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SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES
By lindamuralidharan on 2010-01-01 10:17:51
Happy New Year to all our readers and participants. For you, I wish many good times and experiences. For our world, I
hope, at the very least, that one less person will die violently on each day of 2010 than did on the respective day in 2009.
And it would be a wonderful thing if we could reduce violent death and injury by many multiples of that. In all the
concerns each of us tries to keep track of and face, I am thinking constantly of Afghanistan. I have finally made time to
begin the viewing of the film Rethink Afghanistan which has shown in many public places and can be found in easy to
digest segments at www.rethinkafghanistan.com So far, I am learning a little bit that is new to me and
essentially reviewing the issues as I have previously understood them. I write of "Shifting Perspectives" because there is
support in the public sphere for using a military solution to solve a problem of US security. I study these perspectives
because I would be an irresponsible citizen not to examine all arguments, pro and con, related to the US fighting a war in
Afghanistan. I also observe some of the people who are considered "liberal" and "dovish" to be supportive of the idea that
the women of Afghanistan must be supported by (our) war. And then I return to the many voices describing all the reasons
that 1) military solutions are totally impractical in the Afghanistan context 2) vast numbers of Afghan people find the US
military presence counter-productive on its face 3) we need to be both wise and creative in seeking an approach that
removes the US overwhelming presence from Afghanistan while supporting the gradual development of that country's own
ability to deal with its many issues. From one perspective, a significantly large and unified organized movement of people,
basically Al Qaeda as boostered by the Taliban, are operating out of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan to bring down the
United States. Or to at least damage the nation in a major way. Thus comes the concept that we must attack and root out
this movement in its home environment and eliminate its ability to function as a "threat" to the United States. This
perspective may or may not be underpinned in the mind of particular decision makers by the desire to control gas and oil
pipeline routes in the region. This perspective feeds into the idea that we need to make the world safer and be a more
humane country ourselves by acting as a nation to protect women in Afghanistan. These two perspectives, whether based on
a narrow focused concept of national security or on the obligation of a superpower to help a poor country in massive ways,
pretty much take the same perspective with only slight shifts away from each other. I want to take a really hard look at
another perspective. We could say that there are a number of places in the world where local, historical conflicts contribute
to great instability of governments, devastating losses of life and livelihoods, and various instances of civil wars or violent
nationalistic, separatist activity. In each case, we would probably find that some previous colonial exploitation or other
international interference has made matters worse. We could add that the problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan fit this
picture. There are many, many reasons why Pakistan has focused in a paranoid fashion on its issues both real and imagined
with India. There are many reasons why differing economic classes and ethnic groups inside Pakistan have been served
poorly by their government and thus today present a real internal threat to the government. The government is aware of this
and like so many other governments would rather scapegoat India or the US than shake up the status quo to direct more
funding or ethical governing to the benefit of masses of its people. Part of the ruling class and military view has been that it
needs to control internal Afghan affairs in order to stave off a sense of isolation in its constant military and propaganda build
up targeting India. Along the way both Pakistan and the US have rushed to support varying hard line militia/fundamentalist
types over the past several decades. Some of these groups continue to mainly fight and propagandize rivalries amongst
themselves. Some of them have turned upon the hands that fed them supplies and weapons. These factors obtain inside
both Afghanistan and Pakistan. While it is true that some groups take on world wide ideas ( loosely following the
delusional teachings of Al Qaeda and other Islamist Jihad preachers) that Islam can rule the whole swath of Muslim
countries in the Middle East and Asia Minor with a sharia based empire and must weaken the US and its Western allies in
order to achieve this, such people are scattered far and wide, not concentrated in Afghanistan, and are bound to be far less
effective than they dream of being. Reality is their only enemy. They are capable of doing some damage just as we and
many others kill some people and bomb hospitals or schools. They can not present what is known as an "existential threat"
to a country so large and powerful as ours, one with many powerful friends around the globe, not the least of which is India.
We can ourselves, however, add to the damage by wrongheaded approaches on our own part in response to the bombings
and the rhetoric. Just contrast how little England changed their way of life after their subway bombings with how much we
changed or claimed we ought to be changing after 9/11. These groups like it if we panic. They like it if we respond by
disproportional force which earns us more enemies, not on the basis of ideology, but on the basis of our own behavior. I am
not even particularly concerned about the nuclear weapons in Pakistan in the way that many claim we should be for fear
of their falling into the hands of these loose jihadist groups. It is far more likely that Pakistani instability will lead to an
even more repressive military dictatorship than they have experienced almost consistently since independence. Many of the
regimes have been fundamentalist, and a future one could be even more religious and oppressive. For the most part, they
will not be more irresponsible internationally when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons. They will not seek major acts
of an aggressive nuclear war. They are rational in that realm. However, the less democratic and the more hostile they
remain with regard to other countries, the greater danger that some misstep will lead to a regional nuclear action. Therefore
we need not to take our eye off the ball of how to prom0te internal Pakistani stability that is based on the Pakistani people
being able to solve its own problems. We need to give them less aid, especially of the military kind which has fueled its
paranoid, anti-democratic, military elitism for decades. We need to not interfere but to stand ready to support any actions
that improve the lot of the ordinary people and promote human rights. In the film referenced above, there are many
descriptions of the real issues in Afghanistan, the interwoven factors which suggest that we all start looking at this area as
though it is any area with instability and with a tendency to international criminal attacks or civil wars that spill over
borders. I won't reiterate so many of the points that have been discussed on these pages before and the ways many different
actors are describing these issues in the film. Reader, please watch it yourself. Intelligence experts, people concerned
about women's needs, students of local politics, people with an historical perspective....there are many aspects represented.
The overall emphasis is on the local and regional conflicts that need to be solved at the local and regional level with
minimum interference from international groups. In the end, I would like us to consider our viewing that as a region that
requires some form of international understanding and support and some degree of aid, but basically as a region that needs
to be freed of most foreign entanglements so that it can sort out its own peculiar set of ethnic, economic, geographic, and
regional tensions and challenges. In the long run, that is how countries grow best into modern, approximately peaceful and
democratic societies. In the process, the US can shift more of its attention and resources to effectively tracking and
interdicting violence prone actors in the loose, worldwide network of groups that will try to bomb or crash planes or
buildings or people anywhere in the world where they can get away with it and where they think they can earn some points
with other disaffected or potentially disaffected people within the worldwide Muslim community. I hope it is obvious that
our recent scare over Michigan has reminded us ( and allowed the most competent in the intelligence community to be on
the news again) that we have not done what was promised, we have not changed the culture of our counter-terror
bureaucracies, have not focused on behaviors rather than on ethnic profiles, have not had enough skilled investigators on the
ground in key regions of the world, and have not been willing to pay sufficient attention when red flags are raised. We don't
have to send our armies to foreign countries to save our country. We do have to improve our police work and intelligence
gathering on a significant international scale in order to save lives and protect the property of many people, both American
and foreign. Of course, this involves diplomacy. Of course this involves some forms of international aid. Of course this
involves continued excellent reporting and better press coverage of all aspects of what the reporters discover. Of course this
involves the American people being okay with knowing the limits of our powers. As people who "wage" peace, we do not
want to push for policies that increase danger and violence. The majority of us do want to search for and find the most
effective (not necessarily the easiest or the most feel good) tools and strategies to get us and Afghanistan and Pakistan out
of the mess we are in. Again, please watch the film and consider it from a perspective of respect for the autonomy of these
countries and the understanding of the awful and stupid plans of scattered groups of people with very limited powers in the
face of common sense.
