America is Only Partially the Blame

Posted by johnhouk on Jul 09, 2009
 John R. Houk
© July 9, 2009

Below is a response to a Facebook buddy Scott Isaacs which I will also post below.

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Scott I got to hand it to you. This article is indeed a great piece of writing. The information is extremely accurate.

However, I observe that your conclusions are slanted Left for placing the total blame on America for the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I do like the Nazi/Taliban metaphor though.

I have some thoughts as to a possible reason America did not step up to be a rebuilder of Afghanistan after the Soviet Communist departure.

Going back to the Nazi-Germany/Imperial-Japan scenario: Note that after those two lost WWII that the Soviet Union was officially one of the allies. The rebuilding of Germany really was only applicable to the Western portion occupied by the American and British forces. The "East Germany" occupied by the Soviet army did not receive comparable reconstruction. Also not at the end of WWII the Americans and Brits basically gave Eastern Europe over to Soviet hegemony as the spoil of war. Eastern Europe did not receive the same reconstruction as Western Europe.

The Soviet Union never declared war on Japan until defeat was imminent.
America looked the other way as the Soviets took control of Sakhalin Island; otherwise the Soviets showed little interest in a defeated Japan. America was free to reconstruct Japan into a democratic society.

I don’t believe there is an exact comparison of the reconstruction of the fallen axis powers to that of Soviet devastated Afghanistan.

Here is another thought.

America’s involvement in aiding Afghani tribal leaders eject the Soviets from Afghanistan probably gave a pretty good idea of the combination of greed from the petty (basically feudal) tribes and the Hanafi influenced Islam in the area. America had relatively left the Vietnam debacle that was the result of supporting a corrupt South Vietnamese government that alienated it citizens rather than inspire them to fight Communism. I would a good analysis of Afghanistan would be a risky political enterprise investing democratic principles in an area committed to either tribal/familial authority or Islam or both.

I agree that one huge failure was not protecting an asset like Massoud. Allowing his assassination was a grave mistake; however there was also no guarantee that Massoud would have developed into an Afghanistan unifier either. The best that could be hoped from Massoud would have been was a tool to keep the Taliban/Al Qaeda at bay. Investing in a full military-political support of Massoud could just as easily have been like supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese government.

My belief is that America made the correct decision in not getting directly involved in a post-Soviet reconstruction of Afghanistan and made a fatal error in not throwing covert military support to Massoud. If Massoud proved himself to be an able leader to offset the popularity that Taliban justice was perceived to be accomplishing.

One other thought about your reference about the Taliban not being corruptible to drug money from opium interests: If that is true it is more so because of the Taliban’s own opium production and less so because of the justice demanded by Hanafi Islamic teachings.

JRH 7/9/09
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The Rise Of The Taliban And The Desperation For Stability

Scott Isaacs
July 5, 2009
Newsvine

The rise of the Taliban was kickstarted by an incident that I have found is little-known among Western observers. At least, in my discussions with those same observers, I had never heard about the event that sparked their takeover of 90% of Afghanistan nor did I know about it myself. It all started with a string of felonies that had gone unpunished.

The story is that the local warlord's minions in the Kandahar area had abducted and repeatedly raped two girls and, they being the local roughnecks, escaped punishment. The aggrieved families approached the one-eyed Mullah Omar, the spiritual impresario of a group called the Taliban. The group's name sprang from the root word "talib," meaning student. The Taliban were dominated by Afghan men that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had driven across the border into Pakistan. While there, refugees adrift from their homeland, they grew up without any roots, save one. They were given the spiritual anchor of Deobandi Islam at thousands of madrassas that Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq had constructed. As boys would age out to around 12 or so, they would enroll in a madrassa and then proceed to get military training and fight the Soviets.

Though it was practical at the time to ignore the Afghan-Pakistan border, Deobandi also teaches that there are no national borders. The only borders are between the Islamic world and the un-Islamic world. It also teaches that every Muslim has a right and responsibility to conduct jihad in the defense of fellow Muslims. Given Deobandi's extremely xenophobic view of non-Muslims which borders on hate and homicidal, it was the perfect education to give young male Afghan refugees before they were sent to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. After the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan, Pakistan pushed the Afghan refugees to go home which meant that these Deobandi-educated "talib" were streaming back into the country by the thousands. It was a few dozen of these students that Mullah Omar collected together and used to raid the place where the abducted girls were being kept, rescue them and lynch the mujahideen commander on a progressively rising tank gun barrel. Thus was the start of their reputation as being fearsome enough to frighten outlaws into good behavior and Afghanistan in 1994 was teeming with outlaws.

The Durrani Pashtuns saw that little bit of ad hoc jurisprudence and, having been marginalized during the fighting against the Soviets and disliking their first significant time on the sidelines of Afghan politics for the better part of two centuries, decided that these Taliban were people they could work with. Pashtun tribal elders, including Hamid Karzai's father, gave their support to the Taliban and, like the Knights Templar before them, the Taliban drove forward against their disorganized foes using the discipline bestowed on them by their rock-solid faith. They captured approximately 90% of the country and they were trying for the last 10% when their plans turned disastrously successful.

The Taliban had forged a close relationship with Osama Bin Laden by September 9, 2001. Bin Laden, the man that had spurred construction of the Tora Bora cave fortress, had had his Saudi citizenship revoked for being treasonous towards the House of Saud and then was ejected from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum in 1996. He fled to a place he knew well: Afghanistan. Bin Laden brought with him a ready retinue of Islamic (Arabs mostly, but there were other nationalities as well) fundamentalists thirsting for a taste of jihad and eager to attain martyrdom. Bin Laden has shown no compunction for martyr-like behavior but he most certainly has a way with attracting those that do. Those of us in the West might term Bin Laden a chickenhawk, but that's neither here nor there. His Brigade 55 were his most hardened warriors, acting as a sort of Special Forces command for the Taliban. So great was their fanaticism that when the United States exhorted Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance and revered "Lion of the Panjshir," to capture some of Bin Laden's men so that they could be interrogated, Massoud lamented that it was nearly impossible for his men to capture anyone from Brigade 55 because whenever members of the unit were cut off and in a position to be taken prisoner they would form a circle and perform a synchronized suicide bombing by simultaneously jerking the pins on their grenades and letting the spoons fly. It was the Taliban's collaboration with Bin Laden that would bring them their greatest triumph and greatest setback in the matter of 72 hours.

On September 9, 2001, two members of Al Qaeda posing as journalists assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud with a bomb. It was concealed in a belt the supposed cameraman wore to haul the batteries for his camera. In hindsight and with supplemental intelligence of what Mullah Omar and Bin Laden hoped to achieve together, it becomes clear how Massoud's assassination was the sound of the starter's pistol on the implementation of 9/11. Bin Laden had stated that all Muslims should look up to and respect the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the name that the Taliban contrived for their little radical kingdom, because it was the one Islamic state that practiced Islam as it was truly meant to be practiced by the Prophet Mohammed. To that end, the Taliban and Al Qaeda ambitiously looked northward past the Amu Darya River to what had been Soviet Central Asia. Now it was a jumble of confused semi-independent states that were still setting their course in a world where Russia no longer ruled them but it did exert a great amount of control over them. They were autocracies that were no longer officially atheist bustling with millions of Muslims that had been under the yoke of outsiders for far too long. It was towards this goal that Massoud's assassination was geared.

Massoud's assassination was to serve two purposes. The first was to break the back of the Northern Alliance once and for all, allowing Talqaeda (what I will refer to the alliance of the Taliban and Al Qaeda as from now on) to swarm over them and have an open road north to spread the jihad to Central Asia. The second was to eliminate the sole option the United States had to fund an anti-Talqaeda coalition. They had lived through this before in the 1980's and 1990's, they knew how America played the game. They used the CIA to back their favorite horse and lobbed cruise missiles at the horse they didn't appreciate. By putting down Massoud, who had been communicating and receiving some, albeit small amounts, of assistance from the United States, Talqaeda concluded that they had left the United States with two options for retaliation in regards to the upcoming September 11 attack: fire cruise missiles or invade. Either way, they had deprived Washington of the fulcrum it would be able to use against them on the ground: Massoud.

Talqaeda was used to cruise missile attacks. In the aftermath of the embassy bombings, President Clinton had fired cruise missiles into Afghanistan to make a retaliatory point. Talqaeda was okay with this because missiles costing $1 million apiece were being used to blow up mud brick huts that had been deserted in anticipation of the attack and would take a few weeks of mixing mud to reassemble. It was an efficient and tidy two-pronged assault on the United States: kill Americans and their collaborators and watch while the United States goes tens of millions of dollars into the negative blowing up dirt shanty houses. 9/11 was sure to be a similar gig. Kill Americans and watch cruise missiles fly in to little effect. What other option did the United States have? An invasion would involve the cooperation of at least one of the following countries: Iran, whose 1979 revolution left little question with regard to how they felt about America... Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan which were all still in the Russian sphere of influence with Russia highly unlikely to acquiesce to an American presence... and Pakistan, who had been supporting Talqaeda with supplies, weapons and actual manpower through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency since the beginning. However, things went awry at 8:46 AM on September 11 in New York City.

In two fundamental miscalculations, Talqaeda concluded first that an attack on American soil would not merit a ground invasion of Afghanistan and, second, that the 9/11 attacks would be roughly as deadly as the embassy bombings or, if they were lucky, a bit worse. It turned out that they were wrong on both accounts. As the day progressed into the evening and Americans shook off the shock of the events, it became clear that Talqaeda had just completed the most horrific attack and caused the greatest loss of life of any single strike on the continental United States in the country's history. Northern Alliance intelligence officers would later tell their CIA counterparts that Mullah Omar was overheard on an intercepted call after the attacks saying that Talqaeda's plans had gone much, much farther than intended. From the other side of the planet it had become urgently clear to Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden that the chances for a cursory retaliatory missile strike or, for that matter, anything short of a full-scale attack had vanished with the more than 3,000 American lives that were taken. In a few hours, the stupid and lazy Americans in Talqaeda's world view had gone from enjoying the "peace dividend" after the collapse of the Soviet Union to a fervent belief that Osama Bin Laden's head should grace the end of a pike with its presence. The world had most decisively changed.

Back at the beginning of the narrative, we were discussing how the Taliban got their start. In an Afghanistan that we had spent more than a billion dollars to reduce below even the most rudimentary definition of civilization in a successful attempt to drive out the Soviet Union, we had spent nearly nothing to rebuild what we had paid so handsomely to destroy. When the Soviet Union walked away, we followed suit and left Afghanistan to the depravities of its neighbors: Pakistan carving out a buffer state and Iran attempting to do the same with India's intelligence apparatus fiddling as Afghanistan burned. It wasn't our problem. Except, it was, we just didn't see it yet. As Afghanistan's chaos turned into an amalgam of Pakistan's scheming to put friendly Islamists on the throne in Kabul and the Afghan people's desperation for law and order, something hostile to America took root. In their yearning for stability, the Afghan people turned to the Taliban. Why? Because the Taliban enforced the (religious) law, they refused to be bought by drug money from Afghanistan's poppy fields and they portrayed themselves as what upright Afghan Muslims ought to be. The rub was that they did all this because of their extreme Hanafi religious-legal beliefs which stated that if an action could lead to sin, it was a sin and sin was punishable by brutality. If a woman showed anything but her eyes, it could lead a man to impure thoughts so the solution was to beat the tar out of a woman showing anything but her eyes with a rod. Their other legal pronouncements proceeded along the same lines of idiocy. Instead of staying to influence an Afghan governmental system that interpreted Islam's tenets as commandments to go forth and protect one's fellow people from abuse we had abdicated the field to the Taliban, a group that believed Islam's commandments were to hate and kill all non-Muslims and, as for the fellow Muslims, if they weren't devout enough beat them, forcibly amputate body parts or lynch them. Still wasn't our problem because, like Eddie Izzard says, if you kill your own people that's one thing. It became our problem when they killed someone else's people... in a dramatic knife twist of irony, it was our people that they killed. This sounds so familiar... it's as if it happened before with calamitous consequences.

Indeed it did. The Weimar Republic was the weak, democratic rump that was left of post-WWI Germany. After WWI, Britain and France busied themselves with taking everything that wasn't nailed down as reparations and the United States did nary a thing to stop them. Germany's economic output was harnessed not to provide for the Germans but to pay off France and Britain. Germans got accustomed to, then sick and tired of, watching their lives being co-opted for the benefit of others. While they lived an existence where they hauled their currency to the market in a wheelbarrow and brought home their goods in their wallet and chaos reigned supreme, they watched the powers that had manipulated them prosper. They came to long for a savior that would bring stability to Germany and, low and behold, they found Hitler. He brought stability and, just like the Taliban, the stability was yoked to seriously cracked ideas about how society should function and whom the state's efforts should be geared towards killing. For Hitler, it was non-Aryans but particularly Jews. For the Taliban, it was non-Muslims but particularly Jews. They both brought with them their archaic social ideals of oppressing women and championing the survival of their own kind to the exclusion of all others. For the Nazis, the Slavs were worthy slaves but others had to die because they were inferior and for the Taliban, dhimmi (Christians and Jews, People of the Book) are worthy as slaves and the infidels have to die because they are inferior. There were pleasant Germans and there are pleasant Muslims... there were no pleasant Nazis and there are no pleasant Talqaeda. The ascendancy of both resulted in shocking attacks causing more than 3,000 American casualties. What the Greatest Generation learned with blood we are relearning now: when you totally destroy a place, it's best to stick around for the rebuilding process to make sure that you're seen as the entity that helped them get their lives back together and not the entity that shattered their dreams, killed their relatives and then walked off with the good silver. Machiavelli knew as much in the 16th century when he wrote about the exercise of power. He wrote "A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair," which says that revenge comes easily to those with nothing to lose. He wrote "If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared," which says that you should either absolutely destroy your enemy or make a friend of him by rebuilding his house on a common foundation thus that if he strikes you he harms himself. Finally, he wrote "Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense; benefits ought to be handed out drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more," which says to utterly destroy your enemy in war and then slowly build him back up under your watchful eye and tutelage in peace. As we did with Germany and Japan, razing them to the ground and slowly rebuilding them as liberal democracies with militaries that can protect themselves but not challenge us and common economic and political goals in life, we must do with Afghanistan: create an ally that is strong when with us and weak when uncoupled from us, thus that they wish of their own accord to be tethered in word and deed to American policy. So it is that with some caginess and guile you can save great effort because a man will readily offer what he thinks he has contrived in his own mind to give and will cling tightly to that which he thinks another wants. It will take a good deal of time, sweat, blood and foreign policy acumen but, at the end of the day, just as the toil to create a friend in Germany has saved untold American lives so too will taking the care to create a friend in Afghanistan.
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 America is Only Partially the Blame
John R. Houk
© July 9, 2009
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The Rise Of The Taliban And The Desperation For Stability
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