RSS Feed MenuIf anything indicates the need for a civilized presence in Afghanistan, it’s the recent slaughter of 10 aid workers by the Taliban.
Of course, there will be those who will use the atrocity to bolster the theme that foreigners should leave the country immediately – if not sooner.
An out of sight, out of mind sort of thing.
In their way, the Taliban represent a human capacity for evil.
Their excuse – as if they need an excuse – for killing aid volunteers (six Americans, two Afghans, a German and a Brit), is that they were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Nonsense, but apostasy – the rejection of the Islamic faith – is seen by some radical Muslim sects as justification for killing. Other interpretations decree that apostates should be given three days to repent and re-convert to Islam – or be killed.
Still other factions of Islam say that converting is no crime, unless the person attacks his former faith. And so the argument goes, with nothing in the Koran that explicitly demands death for apostasy.
Muhammad is supposed to have decreed that the choice for infidels should be converting to Islam, or paying a tribute, or being put to death. In any case, the Taliban claiming they butchered the aid workers because they were proselytizing for Christianity is a lie, and perhaps an attempt to mitigate their barbarism.
The aid workers were all adults who had made a conscious decision to help their fellow humans. Their leader was Tom Little, an optometrist who’d lived more than 30 years in Afghanistan with his family, even through the Soviet occupation, and the reign of war lords. His sole concern was treating eye diseases, which are rampant in that part of the world.
One of the victims was a dentist who gave up his practice in Colorado to help bring dental care to children. Another was a nutritionist, working to improve the diets of impoverished and malnourished people. One was a nurse. All were humanitarians in the most positive sense of the word – not religious zealots, not hungering to be martyrs, but individuals seeking only to better the lives of people who have very little.
Perhaps their example of goodness and generosity is what provoked the Taliban. Then again, maybe the Taliban tasted blood, in the sense that the Western world is ready to abandon Afghanistan to extremists.
Picking on aid workers specifically is a bit mindful of Algeria in the last days of French rule, when terrorists of the FLN targeted specific groups of Frenchmen in Algiers and Oran – assassinating druggists one day, postal workers another day, bus drivers after that, shop owners in their turn. Every day a different economic group for a bullet fired into the head from an alley.
The war came to Afghanistan because al-Qaeda was centered there before, during and after 9/11. At the time the world didn’t fully realize how cruel and demented the Taliban was. We know now, and for our soldiers to be withdrawn from that country, leaving the people at the mercy of the resurgent Taliban, would make us complicit in advancing evil.
One hopes the Afghan National Army and police can be trained up to a standard that will protect the people from the Taliban in the future.
Otherwise, future massacres of good people seem inevitable.
Oldskool // Aug 11, 2010 at 12:29 pm
“future massacres of good people seem inevitable”
Naturally, whether it’s next week or one-hundred-thousand years from now, we’ll keep finding ways to kill each other. The Taliban are a criminal gang like hundred of others around the world and we’ll never kill them all. That’s not much of a reason to stay there though. A better reason would be to stabilize the region… and odds aren’t much better for that outcome.
vidoqo // Aug 11, 2010 at 12:33 pm
“If anything indicates the need for a civilized presence in Afghanistan, it’s the recent slaughter of 10 aid workers by the Taliban.”
That’s not indicated at all.
First, “by civilized presence” surely you’re speaking of our troops, for whom we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention putting their lives at risk, and it is not at all clear whether they are now or will ever be a “civilizing presence” to that wretched and chaotic region.
Second, if we’re going to start arguing that any country in which horrendous abuses of human life are occurring ought to be invaded at great expense, the murder of 10 aid workers hardly puts Afghanistan at the top of the list.
If the question is “should Afghanistan not be the way it is?”, the answer is obviously “no.” But reality doesn’t care what you or I think. Thus we are forced to make rational decisions about what we should do based upon what we can do. Whether fighting the Taliban might result in a justifiable diminution of terrorist safe-havens is one argument. But humanitarianism is quite another. There are many areas of the world in which we can spend much less money and alleviate much more suffering.
balconesfault // Aug 11, 2010 at 1:06 pm
So the job of the US military is now to fight evil.
Sheesh.
Where’s Captain America when you need him? Or Ironman?
DeepSouthPopulist // Aug 11, 2010 at 1:24 pm
This incident is more evidence in favor of pulling out as soon as possible.
Among other things, we know from Wikileaks that the Pakistanis are working with the Taliban, which makes perfect sense given that the various factions and ethnic groups along the Afghan/Paki border share a common ethnic identity, culture and religion.
Members of one cultural/ethnic group are naturally going to work with their fellow co-ethnics when they live in close proximity to each other and share a common history. An arbitrary border down the middle of Central Asia isn’t going to change that.
The Paki/Afghan border is not like the border between Germany and Poland. The Paki/Afghan border is more like an arbitrary border drawn through the middle of Poland; any such border would almost certainly not stop the Poles from working each other if the other half of Poland was invaded by a foreign aggressor.
So an Afghan nation building is doomed to failure for this reason and many others, and there is about a 0.0% chance that the US military and civilian leadership don’t know that.
This means that people need to consider the possibility that this decade long Afghan war with no end in sight is being waged for reasons other than the official ones given.
forkboy1965 // Aug 11, 2010 at 1:32 pm
By this logic we should invade Mexico to help alleviate the devastation being wrought by drug lords and criminal gangs and the duplicity of local government officials.
The real problem isn’t whether we stay or leave Afghanistan. The problem is Afghanistan in general. Their culture… their social norms and mores…. are not ones we share. What is important to us (and we can bicker about that all day long) is not important to them.
Trying to export democracy and liberty to people who do not culturally admire such ideas is a hopeless endeavor. The best we might do is slaughter tens of thousands of Taliban and al Queda related folks and hope the rest of Afghanistan moves forward in peace.
Not very likely, but what else is left?
dante // Aug 11, 2010 at 2:04 pm
So glad that all of these “fiscal conservatives” are championing us spending trillions of dollars to make the world a better place for all humanity……..
Peter – would you still be championing this if we had to raise taxes to pay for it? Yeah, I doubt it.
Elvis Elvisberg // Aug 11, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Were we omnipotent and omniscient, we should eliminate the Taliban and help the people of Afghanistan to build up their country as they see fit.
But we’re not. We’ve been there almost a decade, and we’ve been unable to remake Afghanistan in our image. Of course we should work to help more people live safely and get access to health care. But occupying the country may be an ineffective, counterproductive, massively inefficient way of doing that.
[edit-- edited this para] Imagine if there were a foreign power occupying large portions of the US– it wouldn’t matter if they were here to hand out candy and sweets, we would hate them and declare candy and sweets to be un-American. That’s what Spain did when Joseph Bonaparte implemented reforms that made people lives better– they rose up against him. It’s not just the inscrutable Oriental who doesn’t like having an occupying force. No one does.
It just might be that occupying Afghanistan is not a smart way to achieve human rights goals.
armstp // Aug 11, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Oldskool,
It can be easily argued that the U.S. has destabilized the Afgh/Pak region and it NOT helping to stabilize it. With our presence there we have drawn many many more radicals into Afgh/Pak. The Pakistani tribual territories seemed to have become far more radicalized and volatile since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. And you could argue that Pakisan itself has become far less stable since the U.S. entered Afghanistan and now with our entry into Pakistan itself.
In addition, with the U.S. on Iran’s doorstep, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it certainly made them far more paranoid and could have pushed them to a much bigger nuclear effort.
So, no I doubt we will ever stabilize the region, but are likely only making things worse.
As far as the Afghan Taliban go, many of them are just local Afghanis who want the U.S. out. They are only a criminal gang in our eyes, but not necessarily by their standards. In fact, many Afghanis prefer the Taliban to the current Kabal or local govts. The Taliban appear to be less corrupt and bring law and order, even if it is brutal law and order.
Frogmorton // Aug 11, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Someone once said that “Tyranny, like hell is not easily concurred”. If we leave now and the cancer that is the Taliban spreads into Pakistan the stakes rise considerably. If we don’t have the stomach for the present fight what makes us think the coming battle will be a walk in the park. Seeing the towers collapse was a life altering moment for my generation, watching Time Square vaporize in instant will have no less an impact on our children’s. The one thing I agree with most of you on is this battle should not be the responsibility of the US, Canadian or any other NATO member nation’s taxpayers. If the UN was anything more than a stimulus program for Manhattan Prostitutes (no pun intended) they would police the world as per their mandate.
armstp // Aug 11, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Frogmorton,
What makes you think that if the “Taliban spreads to Pakistan the stakes rise considerably”??? Sure there already is the Pakistani Taliban, but they are really no threat. And it can be argued that the further Talibanization of the Pakistan frontier provinces was because of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan to start with.
This is a BS neocon talking point that we need to be in Afghanistan otherwise Pakistan is at threat to falling. Complete BS.
First of all, by all recent public option polls in Pakistan there is about zero public support for the Taliban and the radicals among the Pakistani people themselves. Most of the Taliban are of a completely different ethnic make-up to the majority of the Pakistani. So the only way the Taliban could take over Pakistan is militarily, they would have to fight against the Pakistan people and its military.
Second, the Pakistani military is a modern military with nearly 700,000 troops, modern tanks and a modern airforce. The remain strong and face off against India every day. There is no way several 10,000s (if that) of AK-47 wielding Taliban would even have a chance to take over Pakistan or pose a serious threat to Pakistan. You just have to look at the Pakistani military’s recent success of pushing the Taliban out of Swat Valley in April of this year. They did it in less than one week with very little effort.
In fact, I would go a step further that it is far from certain that the Taliban would even be able to take-over or retake Afghanistan itself if the U.S. left. First, it took the Taliban more than 10 years of fighting for them to partially take-over the country. They never took over the north. To think that it would be a given that they would march right into Kabal right after a U.S. exits is BS. I would argue that the Northern Alliance and other have gotten considerably stronger over the last 8 years and they could more than hold their own against the Taliban. In addition, the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces in the country, including the Afghan army, would still have the world’s largest airforce, the U.S. airforce. The U.S. airforce was pretty much able to defeat the Taliban in a few weeks the first time around. It is one thing for the Taliban to undertake a hit and run guerrila war, where they come out primarily at night time, but to actually take the country and hold it with frontlines is a completely different matter.
It is far from a given that the Taliban would easily be able to take back Afghanistan if the U.S. left and certainly they would have no hope posing a threat or taking over Pakistan. You are just using the typical parnoid “fear” talking points of the neocons.
Frogmorton // Aug 11, 2010 at 4:45 pm
You may indeed be right but I don’t recall saying they would take over Pakistan but I do fear the destabilizing effect they will have in the region. Once the US led NATO alliance pulls out the Taliban will be able to boast that they defeated first the Soviet empire and now NATO. There are those within Pakistan, including many in the military who will embrace them as concurring heroes. Furthermore if you believe a public opinion poll from Pakistan I have an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico I’ll sell ya real cheap.
CentristNYer // Aug 11, 2010 at 4:59 pm
I think we can all agree that the price of leaving Afghanistan is high. But unfortunately, it may be even higher to stay. I fully supported the war initially and still believe that our mission was noble. But at a certain point the calculation changed. It’s a nation that seems impervious to modernity and we’re being undermined by our allies in the region. I think another strategy that doesn’t involve tens of thousands of boots on the ground needs to be employed. No matter how much it pains us as Americans to see such misery inflicted on other peoples, we must accept that we cannot correct every ill in the world.
Chris // Aug 11, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Side issue:
What does Worthington mean by “we”? What has Canada’s role been? 2300 troops and a 1B commitment over 10 years?
Hardly the stuff that allows you to start writing columns titled “why WE are in Afghanistan”.
LFC // Aug 11, 2010 at 6:12 pm
OK, so using Peter’s logic, he believes we should pull out of Afghanistan right away and head into Africa, right? After all, regional conflicts there have taken MANY more lives and MANY more atrocities have been perpetrated.
abk1985 // Aug 11, 2010 at 10:59 pm
“Why are we in Afghanistan?”
Is this a trick question? Oh, I get it …..
“To get to the other side.”
balconesfault // Aug 12, 2010 at 11:28 am
Frogmorton: Once the US led NATO alliance pulls out the Taliban will be able to boast that they defeated first the Soviet empire and now NATO.
abk1985: “To get to the other side.”
I think you’ve got it.
The estimates are that we’re spending $1 million a year for every soldier we keep in Afghanistan.
So consider the big arguments over the spending bill yesterday. $26 billion, which will help 160,000 teachers and 150,000 police and public service workers keep their jobs.
The same sum spent when we increase our deployment to Afghanistan by 26,000 troops.
When Obama took office, there were 38,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Now there are over 100,000.
busboy33 // Aug 12, 2010 at 5:32 pm
@abk:
Dammit, that was nice. A sincere golfclap for you.
Seriously, is this a trick question? Why are we in Afganistan? Well, I kind of thought we went in to get OBL and AlQ. Now that they aren’t there anymore, I thought we were there because we didn’t want to just walk out empty handed.
Is there really some other reason? To help troubled people? Are you f***ing kidding me?
“In their way, the Taliban represent a human capacity for evil.”
What is it about chickenhawk neocons that requires them to deal with symbolism instead of actual reality? The Taliban does not “represent the human capacity for evil” — they are evil people. That’s it. This isn’t a struggle against the dark heart of humanity. Its a fight against some bastards. This is not unusual.
What makes me think Worthington has a complete 1st edition “Left Behind” collection in his office?