Shooting The Elephant, Again
P. Schultz
June 27, 2014
A lesson of
George Orwell’s short story, “Shooting the Elephant,” is this: If you are
“there” – in Burma as the Brits and Orwell were – you have to shoot the elephant. There is no way around it or, put
differently, there is only one way around it: Don’t be there. This is Orwell’s
lesson.
This lesson
is almost grasped in Anand Gopal’s excellent book, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through
Afghan Eyes.” Gopal wrote: “the Karzai government was tethered to American
aid, incapable of surviving on its own.” [p. 273] True enough but this also
means that the U.S. government was tethered to the Karzai government and had to
go on that way endlessly or “get out.” These were the only options.
As Gopal
points out, most the funds the US expended in Afghanistan was not for
“development and governance” but for military purposes, and that most of this
went to “regional strongmen.” This means that the US was actually funding “a
network of power outside the state.”
And this also means that the Karzai government, to remain in power, had to
compete with these strongmen, these warlords, and as a result “the state became
criminalized, one of the most corrupt in the world, as thoroughly depraved as
the warlords it sought to outflank.” [p. 273]
Gopal’s
language, however, obscures that this corruption was and is endemic to the
situation, as illustrated by our “involvement” in Vietnam. It is not
“depravity” that led the Karzai government into “corruption,” but rather it was
weakness. And that government was weak because it did not have the consent of
the people to govern. A strong government cannot be bought because it isn’t
money that makes a government strong. It is consent or, more technically,
legitimacy. Without consent, any government is weak, no matter how powerful it
might appear to be. Even governments that brutalize people are weak as they are
constantly teetering on the brink of disintegration. Hence, the need for
continuing and increasing brutalization.
In
Afghanistan, the Karzai government had to hide its weakness behind what it and
the US claimed was “progress.” But as Gopal shows, “nearly every metric [used]
to show progress unravels upon inspection.” For example, of the 740 schools
alleged to have been established, 80% were “not operating at all.” Of the 4000
plus teachers employed, most were simply collecting paychecks without teaching.
But this
behavior is not the result of, say, bad intentions or even bad people. It is rather
the result of the government’s weakness, its lack of legitimacy, and its need
to spend money intended for “development and governance” in other ways in order
to stay in power. Building real schools and paying teachers to really teach
would not do the trick. As Gopal notes, “Afghanistan…had become a Potemkin
country, built almost entirely for show.” [p. 274] Eventually, Washington
viewed the Karzai government as “corrupt,” as if that government, or any
government in Afghanistan propped up by American aid, had a choice not to
behave as it did. What Washington did not realize was that it was its own
policies that led to the “corruption” of the Karzai government and that the
only alternative to this state of affairs was to “get out.”
As Gopal
notes, as time went on, the warlords who were contesting or supporting Karzai
changed. However, the situation did not change, but “the new class of warlords
was more sophisticated than their predecessors,” having been “rebranded” as
“private security companies,” which of course only fed the corruption by making
it look legitimate. Gopal’s illustration: Americans had about 400 bases
throughout Afghanistan, which, of course, had to be supplied. This required
trucks and the trucks required protection. This meant using the warlords, now
labeled “private security guards,” and these “guards” had their own outlays to
various groups, including the Taliban, in order to secure the supplies.
When the
Congress learned that “US tax dollars were going to support warlordism, racketeering,
and the insurgency,” it promised reform. “But reform was impossible because the
new contracting economy was inexorably bound up in the project of
counterterrorism.” [p. 275] And “short of bringing in hundreds of thousands of
additional soldiers…, there was no other option.” P. 275]
But Gopal
doesn’t go far enough here because, as illustrated by Vietnam, hundreds of
thousands of soldiers would not “work” either. The only thing that would “work”
was consent or, put differently, a political
settlement.” That is, absent a settlement, a real settlement involving all
parts of Afghan society, the “quagmire” would continue, endlessly.
As Orwell
saw from his experience in Burma, you have to shoot the elephant; you have no
choice, other that is than getting out.
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