Afghanistan, from the Horse's Mouth

Down With Tyranny, who has been there, separates fact from fiction on Afghanistan:

The American media is spewing out an awful lot of misconceptions about Afghanistan. One piece, from last Sunday's New York Times Week in Review, Remembering Afghanistan's Golden Age by Elisabeth Bumiller, particularly stuck in my craw. Johann Hari's piece in today's Independent, The three fallacies that have driven the war in Afghanistan, comes from the world of hard reality, unlike Bumiller's fairy tale. We'll get back to that nonsense in a minute. Let's look at the very dire warning-- that the case for escalating the war is based on premises that turn to dust on inspection-- in the Independent first.

Hari makes the uncomfortable point that Obama, manipulated into a no-win political situation at home (unless, of course, he takes the kind of bold and decisive action he's shown us he abhors), is about to seal his fate as a one-term president and "drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses." Clearly escalation, the most cowardly and politically craven move he could take, is going to be announced as soon as the ridiculous fig leaf of the Jeffersonian democracy implanted in Afghanistan is confirmed in 2 weeks. As we saw on the weekend, McChrystal is doing what blinkered military leaders always do: demanding more troops while preparing to blame his inevitable failure of a stab in the back by politicians unwilling to allow the military win by fighting a war of extermination.

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This is the kind of stuff Americans should be digesting and considering while Obama gets bullied into escalating an unwinnable, tragic war that he knows is a catastrophic mistake in the making. But the Independent is a British daily and, instead, Americans are reading Mother Goose stories in the NY Times by lightweights like Bumiller, who spent 2001 until 2007 with her head stuck up Karl Rove's ass. She claims that "American and Afghan scholars and diplomats say it is worth recalling four decades in the country’s recent history, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when there was a semblance of a national government and Kabul was known as 'the Paris of Central Asia.'”

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I spent a great deal of time on the ground in Afghanistan-- and all over the country, not just in Paris-- starting in 1969 and ending in 1972; I drove there from Europe in a VW van. Bumiller's ignorant and misleading statement that the Afs "built national roads" is typical of her sad brand of journalism and explains why she was voted Worst Campaign Journalist of 2004. The Russians built a national road from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul and the Americans built a road from Herat to Kandahar to Kabul. That was it for national roads and there were no railroads. Before the highways were built you basically could only get into the country with an invading army, which is how it was for the rest of the "nation." I say "nation" in quotes because, outside of Kabul, it wasn't. The people in the rest of the country saw the king as the chief of Kabul who had bigger and better weapons from the hated foreigners and could lord it over the rest of them. As for Gouttierre, I agree with him about one thing: I too have "always thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world.” But if it was governable, it was governable because the king had a monopoly on the deadliest weapons and a fragile network of feudal strongmen in place who tacitly recognized that he handled most of the foreign policy and would give them a share of the foreign aid he could extort for the Soviets and Americans, the Indians and the Pakistanis, and the Europeans do-gooders.

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When I went out into the country from Kabul I drove my van as far as I could and then went by horse. Other than walking, that's all there was. The Af villages I visited had never experienced electricity or indoor plumbing and "backward" doesn't begin to describe the country outside of two or three Kabul neighborhoods and a bit of Herat. I remember seeing the Kabul "River," just a few yards from the royal palace, for the first time. There was a man washing his donkey next to a man brushing his death next to a man defecating next to a man getting his rocks off. The imagine has stuck with me for 40 years. I should add that this isn't the kind of scene you would ever see outside the Paris of whatever.

Bumiller's line about how "Afghan women not only attended Kabul University, they did so in miniskirts" is laughable and reminded me of walking in the middle of "downtown" (another joke) Kabul and seeing two stylish women get out of a chauffeur driven Mercedes IN FULL CHADRI when a couple of mullahs immediately come screaming up to them spitting all over them and forcing them back into the car. I lived with a family way up north and the women never left the compound and when my best friend got married neither his bride nor his mother came to the party. I lived in the family compound for months and wasn't allowed to even see his wife until she was pregnant. Women, outside of the ones in miniskirts at Kabul U., who I must have missed, didn't have enough words in their vocabularies to even think abstractly. One of the women I went to college with was in Ghazni as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching women words so they could THINK in their own language about things beyond the kitchen or the bedroom. As for women in miniskirts, keep in mind that Afghan men when I was there were fond of porn and porn in Afghanistan was a photo of a woman without her face covered up. In Kabul, though no where else, the golden age meant you could buy western picture postcards of women without veils at a kiosk near the "river."

Most Americans recognize Afghanistan as this decade's Vietnam and are smart enough to not want to get tangled up in it. Most members of Congress are confused, befuddled and hoping everything just takes care of itself. Only 32 Democrats voted against Obama's outrageous war supplemental last June. Think about saying thank you to them here.

Read the whole thing.