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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Mark Steyn
March 3, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The
mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their
exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:
“Die, die, foreigners!”
And foreigners do die. USAF Lieutenant Colonel John Loftis, 44, and Army
Major Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on
the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices
of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a
numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.”
Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.
Some news outlets reported the event as a “security breach.” But what
exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of the
Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building and its
secure room, and “liaising” with his U.S. advisers and “mentors” was
part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the
locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by
Westerners, and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest
opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual that the Pentagon,
as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term for it: “green-on-
blue incidents,” in which a uniformed Afghan turns his gun on his Western
“allies.”
So we have a convenient label for what’s happening; what we don’t have is
a strategy to stop it — other than more money, more “hearts and minds”
for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders of the
bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, an Oprahfied heap of drivel extensively
exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional Washington insists on
sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound officer class.
Don’t fancy the tea? A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently
stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine in
the coffee. As Navy Captain John Kirby explained, “We don’t know if it was
deliberate or something in the cleaning process.”
Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of
expeditionary forces over the centuries: “Afghanistan. It’s something in
the cleaning process.”
In the last couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations
visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for
Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-
West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy
Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the
full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the
duplicitous warlords, drug barons, and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan’s
ruling class. The visiting Western dignitary is cautiously shuttled through
outer and inner perimeters, and reminded that even here there are areas he
would be ill-advised to venture unaccompanied, and tries to banish memories
of his first tour all those years ago when aides still twittered
optimistically about the possibility of a photo op at a girls’ schoolroom
in Jalalabad or an Internet start-up in Kabul.
The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago.
It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be
any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks
after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were
never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a
picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe
bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on September 10, 2001. We
came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing
behind.
They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs — the vast
impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pashtun mind
resides. Someone accidentally burned a Koran your pals had already defaced
with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United
States issues a groveling and characteristically clueless apology for it?
Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you
and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are
the Afghans who know us best. To the upcountry village headmen, the fellows
descending from the skies in full body armor are as alien as the space
invaders were to Americans in the film Independence Day.
The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was
brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call in
unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the world for
decades. But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad, aimless,
bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed. The United
States is an historical anomaly: the non-imperial superpower. Colonialism is
not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it, and in other ways
, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators and opportunists, it
does not. But even nations of an unimperialist bent have roused themselves
to great transformative “cleaning processes” within living memory: The
Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren wrote this week that he had “conferred the
benefit of the doubt” on “the grand bureaucratic project of ‘nation
building’ . . . predicated on post-War successes in Germany and Japan.”
It wasn’t that long ago, was it? Except that, as Warren says, the times are
“so utterly changed.” It seems certain that, waging World War Two today,
the RAF would not carpet-bomb Dresden, and the U.S. would not nuke Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. And, lacking the will to inflict massive, total defeat, would
we also lack the will to inflict that top-to-toe “cleaning process”?
Ah, well. Kabul is not Berlin or Tokyo. As long as wily mischief-makers are
not using it as a base for global mayhem, who cares? To modify Bismarck, the
Hindu Kush is not worth the bones of a single Pennsylvanian grenadier, or
“training officer.” Afghanistan is about Afghanistan — if you’re Afghan
or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European,
Afghanistan is about America. And too much about the Afghan campaign is too
emblematic. As much as any bailed-out corporation, the U.S. is “too big to
fail”: In Afghanistan as in the stimulus, it was money no object. The
combined Western military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that
benighted land’s GDP. We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most
advanced technology known to man; we have everything except strategic
purpose.
That “crusader fort” image has a broader symbolism. The post-American
world is arising before our eyes. According to the IMF, China will become
the dominant economic power by 2016. Putin is on course to return to the
Kremlin corner office. In Tehran, the mullahs nuclearize with impunity. New
spheres of influence are being established in North Africa, in Central
Europe, in the once reliably “American lake” of the Pacific. Can America
itself be a crusader fort? A fortress secure behind the interminable
checkpoints of Code Orange TSA bureaucratic torpor while beyond the moat the
mob jeers “Die, die, foreigners”? Or in the end will it prove as
effortlessly penetrable as the “secure room” of the Afghan Interior
Ministry?
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America:
Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn |
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