Ten Years After

Ten years after the U.S. began its occupation/liberation of Afghanistan, we still haven’t figured out how to relate to a nation of poppy-growing Muslim fundamentalists. It might seem “obvious” to some that burning Korans is not a good idea when you’re trying to teach Muslims how enlightened you are and how much you respect their religious traditions, but when all is said and done—and a great deal has been said, if not done—an army’s job is to kill people, not to endow quasi-medieval Muslim tribesmen with Enlightenment sensibilities that are entirely alien to the everyday fabric of their lives. It’s no wonder that we haven’t been very good at it.

The New York Times politely sums up the current situation as follows: “Despite an American-led training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars, the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously unreliable soldiers and police officers. The distrust has only deepened as a pattern of attacks by Afghan security forces on American and NATO service members, beginning years ago, has drastically worsened over the past few days. A grenade attack on Sunday, apparently by a protester, wounded at least six American soldiers.”

And so, since our occupation has been a tale told by highly educated bureaucrats afraid to lose face (an “oriental” obsession that seems to have migrated westwards while we weren’t looking), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, there is a good chance that our departure will be delayed, allowing for another year or two of additional nothing, full of additional sound and fury, zero upon zero, purchased at a cost of billions and billions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives. American policy in Afghanistan: generating zeros at an alarming rate.