Things are not going well for the United States in Afghanistan. The Washington Post headlines an increase in US deaths. Somewhere down in the article, we read that a ranking American official says, " . . . There has to be better governance, less corruption, more economic development and more vigilance paid to counternarcotics in order to ultimately bring peace and stability to Afghanistan." (See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR2008070103070_2.html?referrer=emailarticle&sid=ST2008070103113&pos=)
That is spoken by someone who did not ask advice from the British or Russians, both of whom blunted their swords without much effect in Afghanistan.
I do not claim great expertise on Afghanistan. I spent a limited time there years ago, and have followed things from a distance. I think that I know enough to distrust experts who claim to know what is happening where, and how a foreign force ought to invest its efforts. I have seen the emblems on a cliff face in the Khyber Pass of all those British units that failed in the 19th century. Frustrated Russians left the place, having done little more than killing a lot of their own soldiers, perhaps more Afghans, and contributing to the destruction of the USSR.
Were I making US policy, I would have left Afghanistan after giving a massive post 9-11 blow to the Taliban. Whoever ran parts of the country would then know the cost of tangling with America. I would not have invaded Iraq. Never would I aspire to reform either country.
For those who think about Israel's efforts with the Palestinians as a model for how the Americans should operate in Muslim areas, I have bad news.
Palestine is much smaller in size and population than anything faced by the US. There may be 3 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which together are smaller in size than many American metropolitan areas.
Israel has been dealing with Palestinians for its entire modern history. High schools and junior high schools teach Arabic. It is second to English as a foreign language. High school graduates who are close to fluent, or fluent, spend their military service in intelligence. Some stay for a career in the army or another of the security services.
The IDF takes youngsters right out of high school, and makes some of them officers. Later it invests heavily in education for those who stay on.
Last year I supervised the masters theses of five colonels in the National Defense College. They wrote their theses in about three months, compared to one to three years that civilian students allocate to the task. All of them were acceptable, within standards that I have learned over the course of 40 years. Two of them merited translation and publication in international journals. I offered to help, but the students who wrote them were assigned to functions that would demand all of their time.
The security forces also invest heavily in Palestinian sources of information, not in ways they wish to reveal. There are unmanned aircraft and balloons with cameras in the air much of the time. The result is that the army knows which car to destroy from the air, and which house to enter in order to take away more of the bad people.
Aspirations are no greater than to achieve a few years of relative quiet. Under pressure from the Bush administration, some politicians speak of making peace with a Palestine on the road to democracy. Few Israelis buy that line.
We know that concerted efforts against organized violence will lead enraged individuals to take a kitchen knife, or a bulldozer, and seek to kill Jews. I begin to cry whenever I read about the mother killed in the latest incident, who threw her baby out of the car just before it was crushed. The baby is all right.
American optimists see hope for their efforts in Iraq. I do not claim to be a prophet, but I expect that American troops will remain there and in Afghanistan for as long as they will be in Germany, Japan, and Korea. It is not easy being a world empire, with responsibility for everything.
Ira Sharkansky (Emeritus)
Department of Political Science
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Home tel: 972-2-532-2725
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