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.
Joseph Conrad imagines imperialism as a gunboat, anchored off the coast of Africa, pointlessly shelling.
He imagines Africa as a continent, pointlessly being shelled.
He does not imagine Africa as the boat.
Robert Kaplan, in his op-ed, takes an explicitly anti-imperialist position. Afghanistan is a symbol of our declining empire, he says. It is time for us to let it go.
As evidence of our internalized imperialism, though, having Afghanistan and the boat be the very same thing, is strong. We do not notice, but it is how we think. American military might is a focusing lens through which we unavoidably see the world. If Afghanistan is the boat, and the boat is withdrawn, then Afghanistan is left not existing.
It is hardly the height of anti-imperialism, to rhetorically reduce a place we have invaded and occupied, to be our own warships. To imagine an Afghanistan that has no existence apart from us, and no difference.
You could say, Kaplan does not mean that Afghanistan is an American aircraft carrier. He means that America, in Afghanistan, is an American aircraft carrier.
It comes down to the same thing. Afghanistan is reduced to American involvement. We continually use a rhetoric that reduces the country that way.
Conrad’s 19th-century man-of-war flies a limp flag. The masts for its sails are thin. It moves lazily, in the waves.
Kaplan’s 20th-century aircraft carrier is obsolete. It is vulnerable to sophisticated missiles.
But the aircraft carrier of the mind is still so powerful, that it can obliterate the whole of Afghanistan out of existence.
Kaplan writes, sourcing the idea to Ahmed Rashid, of Pakistan, of the basic standards that Afghans enjoyed, from the 1950s, up to the Soviet invasion of December 1979.
I suspect that what Rashid wrote is imprecisely reconveyed. For 1978 and 1979, in Afghanistan, at the historical level, you would not use the word “enjoy.”
”Reign of terror” is a better phrase.
Afghanistan will be called a symbol. Kaplan uses the word. Most anyone writing about Afghanistan sometimes will. The 1978 Saur revolution, in Afghanistan, before the Soviets invaded, is a symbol of a progressive modernist revolution, gone terribly awry.
I do not intend here to be making a pedantic quibble about a small matter of dates.
If the Soviets invade, and we can only see the Soviet invasion, and not see the Afghanistan before it, we do not really have an anti-imperialist view. We are, in our minds, not allowing Afghanistan any independent existence. The Afghanistan of our minds always serves our own political needs.
On board the USS Missouri, in 1945, the Japanese government signed an instrument of surrender, ending the Second World War. American racism, of the day, saw in the Japanese people an inherent fanatical violence. Since that time, Japan has been at peace, and the United States, to various intensities, at continual war.
Nations and peoples sometimes make immediate U-turns on their wargoing, in a way that aircraft carriers cannot.
Robert Kaplan, today, sees a deterministic factional wargoing in Afghanistan.
Indeed, Afghanistan represents the triumph of the deterministic forces of geography, history, culture, and ethnic and sectarian awareness, with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras and other groups competing for patches of ground. Tribes, warlords and mafia-style networks that control the drug trade rule huge segments of the country.
Afghanistan sat out World Wars I and II. Americans, of European heritage, it seems to me, should really lay off on claims of inherent or essentialist or deterministic violence in anyone else.
”[I]t is striking how little discussion Afghanistan has generated in government and media circles in Washington,” Kaplan says. This is true, but it is also missing another side of it.
When I (frequently) read this opinion expressed, I have typically read some four to five media articles about Afghanistan that day. Only four or five, because I am only looking for them moderately hard.
It is striking, to me, what high volume of reporting on Afghanistan the New York Times, in particular, puts out, and yet how invisible it is.
The newspaper discussion of Afghanistan goes by. We have a blindness, and do not see it as it goes. Having been blind to it, we will claim that it does not exist, and say that the media is at fault.
Mujib Mashal describes an Afghanistan of the real world.
This is in his investigative article yesterday, in the New York Times, on the abusive practices of Afghan paramilitary strike forces, supported by the American C.I.A. It is a major piece:
For months, The New York Times has investigated the human toll of the C.I.A.-sponsored forces on communities. Times journalists researched frequent complaints — at times almost weekly — that these units had raided and killed civilians, and The Times went to the sites of half a dozen of their raids, often less than 24 hours after the force had left.
The investigation found details of a C.I.A. mission with tactical successes that have come at the cost of alienating the Afghan population. One former senior Afghan security official bluntly accused the strike forces of war crimes.
You will find, in that article, Afghans given voice, and a strong one.
I just do not see how we here, in America, can get to any truth about Afghanistan, or to any truth about American involvement in Afghanistan, if we are always and continually mentally putting an aircraft carrier in between us and them, which then blots them out.