Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)
Robert Kaplan makes an Afghanistan of the mind.
This is in his New York Times op-ed today, where he spells out why, quoting a hedged form of his opinion, “it may soon be time for the United States to get out of the country altogether.”
Afghanistan, Kaplan says, is like a huge and hugely expensive American aircraft carrier.
But let’s be honest with ourselves: Afghanistan is like the huge and hugely expensive aircraft carriers we continue to build, increasingly obsolete in an era of sophisticated missile technology and hypersonic warfare.
If we imagine Afghanistan as an expensive aircraft carrier, we are not being honest with ourselves. Afghanistan is not like an aircraft carrier, at all.
Afghanistan is like Bolivia. Afghanistan is like Nepal. Afghanistan is a high and landlocked country, with very high levels of hunger and extreme poverty. It is a country of subsistence farmers, and a country with a densely-populated capital confined in a high mountain valley.
It is a country with many people struggling to balance idealism and pragmatism in their politics, hope and realism, under trying political conditions, perhaps much like ourselves.
Afghanistan has been at war now, in differing phases and intensities, for 40 years, to devastating accumulated effect on the people and on the infrastructure. With internal war of that duration, it is not like many other places at all.
By imaging Afghanistan as an American aircraft carrier, we effectively hide the hunger and the poverty from ourselves. We hide from ourselves, anyone who lives there, and what they think. We hide from ourselves the full scope of the longer war.
Hiding these things from ourselves might make op-ed level discussion of whether the United States should now leave a whole lot less uncomfortable. It does not make the discussion more honest.
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