Why are we in Afghanistan? (with apologies to Norman Mailer)

Damir has a generous post in which hedges some his disagreement with Christian Brose regarding the scale of our presence in Afghanistan. It stands in contrast to Andrew Sullivan’s post in which he tars Brose as a regressive neoconservative (incidentally, the Sullivan who now labels anyone who supports intervention in Afghanistan as a neoconservative is twin to the Sullivan who formerly labeled anyone who disagreed with the same intervention as a cowardly leftist and/or amoral realist).

In any case, part of the problem with having a solipsistic worldview is that you tend to miss certain obvious things about the world: like the fact that Brose’s position hardly makes him a neoconservative; it in fact places him pretty squarely within the foreign policy Establishment (and somewhere to the left of President Obama, if one holds him to his remarks on the subject during the campaign).

Now Damir remarks that he’s always held a high regard for Brose’s intelligence. Having known Brose for the better part of a decade, I can attest to that. Certainly, he belongs at the forefront of that Establishment. Nonetheless, his is still a position I happen to disagree with — for reasons having nothing to do with fatuous arguments over whether Pashtun culture is inimical to democracy.

This isn’t really even a matter of shepherding a foreign country to democracy, as has been done before. This, as I see it, is a matter of state-building, which we’ve actually never done before in the true sense of the word. The issue for the people of Afghanistan is not whether their regime will be democratic, feudal, authoritarian, etc., but whether the state will have any kind of legitimacy at all — whether relations among different groups will be governed by anarchy or stable hierarchy. What we now call Afghans have lived with some form of anarchy for literally centuries. That the Taliban initially brought order of a kind was one of the reasons that their rule was embraced — at first.

Historically-speaking, most states have been carved out through war. The process of replacing anarchy in a given territory with something else is a long and bloody one. Today, our presence in Afghanistan provides some form of order, intended to mitigate the effects of that process. The U.S. military is a Leviathan, of sorts. This is what we’re really talking about: shielding the bulk of Afghan territory from anarchy as its people build a semi-modern state peacefully rather than violently.

I confess that it escapes me how this relates to U.S. interests, given our resources (which are scarcer, I think, than Brose allows). Ultimately, this is a colonial venture, which has historically only put off rather than defrayed the true and tragic costs of state-building.

Perhaps I share Damir’s pessimism, though in my case it is probably due less to any Slavic heritage and more to listening to The Cure too much when I was an adolescent. In any case, I cannot help but see our mission in Afghanistan as hubristic, and I would rather bear (the very real) cost of withdrawal than the ongoing cost of seeing it through to an ill-defined end.

Or, to put it in literary terms, I’d rather be Harry Flashman than Peachy Carnahan.