What’s Wrong with the World

Obsidian Wings' Eric Martin posted an email he got from WSJ's Anand Gopal in December 2009 that is equally pessimistic.

Mullah Omar...[is] not that far removed from the society he came from. The Taliban did not just drop out of the sky one day--they are expressions of the rural, pre-modern, reactionary outlook prevalent in the Pashtun hinterlands. Women are essentially enslaved in these rural Pashtun areas, and this has little if nothing to do with the Taliban. Take a trip through the Pashtun countryside and you will meet many "women-hating, porn-fearing, music-despising people." I remember during my first week as a journalist in Afghanistan, I went to the aftermath of U.S. bombing raid and asked one man for the name of his wife (who had been injured). He pulled out a gun, slammed me to the floor and nearly killed me (because mentioning a man's wife in public is tantamount to adultery in those areas). Another time I remember a female Afghan friend I had (a university student) who made a call to a radio-call in show to request a song. When her family found out they cut all of her fingers off and force fed them to her (because singing and music is sinful). In fact, the word for musicians and public performers in Pashto -- dum -- is also a derogatory term!

The point isn't to excuse Mullah Omar or be a sort of moral relativist but rather to explain that the Taliban are products of the society they were born from and it isn't productive to call them "nuts". It will take years of modernization, urbanization and de-tribalization to change the cultural outlook in these areas, I believe. In the meantime, Mullah Omar and his ilk have shown themselves to be quite rational, with a sensible strategy to try and reclaim power. They've even gone a step further recently, expunging most references of Islam from their statements. They've gone out of their way to remove commanders who treat the population poorly and have instituted a mechanism to deal with complaints from locals. This isn't because they are a humanitarian organization all of a sudden but because they (like the Americans) realize that the population is the prize and they are trying to do everything they can to win them over. Therefore they are a very different movement from the one that ruled in the nineties.

step2, I especially appreciated your first block quote, with sauce or without?

I really don't see the problem here, apart from dietary oddities that is, let's just pull out,cancel the whole deal, and concentrate on the baseball season. I'm sure we will be left alone by islamists hither and yon, though I won't be accepting any dinner invitations from them.
I mean, the whole thing is just a misunderstanding.

and it isn't productive to call them "nuts".

While I'm fully on-board with condemning nation-building, I really get annoyed when people say things like this. Right. If being the sort of people who feed girls their fingers for calling into a radio station isn't enough to get you called "nuts," I don't know what is. Would "horrible and evil" be preferable? Don't tell me what it is or isn't productive to call somebody, or, yeah, you do start sounding like a moral relativist.

Don't tell me what it is or isn't productive to call somebody, or, yeah, you do start sounding like a moral relativist.

Calling them nuts is the same thing as when the left calls members of the right "ignorant" for disagreeing with them or behaving a certain way. It's not really ignorance then, and it's not "nuts" for a family to that to their daughter. It's evil, it's barbaric and the sort of thing for which every participant should be strung up in a just society from the nearest lamp post outside of a mosque by court order.

It should also be pointed out that nation-building is to the right, what domestic welfare is to the left. The hundreds of billions we've spent on rebuilding Iraq is no different from the billions that Robert Byrd has pumped into West Virginia in the overarching goal and effectiveness.

If being the sort of people who feed girls their fingers for calling into a radio station isn't enough to get you called "nuts," I don't know what is. Would "horrible and evil" be preferable?

Steve,
Although I agree with your conclusions, I don't think that Matthew Hoh ought to be considered a strategic expert with respect to Afghanistan. Yes, he's a great American and a bright young man. But his service in Afghanistan was local and of short duration. He's a Title 5-3161, not an FSO. That means that he was hired temporarily and for a specific purpose. He's not a career diplomat (that doesn't mean that FSOs have requisite expertise to understand Afghanistan either). And if you were to see what regional scholars have to say about the impact of tribalism in Afghanistan, you would realize that Hoh is not the SME you think he is. During the last couple of years, Afghan "experts" seem to think that tribes are the key to strategy in that region. If that is the case, what motivates Mullah Omar, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar? Tribal interests? After my tour in Afghanistan ending in 2007, I learned that there are few individuals with any depth of experience in the region - including advisors to the ISAF commander. OK, there are some who've been there since the '70s and studied Afghan dynamics to include Thomas Goutierre, and Barnett Rubin. There are also others that have a deeper understanding of regional dynamics. But Matthew Hoh represents the dangers of generalizing from a particular experience.

Yes, for pity's sake let's leave. The Afghans aren't worth it. They are violent, cruel, woman hating, modernity hating, child abusing in-bred cretins. You can't work with that.

In fact, the word for musicians and public performers in Pashto -- dum -- is also a derogatory term!

I love the used-without-irony exclamation point. As recently as the 1950s, entertainer was still an at least vaguely disreputable profession in Christendom. Thank goodness we've overcome that primitivism!

Calling them nuts is the same thing as when the left calls members of the right "ignorant" for disagreeing with them or behaving a certain way. It's not really ignorance then, and it's not "nuts" for a family to that to their daughter. It's evil, it's barbaric and the sort of thing for which every participant should be strung up in a just society from the nearest lamp post outside of a mosque by court order.

I really don't think so. Normal people call such beastly behavior "nuts" as a kind of shorthand for someone who can't be reasoned with--they don't necessarily mean "clinically insane," whereas a liberal does mean it literally when he says that non-liberals are ignorant. The distinction this guy is making is punctilious and silly, since the presumption of actual, clinical insanity on the part of the Taliban is in no way US policy. Maybe Glenn Beck calls them nutcases, but really, so what? It's not our policy and in fact we're not nearly as benighted in the policy arena as this guy would have you think, so he's just being a preening smarty-pants when he says things like this. Maybe it's not productive for the analyst to call the Taliban "nuts" in a policy document, but for most purposes it's actually useful.

Bottom line: The Taliban are neither reasonable nor good, and it's that suggestion that bothers him, because it sounds like a jusdgment and he doesn't like judgments (at least about foreigners).

I could go on for pages--I did an MS in Defense and Strategic Studies, and there's so much this guy has to say that sounds shocking and profound, but really is just tendentious simplification that puts everyone involved (other than himself, naturally) in a bad light. For example, his explanation for why the US brass didn't acknowledge the size (or even existence) of the insurgency very early on has been exhaustively laid bare by counterinsurgency experts inside and outside the Pentagon, and his explanation that everybody involved was either cowardly or dishonest just doesn't wash--though it's useful if you want to play the whistle-blower, that lone voice of reason crying out in the night. There are good reasons you don't cry "insurgency!" at the first sign, or the second sign, or even the third sign of trouble, and while in this case the DoD was paralyzed for far too long on this, let's just say that the policy wasn't "nuts."

Look, I loathe nation-building, and I have no use whatsoever for our continued presence in Afghanistan, and much of what he says is right. But from my perspective, it's not nearly as mind-blowing as Steve Burton thinks it to be. And anybody who issues a blanket statement that al-Qaeda is a law-enforcement issue, period, full stop, wihout caveat, and ought to be handled that way, period, full stop, without caveat, isn't a particularly serious analyst of the situation--and no, I don't care where he spent his days in 2003-04.

One other point:

Just as a hint, when somebody is trying to play the "insider with a special take on the situation," always watch for the sentence that begins:

"I saw this one document this one time..."

It's probable that the document did exist but was of zero importance, especially in a policy shop where the production and discussion of such things is what people do for ten hours a day, and where no view of the situation is too stupid to find its way onto a piece of paper.

The Taliban are neither reasonable nor good, and it's that suggestion that bothers him,

I think it's _very_ important that we not treat our enemies as having some sort of rational goals. The Taliban is not some sort of rational actor with goals that, if we only understood, we could somehow sympathize with or accommodate. This is a point in foreign policy that, I'm sorry, but some on the paleo-right just don't get. Every horrible terrorist group or nation, no matter how death-worshiping, is supposed to be treated as having some sort of "understandable" or "rational" goals, which means, of course, that somehow it's our fault if we can't get along with them. "How would we feel if..." blah, blah. Which is not only moral equivalence mongering but is also prejudging a situation and then being unamenable to bucketsful of evidence to the contrary.

Lydia, the distinction that international security affairs chin-strokers like to make is between "bounded" versus "instrumental" rationality. In short, the Taliban are a rational actor because they are able to construct suitable means to their ends--we may not think their ends are reasonable, but they do behave "rationally" in pursuit of their goals. Ergo, they really are rational actors, even if we don't consider their goals rational.

This has become a pretty shopworn line of analysis in reaction to the notion of "rogue" actors on the international stage that require special approaches. Don't worry about North Korean nuclear weapons--it's "unhelpful" to call them crazy because, after all, we might not like their goals but they are rational enough at a fundamental level to be deterred by traditional means. If you just assume he has goals, and not worry about whether the goals themselves are rational, you just just skip to the part where you manage their behavior with an intricate scheme of carrots and sticks.

This is also where you get the neo-realist idea that more nukes in the hands of states like Iran are actually a good thing. See if they have nukes, they'll be induced to caution, because nobody is really irrational, and rational actors can always be deterred by the threat of nuclear annihilation, etc...

Again, I think Hoh is making either a trivial point (they're not literally incapable of forming a rational thought), or an offensive one (they're not really so bad that they can't be reasoned with).

they are rational enough at a fundamental level to be deterred by traditional means.

I think what you're saying to this, Sage, is what I would say: Mere means-end rationality does not entail this conclusion. If the end is sufficiently (dare I say it) crazy, then the fact that some group is capable of forming plans as means to that end hardly means that they can be deterred by traditional means, that we can manage their behavior, that we shouldn't worry about their having nukes, or anything else.

And isn't it just incredibly patronizing to tell people that it's "unhelpful" or "unproductive" to say something that might be _true_? Very annoying.

I think we should try to imagine how the enemy thinks so that we can better defeat them. This probably requires some degree of empathy, which is perhaps dangerous, because that requires you to think like an evil person. But I don't see an entailment between adopting the views I've just endorsed and moral relativism.

That said, it's worth thinking about what it's like to think like an evil person. It will involve, necessarily, I think, some irrationality. Not necessarily irrationality about what is the best means to your ends, though possibly that, but rather irrationality about what kinds of things count as a reason. For instance, here is (possibly) a kind of irrationality that an evil person (possibly) engages in:

(1) If you do A in situation S for reason R, then what you do is immoral.
(2) If I do A in S for F, then what I do is morally praiseworthy.

The reason (1) is false is that you're you; the reason (2) is true is that I'm I. There's something special about me that makes my actions morally good and there's something you lack, which I have, that makes your actions morally right. But it's primitive. It's a haecceity. So, too bad for you.

The kind of irrationality that I'm positing for the evil person makes mirroring a bit harder, because when we try to mirror someone's thoughts, we usually start out by saying: here's their basic values and knowledge-base, and if I had that knowledge-base and those values, how would I act? But if we add the possibility that evil people are going to constantly reason defectively in the way I'm described above, then it could very well be that mirroring an evil person requires engaging in some pretty irrational thinking, in addition to having objectionable values.

Good grief.

Horrible of me, I know, but....

The Taliban's protection of Bin Laden merited a strong response, not a press release about "deploring" it.

Just how bad would it have been to nuke...no, no, okay, fine, too many emotional associations with those weapons. Just how bad would it have been to carpet-bomb the whole place so thoroughly that it would have been the equivalent of nuking it...and then just leave it smoking? Along with a statement to the effect of, "The humanitarian difficulties of those who harbor terrorists are of great concern to the compassionate American people, and may thus prompt voluntary charity, but as for the American government, it is really not our problem" ...?

If there is no civilized tradition in a place, what else can one do?

Or can we write up our involvement on this occasion to the principle that "Even the most barbaric stone-age society gets one freebie reconstruction, because in the end we Americans are such stand-up, generous folks. But after that, we will follow the Rubble Don't Make Trouble principle."

I want to be compassionate here. But one runs out of energy.

Good find, Steve.

The extremely costly Wilsonian transformation of the Middle East to liberal democracy has nothing to do with America's security. Terrorism is an immigration issue.

Kidding, in the bloggingheads interview Hoh questions just how much control the Taliban and that they may not have been able to do anything about Bin Laden even if they wanted to.

The Americans had a clear causus belli for invading Afghanistan. This was a war that even the pacifistic John Paul II found difficult to oppose. At the start of the war, the received wisdom was that the Americans, having exploited the Afghan mujahideen to order defeat the Soviets had in their turn left the Afghans high and dry, at the mercy of the elements, the warlords and ignorance. George Bush stated explicitly that this time, it was going be different. The Americans were going to build to schools, bring running water, educate girls so that they can aspire to become doctors and teachers. It was an easy enough mistake for the generous Christian, George Bush to make, his judgement possibly clouded by the refusal to accept that in the end, the war is about is Islam and the overwhelming number of its irredentist elements that live in that part of the world. He certainly had no interest in igniting a global war against Islam and, in the manner of the devotees of the Mid-East 'peace process' tried one palliative after another instead.

Hoh questions just how much control the Taliban and that they may not have been able to do anything about Bin Laden even if they wanted to.

Poh babies. I'm beginning to be glad I didn't watch the video. This guy is starting to annoy me just _hearing_ about him.

Lydia & Sage: I really think that your reactions to Step2's quotation from Anand Gopal are kind of over-the-top &/or beside the point.

Suppose we take out that phrase "it isn't productive to call them 'nuts'" and make it explicit that the kind of "rationality" he's talking about is *instrumental* rationality:

"the Taliban are products of the society they were born from.... It will take years of modernization, urbanization and de-tribalization to change the cultural outlook in these areas, I believe. In the meantime, Mullah Omar and his ilk have shown themselves to be quite [instrumentaly] rational, with a sensible strategy to try and reclaim power. They've even gone a step further recently, expunging most references of Islam from their statements. They've gone out of their way to remove commanders who treat the population poorly and have instituted a mechanism to deal with complaints from locals. This isn't because they are a humanitarian organization all of a sudden but because they (like the Americans) realize that the population is the prize and they are trying to do everything they can to win them over. Therefore they are a very different movement from the one that ruled in the nineties."

This seems to me like a true & important point.

Kurt (3/18 at 10:35 a.m.): that's all very interesting, but how does it contradict the truth &/or importance of any of Hoh's particular observations about the situation in Afghanistan today? Where, exactly, is he wrong?

Mike T: "nation-building is to the right, what domestic welfare is to the left..."

Almost perfect, but it needs another phrase to make it an apothegm. How about this:

"Nation building is to the right what welfare is to the left - the proverbial road to hell, paved by good intentions."

Sage (3/18 at 6:06 p.m.): you're mixing up Matthew How with Anand Gopal. It's the latter, not the former, who described the Taliban as "quite rational."

Therefore they are a very different movement from the one that ruled in the nineties.

A true and important point for what purpose, Steve?

And how different is "very different"? You mean they don't threaten girls who are trying to go to school anymore? You mean they stop men from cutting off their twelve-year-old wives' noses and ears? This "Taliban is winning hearts and minds" stuff really rings rather hollow to me. Mind you, it may be that a lot of the people there don't need to be won over because they are committed themselves to the evil the Taliban represents. Which is also an argument against attempting nation-building, but is a _different_ argument from some sort of image of a kinder, gentler Taliban winning over the populace by being more enlightened.

Kidding, I Think: it would have been *very, very bad* to "carpet-bomb [Afghanistan] so thoroughly that it would have been the equivalent of nuking it." Think of that poor girl whose own family cut off her fingers and then forced her to eat them. Bombing her family would mean bombing her, wouldn't it?

Lydia: I really think that if you took the time to watch the interview, you'd find yourself more impressed/less annoyed with Hoh than you are now, based on second-hand reports.

And I *don't* think that Anand Gopal is trying to suggest that there is anything "kinder" or "gentler" or more "enlightened" about the Taliban in its current form. He's just pointing out that they're getting smarter about pursuing their (undoubtedly "horrible & evil") goals.

"Nation building is to the right what welfare is to the left - the proverbial road to hell, paved by good intentions."

Robert McNamara once justified the Vietnam War something akin to "LBJ's Great New Society exported to Asia."

If the real right could have any influence in the terrorism debate, it would be to effect a paradigm sift on the terrorism issue: change the public understanding of terrorism from a foreign policy issue to an immigration issue. The European Right already realizes this. Unfortunately, Americans do not. Since Bush II's invasion of Iraq, more Muslims have immigrated to the U.S. than during any other period in U.S. history. As Steve Sailer has written, "invade the world - invite the world."