Nation Building, Nation Leaving

 

Not for nothing has Afghanistan been called "the graveyard of empires."  It's seen several come and go, and it's unclear that any of them left it changed in any significant or enduring respect.  This isn't to say that it has been unchanged since the time of Alexander the Great, when he and the army his father Phillip built wandered and conquered there.  But it is to say that what has changed in Afghanistan would very likely have changed regardless of efforts made to control and dominate it by foreign powers.

Our Glorious Union was there in force for twenty years.  Let's not debate whether our Great Republic is an empire, properly speaking.  Let's not debate the soundness of the reasons for our entry, though that's certainly something which can be debated.  Of more importance at this time (I think) are what took place after we intervened in that country's history, and the manner of our departure.

I can't think of an instance where a foreign power has conquered a nation and successfully built another, different nation in its place.  The concept of "nation building" strikes me as essentially hubristic.  It's a task so colossal, and therefore so expensive, that it's hard to believe any would attempt it.  Ancient Rome managed to conquer and have imperium of vast territory occupied by different nations for centuries, but even when "Romanizing" its provinces, it never sought to drastically alter the religion and culture of those conquered, except in the case of Judea.  Judea was a special case, though.  It revolted twice, and its distinctness, otherwise tolerated by Rome due to the fact its uniqueness was ancient, became dangerous.  Also, the emperor who presided over the second revolt of its people, Hadrian, was misguided in thinking he could change it into something it simply could not be.

It's likely that Hadrian may have thought not merely that the response to the second revolt should be brutal and thoroughly so, as it certainly was.  He may have thought, as an avid Hellenophile, that suppression of Judaism and forceful imposition of Graeco-Roman culture and religion was in the best interest of its people.

It doesn't seem to be the case that we entered Afghanistan to engage in nation building.  But the mission must have changed, somehow.  Our leaders evidently thought it was in the best interests of the people of Afghanistan that its society, culture and religion be changed, not merely that its people be controlled and rendered quiescent.  The latter was generally the strategy of Rome.  Let them be orderly, peaceful, and tax-paying, respectful of the genius of Rome and its emperors; then all will be well no matter what gods they worship or what their customs may be.  It's possible that order may have been achieved, and violence, at least against the U.S., limited if not eradicated.  But I think it's always been highly unlikely that Afghanistan would become anything like America or Europe in its customs, or in its religion or system of law, or in the freedoms and rights granted its people, though that may well be in the best interests of its people.

When that's unlikely or impossible, the wisdom of "nation building" must be questioned, and the costs especially in terms of lives lost or destroyed that result from such an ill-fated effort recognized, and it should be avoided.  Some people are very different from us and some don't even want to be like us.  They can't be made to be like us.  This should be a truth easy enough to accept.  But it seems we don't, or can't accept it.

In any case, it seems that if we're inclined to accept it, we do so far too late, and when we do we strive to extricate ourselves from the mess created precipitately.  We want to "cut our losses" as soon as we can.  The thought is to remove Americans as quickly as possible, regardless of consequences.  The result is chaos.  Such is the fate of those who purport to create a Western style democracy in Afghanistan, perhaps.  

The speed with which the Taliban was able to "take back their country" to use a phrase we've heard before was apparently surprising.  Also surprising, we hear, was the manner in which the army we tried to create to replace us, eventually, took flight from them.  Perhaps it was our intent to help those who helped us, putting their lives at risk, by evacuating them as well as ourselves.  One would hope so.  One would hope we still manage to save all the people we can.  But we won't save all who helped us or wished for a change, and their fate becomes the legacy of our twenty years there, to little purpose though the cost was great.  What did those who died in service to their country there die for?  We ask the same question regarding those who died in Vietnam. 

A helicopter perched on the top of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, a line of people trying to climb into it.  That photograph taken in 1975 during the Fall of Saigon is a famous one, and has been dug up for display alongside photos taken much more recently in Kabul.  The evacuation of Saigon was called "Operation Frequent Wind."  One wonders who came up with the name, and what was intended by it.  Better than "Breaking Wind" I suppose.  What will the evacuation of Kabul be called?  Something like "Frantic Departure" probably won't be selected.  

The United States should not be an empire.  It acts as if it is one from time to time.  In the Mexican War, in the Spanish-American War, in taking the Philippines.  There clearly are moral reasons for not being imperial.  But I also think that we're too inclined not only to enrich ourselves and our friends, but  also  to impose not merely order but what we think and believe on others, our culture and society, on others.  That may be impossible and is certainly impractical.  We're not Romans, that's to say.

The War I Missed



I turned 18 in 1972.  That was the year the last draft lottery took place.  The lottery applied only to those who had been born in 1953, though, and I was born in 1954.  I duly registered for the draft, but consequently wasn't drafted.  My draft card lies somewhere among the debris I've accumulated over the years, but there is no other token of the Vietnam War among that debris, nor did I become debris of that war as many others did.  The Burns/Novick production The Vietnam War serves to remind me of the war I was fortunate enough to miss.

I didn't know when I registered that there was no chance I would be drafted, unless another lottery was held.  In fact, I knew little enough of the war itself.  Though a Boomer, I wasn't an old enough Boomer for the war to have a great deal of impact on me personally.  I knew no veterans at the time.  As far as I can recall, there wasn't much discussion of the war among my friends in high school, or even in college.  We weren't threatened by it, not really.  By the time I graduated from college, of course, the war had ended.

What I remember of the war and those times is what I saw on TV or read in the newspapers.  Like most whose exposure to the war was thus limited, I knew very little, relatively speaking.  I never participated in a protest march.  I never protested.  I was 14 at the time the 1968 Democratic convention took place in Chicago, and saw footage of the rioting, heard the speeches at the convention, or some of them, watched the now famous, or infamous, Buckley/Vidal debates with what comprehension I had as a 14 year old, which I think wasn't much.

I'm a fairly avid reader, though, and read of the war as I grew older.  I knew, for example, that in purely tactical terms the Tet offensive was a miserable failure for the North long before the work of Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick appeared on our TV sets, and knew also that our nation wasn't particularly impressed by that fact.  I knew the argument that we should have won, but could not win as the war wasn't supported by the nation.  I knew that this lack of support was sometimes blamed on liberals or the liberal media.   I tend to think that an empire failed to do justice to its soldiers, and failed even to recognize that it was an empire engaged in a war of empire, between empires.

I knew the argument we should not have been there in the first place, knew of the incursions into Laos. the troop withdrawals late in the war, the largely ineffective "peace talks", Kent State, the march on the Pentagon (I read Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night; also Miami and the Siege of Chicago), the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the campus protests.  Much is called to mind in watching Burns/Novick's version of the war.

What I didn't know, most of all, was what happened to those who fought or otherwise served in the war.  This documentary does us a great service by informing us of what happened to them, and what they thought and think about it. 

I think that if I had been drafted, I would have been one of them in some capacity or another.  I had no objections to the war which would have sufficed to prompt me to seek refuge in Canada, and didn't think of myself as a conscientious objector.  What I find most remarkable, and disturbing, is how little touched I was by a war that took the lives of many of those but a year or two older than I was; it's an unsettling fact.  Perhaps our sense of history is ultimately selfish, or perhaps mine is, in any case.

 

Very few of those appearing in the documentary come out looking well, outside of those who fought.  For them I find it impossible to feel anything but pity and respect.  Those objecting to the war appear small.  It's possible, of course, that objections to the war could have resulted from the belief that the war was immoral, but the protesters preening in front of the cameras hardly seem heroic or lit with the fire of righteousness.  Pity for them is appropriate when they're killed, as were those at Kent State, or beaten, or jailed if for merely expressing an opinion.  How many of them were, though?  The politicians seem even smaller, in fact despicable. 

 

In the end, America did what was politically expedient.  Arguably, that's what it did when it became engaged in Vietnam in the first place.  Arguably, that's what it does now and what it will always do; what is all it can do.