Barack Obama won the Presidency with the promise of change. What kind of change?
It now appears that one change will consist of sending another 20 to 30 thousand US troops to Afghanistan, more or less doubling the number of Americans fighting in that country.
What should we think about that?
Afghanistan is a country the size of Texas with a population of 32 million. Literacy is at 28 %, average life expectancy 42 years. It is very different from any country we know. Infrastructure--roads, electric power supply, drinkable water, reliable communications and transport hardly exist. The different parts of the country are not well knit together. Afghanistan is one country in name only. Different parts of the country are inhabited by different peoples who each speak their own languages. Each have strong loyalties to their own and deep distrust of the members of the other peoples.
There is a central government in the capital, Kabul, that controls the capital itself, more or less. But it does not control the rest of the country. There police and military power is in the hands of warlords--strongmen with their own armies that control a bit of territory and are frequently battling other strongmen. In addition there is the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic force. The Taliban were organized originally by the ISI ( The Pakistani Internal Security Services) with the support of the US who groomed the Taliban the fight the Russians when they occupied Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s.
Once the Russians left, the US lost interest in Afghanistan and left the Taliban to take over the country.
Why are we fighting in Afghanistan?
The official story is that after 9/11 the US government demanded that the Afghan government--then in the hands of the Taliban--hand over Osama Bin Laden. When they refused we invaded to catch Osama and punish the Taliban. We seemed to have succeeded in the second goal because the Taliban collapsed after a brief war fought by US planes and Afghan warlord ground troops. But today the Taliban are daily growing in strength. They are said to be active in 72% of the country.
The truth is more complex. The US government was pretty ready to attack Afghanistan even before 9/11, hoping to weaken Al Quaeda by expelling them from their sanctuary there. Nor is it true that the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden. They did refuse to hand him to the US, but were willing to hand him over for trial to a third country. But our government rejected that offer.
We did not catch Osama. He is, people say, in Pakistan . So why fight in Afghanistan? That question is difficult to answer. Maybe it does not have an answer except that, having once started the war, we need to fight to victory. But we know where that kind of thinking leads. It added several years to the war in Vietnam and we lost it anyway. It is clear that the insistence on victory has needlessly cost a lot of lives--American as well as many more Iraqi ones--without bringing us any closer to victory in Iraq.
What are we fighting for?
There are different answers to this question:
1. We are trying to support the democratic government of Hamid Karzai. But the government consists largely of different warlords whose dedication to democracy may be doubted. The people of Afghanistan do not believe that their government is democratic. More importantly, American-style electoral democracy is not a part of Afghan culture. It is doubtful that it can be imposed by a foreign army.
2. Stability in the region. Afghanistan was reasonably stable under the Taliban ( as Iraq was under Saddam Hussein). Our efforts have been effective in destabilizing the region. A prime example: Today Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world’s opium supply. The opium trade had been suppressed pretty effectively by the Taliban. Opium is Afghanistan’s only export. It has corrupted everyone including many government leaders.
3. Suppress Al Quaeda and the Taliban. The Afghan war does not seem to have succeeded in do that. For all anyone knows Al Quaeda has moved on to Pakistan and our efforts should be directed towards strengthening the fragile democracy there.
Is there a military solution?
Our military efforts routed the Taliban in 2002--only temporarily, it seems now--and installed our government under Hamid Karzai. But our military efforts were unable to establish a government that is able to govern. These military efforts were unable to unify the country, or even to make the country secure enough for rebuilding what decades of invasion and civil war have destroyed and to bring the country’s infrastructure, let alone its educational system, into modern times.
The critics of the US military effort--and there are many of those--point out that the goal of unifying the country, or establishing a government that actually governs, is not a task that any military establishment can accomplish. Heavily armed soldiers, helicopter gunships and bombers do not serve to establish governments that their citizens respect and, more importantly, obey. Soldiers and planes to not serve to unify a country in practice divided into many separate fiefdoms, each with their own military leader and private army.
As a part of the military solution, the US command is now arming private warlords to fight the Taliban. We have done this before, for instance, when we armed Osama bin Laden in his struggle against the Russian occupation. That experiment ended very badly. But the lesson that arming private militias in Afghanistan often has disastrous effects, seems lost on our military leaders.
The aims of US actions in Afghanistan, say these critics, are political--unifying the country, establishing an effective government. Military means cannot reach those goals.
What should Obama do?
A larger view of the region points to the involvement of Pakistan in the Afghan troubles and reminds us that, on the one hand, the conflict with India is a central aspect of all Pakistani actions and that, on the other hand, Afghanistan’s neighbor on the opposite side, Iran, must also not be forgotten. The resolution of the problems of Afghanistan, some experts believe, requires an effort at regional diplomacy to try to help lower the India-Pakistan tensions, and to address Iranian interests, on the one hand, and to give generous but carefully supervised economic ( not military) aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The role of the US military as well as of NATO is of lesser importance than the diplomatic efforts. Those would consist centrally of negotiations between the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and the Taliban, on one side, and between India and Pakistan on the other. They might also involve negotiations between the US and Iran
The only reasonable policy is to develop a plan for leaving Afghanistan as soon as possible in order to replace the current, failed military strategies with attempts at many-sided negotiations.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Rampant Dishonesty
Corruption is in the news A Massachusetts state senator recently was forced to resign after being accused of publicly groping several women. State Representative Diane Wilkerson had to resign after she was photographed accepting money for procuring a liquor license. The Speaker of the House is under heavy suspicion of corrupt practices. One of our local state representatives almost lost his recent reelection to a last-minute challenger because of personal conduct and financial transactions that appeared corrupt to many voters.
These are merely some examples of political corruption in Massachusetts and in Worcester. I do not have space to document pervasive corruption across the nation.
We have become accustomed to widespread public dishonesty but now a national survey shows that significant numbers of young people steal and lie. Dishonesty is no longer limited to business transactions or to politics. "In the past year, 30% of US high school students have stolen from a store and 64% had cheated on a test according to a new, large-scale survey..." Have you talked to your son or daughter about dishonesty lately?
Widespread dishonesty among young people is no doubt encouraged by the blatant corruption of our elected officials and the pervasive dishonesty in business that has brought our economy to the brink of collapse. If our political leaders as well as the business people who are "successful" -- who drive BMW’s up to their trophy homes -- get ahead by cutting corners, our young people will, of course, do the same.
Our nation does not only face the possibility of economic collapse; much more seriously, we are losing our moral standards. We are becoming a nation of liars, of thieves and petty chiselers.
What has happened to us?
Morality is anchored in personal relations. Lying to or stealing from persons you know seriously affects relationships. If your neighbors no longer trust you, your life loses security and comfort. If the people in your neighborhood think of you as untrustworthy, your place in the community changes for the worse. Dishonesty within the family creates serious problems.
But, in our world, we have fewer and fewer relationships within our immediate locality. Shoplifters do not steal from the local store whose owner may be a neighbor. They steal from an international corporation with stores not only in the US but all over the globe. The employer you lie to about being sick when you take a day off to do your Christmas shopping may have its headquarters in some foreign country. The businesses we may be tempted to steal from -- the drugstore or the insurance company – are vast international corporate giants. Your relationship to your employer is similarly impersonal. You have no personal relationship to the people you work for. You are not working for any human being but for an impersonal bureaucracy designed to put money in the pockets of its stockholders.
The government has, similarly, become large, impersonal, and distant. Local programs in Worcester are largely financed by the state of Massachusetts and the income tax it collects, as well as by the federal government and the taxes it takes from us. The city has little money of its own and little say-so over what happens here. Like businesses, the government has moved away and is no longer under our control. We may know some city politicians but they have very limited powers. Al they control is fixing roads and sidewalks.
Personal integrity has shrunk because it matters only in very limited contexts. It matters within the family, it matters with your friends. Many people in cities do not know their neighbors; many do not know their children's teachers. With a few exceptions we do not know who owns the local stores. The sales people we deal with, come and go.
Improved transportation has made a lot of difference. People move everywhere and rarely die anywhere either the place where they were born. A few years ago my neighbor died in her 80s in the house in which she was born. There are not many people like that left in America. Most of us are from “somewhere else.” Frequent moves disrupt personal connections between neighbors.
It is not enough to bemoan how footloose we have become and how impersonal life in our cities is today. Within limits, we can make efforts to know our neighbors, to engage in community improvement projects, to know who lives near us and to establish personal relations with them. Some neighborhoods managed to organize themselves to try to deal with local problems, to organize a crime watch, to build a park or playground. Most neighborhoods no longer do that. We do not know the people living close to us.
Efforts to maintain human relations in one's community are one way of maintaining our moral standards. It is easy to cheat and to deceive a global corporation because they are things; they are not human beings. But in relations to real human beings who live close to us, we find ourselves hesitating to practice deceit and dishonesty. It is more difficult to look in the face of the persons you have defrauded. Our moral obligations to our neighbors, like family members, are very powerful.
We should respond to reports of dishonesty from all quarters by redoubling our efforts to maintain human communities. For many city dwellers, their neighbors are as distant as the strangers on the bus. Go out and meet your neighbors; if there are problems you can try to tackle them together You can improve your neighborhood, get it cleaned up, make it more livable. Only a place where people know one another and work together for common goals will support a common morality.
These are merely some examples of political corruption in Massachusetts and in Worcester. I do not have space to document pervasive corruption across the nation.
We have become accustomed to widespread public dishonesty but now a national survey shows that significant numbers of young people steal and lie. Dishonesty is no longer limited to business transactions or to politics. "In the past year, 30% of US high school students have stolen from a store and 64% had cheated on a test according to a new, large-scale survey..." Have you talked to your son or daughter about dishonesty lately?
Widespread dishonesty among young people is no doubt encouraged by the blatant corruption of our elected officials and the pervasive dishonesty in business that has brought our economy to the brink of collapse. If our political leaders as well as the business people who are "successful" -- who drive BMW’s up to their trophy homes -- get ahead by cutting corners, our young people will, of course, do the same.
Our nation does not only face the possibility of economic collapse; much more seriously, we are losing our moral standards. We are becoming a nation of liars, of thieves and petty chiselers.
What has happened to us?
Morality is anchored in personal relations. Lying to or stealing from persons you know seriously affects relationships. If your neighbors no longer trust you, your life loses security and comfort. If the people in your neighborhood think of you as untrustworthy, your place in the community changes for the worse. Dishonesty within the family creates serious problems.
But, in our world, we have fewer and fewer relationships within our immediate locality. Shoplifters do not steal from the local store whose owner may be a neighbor. They steal from an international corporation with stores not only in the US but all over the globe. The employer you lie to about being sick when you take a day off to do your Christmas shopping may have its headquarters in some foreign country. The businesses we may be tempted to steal from -- the drugstore or the insurance company – are vast international corporate giants. Your relationship to your employer is similarly impersonal. You have no personal relationship to the people you work for. You are not working for any human being but for an impersonal bureaucracy designed to put money in the pockets of its stockholders.
The government has, similarly, become large, impersonal, and distant. Local programs in Worcester are largely financed by the state of Massachusetts and the income tax it collects, as well as by the federal government and the taxes it takes from us. The city has little money of its own and little say-so over what happens here. Like businesses, the government has moved away and is no longer under our control. We may know some city politicians but they have very limited powers. Al they control is fixing roads and sidewalks.
Personal integrity has shrunk because it matters only in very limited contexts. It matters within the family, it matters with your friends. Many people in cities do not know their neighbors; many do not know their children's teachers. With a few exceptions we do not know who owns the local stores. The sales people we deal with, come and go.
Improved transportation has made a lot of difference. People move everywhere and rarely die anywhere either the place where they were born. A few years ago my neighbor died in her 80s in the house in which she was born. There are not many people like that left in America. Most of us are from “somewhere else.” Frequent moves disrupt personal connections between neighbors.
It is not enough to bemoan how footloose we have become and how impersonal life in our cities is today. Within limits, we can make efforts to know our neighbors, to engage in community improvement projects, to know who lives near us and to establish personal relations with them. Some neighborhoods managed to organize themselves to try to deal with local problems, to organize a crime watch, to build a park or playground. Most neighborhoods no longer do that. We do not know the people living close to us.
Efforts to maintain human relations in one's community are one way of maintaining our moral standards. It is easy to cheat and to deceive a global corporation because they are things; they are not human beings. But in relations to real human beings who live close to us, we find ourselves hesitating to practice deceit and dishonesty. It is more difficult to look in the face of the persons you have defrauded. Our moral obligations to our neighbors, like family members, are very powerful.
We should respond to reports of dishonesty from all quarters by redoubling our efforts to maintain human communities. For many city dwellers, their neighbors are as distant as the strangers on the bus. Go out and meet your neighbors; if there are problems you can try to tackle them together You can improve your neighborhood, get it cleaned up, make it more livable. Only a place where people know one another and work together for common goals will support a common morality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)