February 4, 2009

The Taliban as Aliens

By: Daniel Kennelly

I can understand why Daniel Larison is outraged at Ralph Peters’ column arguing that as a mental exercise we ought to think of Taliban as being alien life forms. Given the context of Peters’ hyper-aggressive oeuvre, the Taliban-as-aliens heuristic device is, to be charitable, imprudent—notwithstanding Peters’ protest that “[t]he point isn’t to argue that Afghans are inferior beings.”

I have no doubt that Peters, in his experiences as an intelligence officer, encountered colleagues who saw in every Russian, Chinese, or Iranian an American yearning to be brought out. But the last thing American policymakers, soldiers, or the public need at this moment is to begin thinking about allies, neutrals, or enemies in Afghanistan as being alien and therefore beyond the protections of human dignity.

Nevertheless, in the hands of a safer and more thoughtful writer and analyst, the other-as-alien exercise could offer a useful corrective for the conduct of foreign policy at all levels. Larison is right to say that

Ideology teaches that those who do not fit into a universal scheme, whatever it claims about human nature and society, cannot really be human or at least they are not deserving of the treatment accorded to fully rational human beings.

This is the what eventually happens to the kind of person who assumes that in every <insert group here>, there’s an American trying to break free. When the “other” begins to act in ways that seem wildly contrary to the ideologue’s sense of justice or interest, the ideologue begins to see the other as beastlike. But if you “[b]uild your assessment from a blank slate”, to use Peters’ forumlation, you’re more likely to see the other for what he or she is and to extend common human protections.

Peters claims he learned this fairly straightforward bit of wisdom from reading science fiction books. I tend to think these lessons ought to be obvious to any mildly self-reflective individual, but it’s easy enough to take him at his word in this. In fact, I have a good idea of an example of what he’s talking about, taken from Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Much of Dune is made up of episodes of interlocutors whose cultural distance brings them “out of phase” with one another, but I have one scene in particular in mind. In this scene, which is one of the earliest in which the civilized, honorable, noble-born Atreides clan comes into contact with the nomadic, “savage” Fremen of the desert, the Atreides advisor Thufir Hawat seeks help for the wounded soldiers under his command from the leader of a Fremen war party. Their conversation is as follows:

HAWAT: You haven’t yet told me whether your people can help my wounded.

FREMEN LEADER: [Mild confusion.] They are wounded.

H: We know they are wounded! That’s not the—

FL: Peace, friend. What do your wounded say? Are there those among them who can see the water need of their tribe?

H: [Irritated] We haven’t talked about water! We—

FL: I can understand your reluctance. They are your friends.

They eventually come to at least partial mutual understanding, but not before the conversation almost turns violent. The reason for Hawat’s initial irritation, of course, is that he hasn’t truly assimilated the importance of water to a desert people such as the Fremen, who kill their seriously wounded comrades and sap the water from their bodies for the survival and advancement of the tribe. And the Fremen leader, for his part, finds Hawat’s loyalty to his wounded comrades to be an irrational, suicidal act that threatens the health of the Atreides “tribe.” In the end, they figure out how to see each other plain, and the Atreides and Fremen defeat their enemies as a result.

This was what Peters was trying to say, of course, rather than suggesting that our enemies are beyond the pale of the protections of human dignity. But Larison is spot on to say that Peters’ column isn’t the right medium for this message.