Our ignorance of Afghanistan
Why we are so out of touch with the realities of our situation there
The press corps, or what’s left of it, is badly uneducated and misinformed about the realities on the ground in Afghanistan. Firstly, because it is almost impossible for members of our media to break away from the protection of the US military. How candid is a typical Afghan villager going to be with a reporter (if there was one) while in the background there is an idling Bradly fighting vehicle with its machine gun pointing towards his head? Secondly there is a real dearth of Afghan experts to consult with. For the last thirty years or more the country has been a war zone. No PhD candidates roaming the country and living with the natives a la Margaret Mead. Even before the Russians invaded, Afghanistan was a dangerous and inhospitable place to do ethnographic research or any other kinds of study outside the few large cities. Thus, even today the number of real Afghan experts can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I am not including those who gained their “expertise” as part of the army of occupation either directly or as camp followers. When our media report that “Afghans think this” or “Afghans fear that” they are usually talking about educated urban dwellers who speak English and have very little in common with “real” Afghans. These accessible Afghans are a tiny proportion of the overall population.
For the United States to attempt to sign a "peace treaty" with any group, Taliban or otherwise, is an exercise in futility. The desire to rid the country of foreign (especially infidel) influence is baked into the Afghan psych. Any group that signed a peace treaty that did not call for total foreign withdrawal and noninterference in Afghan internal affairs would quickly be ignored and new groups to fight foreign interference would immediately spring up. I am sorry to say that to abide by the US written Afghan constitution in any way is a nonstarter. Anyone who thinks, for example, women's rights could be preserved post occupation is sadly mistaken. To grant these rights would mean that Afghans wouldn't be Afghans anymore. It would be the equivalent of the Afghans insisting that the United States imprison, flog, and perhaps execute all homosexuals in the US as part of the peace treaty. Sounds crazy because it couldn't possibly happen and equally true all the idealistic Western traditions, we would like to inoculate the Afghan society with are equally unlikely to happen, to say the least. Wouldn't it be nice if we had our negotiators tell their military/political masters the truth in this? I am sure Amb. Khalilzad knows this, but it's not what his superiors want to hear, The war is bleeding us as surely as it bled the Soviets. Every bomb dropped kills Afghans and builds further hatred. How many more Afghans have to die before we can leave? I am sure that the most important reason we don't is we simply don't want to lose face. A character flaw we used to only ascribe to more primitive societies