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Nov 17, 2001 Change is coming to Afghanistan. The Taliban are on the run, having lost a great deal of territory and at least one key leader. The question now is who will emerge from the fray with control of Afghanistan. Western television stations have shown Afghan citizens shaving their beards and rending their veils, publicly abandoning the religious strictures imposed upon them by the fundamentalist Taliban. The increased freedom is a positive development. We’ve also had brief glimpses of more troubling activities: a group of Northern Alliance soldiers brutally beating a Taliban soldier, for example, or the Northern Alliance charging into Kabul despite American requests that they hold back. Such things happen in wartime, to be sure. As retired Gen. Wesley Clark told to Wolf Blitzer, "War is a matter of relative evils. We're not legally responsible for all this and we're probably not going to be able to physically stop it, either." Neither can we ignore it, because it presents an important lesson for the United States of America. We do not have the luxury of neutrality. For all that our president insists we are not interested in nation-building, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We have taken one apart, and the only alternative to rebuilding it is to repeat the mistake we made in this very place: achieving our narrow objectives and then turning our backs. The United States supported the mujahadeen in driving Soviet forces from Afghanistan. When the Soviets departed, so did we, our narrowly defined object achieved. We left rival Afghan groups jockeying for power, and the Taliban emerged victorious. They cast their lot with Osama bin Laden, and so we’re back, fighting in Afghanistan. Unless some power — the UN would be the appropriate entity — enforces democratic elections in Afghanistan, the group that rises to fill the void left by the retreating Taliban will once again be the most vicious rather than the most popular, the most humane, or the most able to set up a sustainable government. Americans may not understand the political realities of governing a poor, primitive country. Instant democracy will not be possible. Someone must help Afghanistan to become a nation that sees more benefit from participating responsibly in world affairs than from harboring such terrorists as bin Laden. That cannot be accomplished by standing back and watching. We must not forget Clark’s point about relative evils. There’s no doubt that the Taliban was, in many ways, evil, but the Northern Alliance is not saintly, even in relative terms. The Northern Alliance is also not the only rebel group in Afghanistan; it just happens to be the one winning right now. Bush has said many times that those nations and groups that aren’t with us are against us, but the reverse doesn’t hold true. Those that aren’t against us, right now, may not be long-term allies. The mujahadeen were not. There’s nothing morally wrong with building nations. We have the expertise, we have the resources, and we have the best reasons for doing so: If we don’t, someone else will, and it’s very likely to be someone with considerably less respect for the welfare of the Afghan people than the United States would demonstrate. This is not the time for isolationism. It’s time to learn the lesson that Afghanistan has to teach us. |
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Copyright © 2001 the Cortez
Journal. All rights reserved. |
