Holbrooke's Last Words

There's a metaphor for our foreign policy in there.  You find it.

Rumor has it that Richard Holbrooke's last words were, "You've got to end this war in Afghanistan."

Now, maybe he was talking to a Pakistani doctor, in which case everything I'm about to write is less germane.

I don't know if Afghanistan was ever fixable.  I do know it was never going to become Sweden.  Hell, it wasn't even likely to become as stable and prosperous as Colombia is today.

When we speak of nation building, we speak of a complicated process of assisting, nudging and nurturing existing beneficial institutions.

There were no beneficial institutions in Iraq or Afghanistan.  No respect for human rights, civil liberties or the rule of law.  None.

Without those three things, you cannot have a representative government that is worthy of the name.  You can have elections, you can dip fingers in purple ink, but ask the Iranians what happens when the will of the electorate clashes with the will of the state.  In the US, the will of the electorate becomes (more or less) the will of the state.  In Southwest Asia, the state exists separate from the people, where it exists at all.

This is, in large part, because oil allows the state to ignore the people as a source of revenue.  Once you start taxing people, you have to respond to their wishes.  Ask King John.  As for Afghanistan, they don't have oil, so corruption has taken its place, and drugs, too.

We are not going to fix that.  Not in two years, not in twenty.  We certainly aren't going to fix it with Predator strikes and seize and hold counterinsurgency tactics.  If anything, we will only make it harder for Afghans to take us seriously as people who want to help.  "Let me help you or I will blow up your wedding" is hardly the stance of an altruist.

Ultimately, the real damage of the Surge was not to the Sunni insurgency, it was to us.  It gave us back our sense of Exceptionalism, that we can do no wrong.  We did wrong in invading Iraq.  That country will need decades to recover, if it ever will.  I look in Iraq's future and see Lebanon on steroids.  But because we brought about a "peace of exhaustion" for a few months, doesn't mean Iraq is on its way to pluralism and stability.

We've had nine years in Afghanistan, and while we screwed that up by diverting our resources and attention to Iraq, we were unlikely to get anything more than a corrupt narco-state that will be a plaything of Pakistan's ISI.

Well, we have that.

Can we leave now?