but leave roughly 68,000 troops until 2014 when combat responsibilities are turned over to the Afghans. Is Ajami's complaint that we don't withdraw all the troops as soon as possible, is it that 2014 will come and go and our troops will most likely remain, or is it that we should go ahead and take out Karzai as we took out OBL? I have read this essay twice and cannot say what Ajami wants us to do; he lays the blame solely on Karzai as though the Afghans bear no responsibility for the flim flam. Al Qaida has been degraded to the point of almost irrelevance thanks to the successful drone war conducted with the help of the Pakistanis and OBL's death, but the raid that took out OBL has offended the Pakistanis and most likely ended help from the Pakistanis in Afghanistan. Mr. Ajami, what should we do now?
- rayward
November 19, 2011 at 8:53am
Man, there's the sneering imperial master putting the wogs in their place. And the fact that he's named Fouad Ajami only makes the irony more delicious.
- SMacEachern2
November 19, 2011 at 11:08am
Karzai is an asset. He proves we're not pursuing a colonial strategy, at least not competently. We need a place to keep our combat edge. Afghanistan is perfect. Fuck hearts and minds. We can use it to practice war in perpetuity at relatively little cost. Pashtunistan is more of a reality than maps, and should be split off from Pakistan in concert with an Indian push in the Punjab with the ultimate goal of re-integrating that abortion that survived with India, a real country.
- Robert Powell
November 19, 2011 at 11:35am
"So we are to remain on that Kabul hook. We are to do so without a serious debate, and our electoral calendar being what it is, we are not to take up the question and the costs of Afghanistan in the run-up to our presidential contest." It really does come down in the end to our debased domestic politics. I voted for Obama in 2008 (and will probably vote for him again), but we shouldn't forget that the price for his election, which we will likely be paying long into the future, was a willingness to go the whole hog in Afghanistan. Obama and his handlers knew that he could never prevail against a war hero like McCain without his cynical good war/bad war dichotomy. Sad to say, it will probably take an unprincipled technocrat like Romney (or pretty much any Republican -- their patriotism is never in question unless they speak Mandarin Chinese) to pull us out of that morass.
- lfeinber@email.unc.edu
November 19, 2011 at 5:42pm
Is this the same Fouad Ajami who told us that invading American troops would be greeted with "sweets and flowers" in Iraq, thus helping to distract our attention and manpower from Afghanistan when we might have made more of a difference there? No doubt, Karzai leaves a tremendous amount to be desired. But I'll take my cues on what to do in Afghanistan (not that Ajami takes his superficial analysis that far) from other experts...just about any other experts.
- Thunderroad
November 20, 2011 at 2:30am
In fact Thunderroad, we WERE greeted with flowers in Iraq. Then Bush ignored what General Tony Zinni called "ten years of work" in the planning for a post-Saddam Iraq by State and Central Command, put Rumsfeld and the morons of the Provisional Authority in the driver's seat, and essentially looked the other way while the country imploded. Ajami wasn't responsible for that. ljach has it right. The basic fallacy here was the Democrats' "good war/bad war" talking points that O either naievely believed or cynically pretended to. Once we toppled the Taliban and blew the chance to kill OBL, we never had any particularly important interests in Afghanistan. Iraq was, is, and will remain for some time to come an area of vital national interests. The replacement of the excellent Ryan Crocker with the appallingly inappropriate Christopher Hill, and the associated hands-off approach to the Iraqi elections and the SOFA negotiations is likely to haunt us considerably more than whatever happens in Afghanistan.
- Robert Powell
November 20, 2011 at 6:24am
Not just "then." Already on the entry ramp to the Iraq invasion the administration had indicated it wanted NO participation by the State Dept group that had developed extensive plans for what would be needed in the aftermath assuming the collapse or surrender of the Iraqi military and the de facto takeover of Iraq by the U.S. It wasn't just that they were ignored, they were formally barred from attending the planning meetings.
- ironyroad
November 20, 2011 at 5:48pm
RP: all good points. I forgot to recommend that a wall be built to keep Pashtunistan pristine, forever untainted by foreigners. Have you seen HBO's "Generation Kill", the true story of First Marine Recon into Iraq, with the Rolling Stone reporter embed? Mostly, the Iraqis were begging for water and valium. Well, back to my fantasy that Ryan Crocker is our next SecState. If he survives Kabul. About Iraq, circa 2011. Perhaps Joe Biden will get his wish without having been the wizard behind the curtain. Free Kurdistan, Sunni Iraq annexing itself to Saudi Arabia, and the Arab and Persian Shi'a kill each other until Moqtada al-Sadr reveals he really is the Twelth Imam, but is addicted to Bollywood dvds.
- K2K
November 20, 2011 at 6:57pm
There's nothing in the Holy Koran that prohibits Bollywood movies. More likely to be a problem for Moqtada is erosion of his base in Sadr City by mainstream parties, and his eventual assassination by one or more of them. I don't think the Biden plan is going to play out. Too much at stake in Baghdad. And I'm sure neither Sunni Iraqis nor Saudis would welcome, or be able to manage, an Anschluss. How can you merge two imaginary countries? More likely Iraq absorbs Jordan.
- Robert Powell
November 21, 2011 at 2:37pm
RP: I assume you knew I was joking about Moqtada Al-Sadr and Bollywood. The actual Muslim distaste of Bollywood movies is that they are so Hindu :) Moqtada al-Sadr is the grand-nephew of Musa al-Sadr, allegedly murdered by Qaddhafi, still considered by many Shi'a to be the 12th Imam. As to Iraqi Sunni's and Saudi Arabia? Look at the Ralph Peters map. Sunni Iraq shares a much longer border with Saudi Arabia, the tribes are trans-border, the Saudis have oil and not enough natives to man their growing military. One of the Sunni provinces just passed a non-binding resolution calling for secession. Baghdad is divided by the Tigris river, so easy enough to split apart. Jordan is majority palestinian, and no one wants them, not even the minority Jordanian Bedouin, Circassians, or Hashemites. Jordan is as imaginary as Iraq - even more so when you consider that the Hashemites were given Trans-Jordan as a consolation prize for relinquishing their hereditary status as the Sharifs of Mecca. The British legacy never fails to complicate the present!
- K2K
November 21, 2011 at 6:58pm