Category Archives: afghanistan

Thoughts on Militarism on Italy’s Day of the Republic

Come visit Italy...

Italy rarely has national holidays that anyone cares about. Milan My building is pleasantly empty at the moment, with most denizens having gone away for a long weekend. Militarism is rarely on display for secular holidays here, although this year has seen a bit more than usual, with the 150th anniversary of unification. Jasmine Tesanovic, born in Belgrade and educated in Italy, wrote that Italy’s alpini crowding into Turin’s public squares last month reminded her of Serbia’s military and paramilitary crowding into Belgrade in the early 1990s:

These volunteer warriors, loud and bold and claiming to fight for a good cause, resembled the Serbian military and paramilitary which conquered the downtown of Belgrade at the beginning of the Balkan wars.

As she notes, the alpini are in Afghanistan along other NATO troops, and whether that war is a “good cause” is definitely worth questioning, especially in these post-bin Laden days. (It should be remembered that Serbia controversially sent troops as well.)  But as anything other than a general condemnation of militaries in general, her comparison rings hollow.  Militaries of any kind have certain things in common, namely, as the saying goes, rough men (and in the American armed forces, increasingly rough women).  And one could argue, although I wouldn’t too forcefully, that violence in Kosovo was done in the loose name of preventing terrorism, in common with the violence being done in Afghanistan today.

...before it visits you?

But there the comparisons end: the Yugoslav People’s Army amping itself up for conquest in Croatia and Bosnia in the early ’90s is extremely different from a crowd of “mostly aging, tipsy men,” as she characterizes them, out to do what Italians do best: celebrate in public.  More broadly, Milosevic’s wars, opportunistic land-grabs that played on ethnic divide, bear little resemblance to American-led efforts to bring Afghanistan into a broader orbit of nations – however misguided and bungled those efforts may be.   This kind of equivocation obscures the politics by other means that is at the root of warfare — a dangerous gambit.

On the level of the personal and the violence of war, this week the Washington Post ran a piece based on interviews with three former Navy SEALs who tried to sketch a portrait of the man who shot bin Laden.  The piece is more along the lines of patriotic entertainment than reporting – there should be no doubt that any qualified solider, much less one in the Navy’s crack troops, would be able of hitting a target at close range – but it included an interesting detail:

Smith, who served in the SEALs from 1991 to 1999, got together recently with five Navy SEALs, some of whom he’d served with and others whom he’d trained. “They were responsible for 250 dead terrorists,” Smith says. “They know their number.”

That’s 50 dead men apiece. One wonders if every special forces solider has statistics like this. Every society has had its elites who exercise state-sanctioned violence in the baldest of terms, from the Praetorian Guard and the Janissaries to today’s “operators”, recently put in the spotlight by the Osama bin Laden killing.  Ruminating on their “number” will show that those who practice it are assuredly of a very different bearing than most of us.

There’s a vivid passage in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men in which Carson Wells, himself an ex-Special Forces operator, reaches the end of his life. Curiously, among images of his mother and his First Communion that flash before his eyes, are those who died before him. Although it probably bears little resemble to reality, it’s intriguing.

 

Song for the New Breed

No UN office here

Rory Stewart‘s The Places in Between, an account of his walk through Afghanistan in 2002, is every bit as good as critics say it is. (I can’t remember the last time when I read a book that proudly announced that it was a “New York Times Bestseller” on the cover, but publishing is a tough business.) That it is worth reading for anyone who wants to seriously understand the region, what it means to travel, or man-dog friendship is unquestionable. It is also worth reading for the few but trenchant words it offers up to so-called development specialists who seem to populate places like Afghanistan, the Middle East and the Balkans. One wonders if they will be flocking to the Maghreb next.

In light of what’s happening there and watching Western news organizations try to make sense of it, I’ll quote Stewart’s footnote from near the end of his extraordinary travelogue. The parts of the book that barely mention the West at all are the best parts, of course.

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a 19th century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and conducted countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly the population would mutiny.

Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

This is an excellent summary of everything I have seen and heard of development experts in two years in the Balkans, and two more years of attending school with many who aspired to be development experts.  What must one do to understand a people?  Walking staying in their houses, speaking their language, and walking with them is a start, Stewart seems to be admitting, although even that barely scratches the surface.  I’ve long been impressed at the long view that the British Crown took in sending young men to India in the 19th century.  Our 21st-century development agencies and governments typically send people out on two-year rotations.

To be fair to development experts, I should mention that for awhile I made a living teaching the local employees of international businesses how to understand monolingual English-speakers who made zero effort to learn or speak in a local language, and for whose sole benefit department-wide meetings were often translated, despite everyone else having a common tongue.  There is no monopoly on loutishness or cultural imperialism, but it can also be said that these monophones demonstrably added value to the company that they put through so much grief.  If they didn’t, they lost their jobs.

Can the same be said for the would-be architects of the new quasi-protectorates?

A side recommendation: I had heard for some time that there was a book out by a Scotsman who had walked across Afghanistan, but the New Yorker’s (paywalled) portrait of Stewart cemented my interest in this remarkable and powerful book.  Ian Parker’s portrait is recommended as well.  Read both with a strong cup of sweet tea on the side, and perhaps listen to PJ Harvey’s veddy English album afterwards.