By Steve Hynd
Today is the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Welcome to the tenth year of occupation.
Afghanistan became a nine year war under an exceptionalist, colonial interpretation of the Pottery Barn Rule - we broke it, so we get to fix it - that allows Americans to ask questions like "should Afghanistan exist?" without even a hint of wondering whether that's really Afghans' question to answer.
Whatever happened to the real Pottery Barn Rule? The one that went, implcitly: "You broke it, you pay for it and get the f**k out of our store."
Well, the neoconservatives of the right had dreams of shaking up the world that involved "exporting democracy" at gunpoint and the neoliberals of the left had dreams of "humanitarian intervention" at gunpoint that both floundered on the same rock - the locals don't like having guns pointed at them. Go figure. However, their shared dream of intervention via the magic of counterinsurgency - inevitably colonialist, with all the negatives that entails, even as it was supposed to rescue two failed foreign interventions - has meant that for the last nine years we have spent thousands of lives and trillions of dollars trying to apply the first version of that Rule - at gunpoint - rather than observing the second.
Denial of this basic fact allows interventionists to argue, with a straight face, that "disaffection" with the current state of the Afghanistan misadventure is "fundamentally rooted in a lack of knowledge". I'd love to see Adam Weinstein of MoJo say that to Giles Dorronsoro's face!
Adam would do better to listen to Daniel Drezner:
"I think what this has been a referendum on is statebuilding," he told me. But maybe that's a good thing, he added: "We've proven we're not terribly good at it."
We've proven terribly bad at it because we've ignored the real Pottery Barn Rule. The worry should not be that the U.S. will become "full-on isolationist, rejecting even the most pressing of future interventions for human rights or security". The worry should be that the U.S. will remain inclined towards magical thinking that encourages interventionsim even in cases where the national interest is at best marginal - or where, like Iraq, the national interest is entirely made up.
In this tenth year of occupation, it's time we remembered that rule.
Bush/Cheney couldn't leave Afghanistan after not getting Bin Laden, even if they would have wanted to and despite the fact that their real target was Iraq, because any additional terrorist attack by any Bin Laden franchise or by attackers linked to Afghanistan would have cost them the presidency.
ReplyDeleteObama doesn't seem to think he has a solution for that issue either, even though the personification of the problem by Bin Laden may be fading.