Crashing Out
In Afghanistan, the United States succeeded only in creating a virtual fantasyland.
In the summer of 2002, Karl Rove arranged a meeting with journalist Ron Suskind to tell him that reality was a thing of the past. Rove was the most senior and best-known advisor to President George W. Bush, the mastermind behind his election almost two years earlier. The meeting with Suskind happened as the Iraq War was looming. Public debate about invading Iraq revolved around forensic evidence and intelligence reports, taken more or less seriously by the members of what Rove called the “reality-based community”—people emotionally attached to reality the way their ancestors were attached to God.
Suskind did not disagree. He liked to believe that solutions emerge from the “study of discernible reality,” but when he started to mumble something about the values of the Enlightenment and the ideal of empiricism, Rove cut him off. “Not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality . . . we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort themselves out.”
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the point of the enterprise was to act decisively against an old foe and bring him down. What might happen afterward was not really considered. The connections linking the invasion to the surrounding context, the parallel plot lines, the vast network of unpredictable consequences that the wars would inevitably bring about or the new possibilities that they would open up—all these elements were mostly ignored. If the invasions and wars were a story, they were an adventure tale, composed of the simplest elements: the hero sets out to defeat a cruel enemy and returns home, covered in glory.
In the movies, everything is much simpler. Look at the credits: people are clearly identified as Nazis, and assigned actors play the roles. The real world is more ambiguous. What the American forces started to discover once they were on the ground in Afghanistan in December 2001 was that the Taliban were less a band of criminals or fanatics than a sociological reality. One could be a Taliban this week and something else the next. At the same time, they were deeply implanted in Pashtun society, and any attempt to extract the body of the Taliban from the body of the Pashtuns was by definition impossible.
Craig Whitlock’s recently published Afghanistan Papers include evocative passages describing the moments when Pashtun elders tried to explain the laws of sociology to the foreign generals they entertained for tea. “There are three kinds of Taliban,” they began. The Americans listened in wonder, as if being introduced to a new way of looking at the world.
Once these new thoughts were processed, the conviction in something like a final victory started to dissipate. How could the Taliban be defeated? They could certainly be overcome, but that would require a radical transformation of Afghan society, and the Americans weren’t really interested in that. The Soviets had tried to do it and failed, but for America it was never a serious project.
*****
Continue reading this article, published September 13, 2021 at City Journal.
