Maybe Elisabeth Bumiller Forgot To Insert "BC" When She Dated Afghanistan's Golden Age

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. It also inspired my little David Bowie clip below. 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.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders – but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren't hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus' counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan-- where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable-- but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said last week there were 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the "training camps" they want there-- but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

...Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument-- and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president-- Karzai, or his opponents-- will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa'ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact, in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses-- without their achieving anything of note!" These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa'ida recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt America". They walked right into his trap.

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.'”

Tehran was the Paris of that part of the world. (Saigon was the Paris of Indochina; Beirut the Paris of the Middle East... and then there's Paris, Texas.) Kabul was less of a hellhole than it is now, but the only thing it had to do with Paris is that if any of the wealthy feudal families who owned all the land wanted to get a daughter educated, theyt'd send them off to Paris to study.

Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation, but one that built national roads, stood up an army and defended its borders. As a monarchy and then a constitutional monarchy, there was relative stability and by the 1960s a brief era of modernity and democratic reform. Afghan women not only attended Kabul University, they did so in miniskirts. Visitors-- tourists, hippies, Indians, Pakistanis, adventurers-- were stunned by the beauty of the city’s gardens and the snow-capped mountains that surround the capital.

“I lived in Afghanistan when it was very governable, from 1964 to 1974,” said Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who met recently in Kabul with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. Mr. Gouttierre, who spent his decade in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbright scholar and the national basketball team’s coach, said, “I’ve always thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

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.

Bumiller then goes on to give free rein to neocon extremist Zalmay Khalilzad, who-- surprise!-- makes the case for... escalation. He, and her, neglect to mention that the only time in contemporary Afghan when women were afforded any degree of Western-style dignity and independence (the Afs, from the context of their culture, look at it differently, of course) was when the Russians were running the show in the 80s and women were constitutionally guaranteed equality. Could she find anyone with an even more neocon perspective than Khalilzad. Maybe she called the American Enterprise Institute or the RNC (they have separate phone numbers) because next up was Freddy Kagan, also, as usual, pushing war and escalation.

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 teeth 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.