I'm not at all saying that you're wrong (I don't know enough about Afghan particulars to do so), but paying off the opposition and coopting premodern traditions (like, exploiting blood feuds between clans that were linked to Taliban-style Islamism and those that were Sufis) is pretty much exactly how Russia established peace in Chechnya, and Grozny nowadays looks like Houston (photos here: http://www.grozny.moy.su/photo/11-1 ) "Merely" all you have to do to get them to stop fighting them is to give them a reason to do so that makes sense from their cultural vantage point.
----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Mon, December 21, 2009 3:50:32 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Afghan stories
If anyone has time to kill, they might enjoy the following.
This article in The Nation about how the US funds the Taliban is beginning to get legs:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston
It's exactly what you'd expect, it's happened in many guerilla wars, but there's something about its scale ($200M/yr), the openness of it (it's basically a charge sheet) and the unavoidableness of it (the roads are just never going to be securable unless you want to fight a battle every time you ship food or gas) that really brings out home this war breeds its opponents, and the only way to douse many of them would be to withdraw. Nobody's going to stop fighting us when there's $200M/yr to be made! Not even in a rich country, never mind the poorest country in the world.
Which brings us to the second story, in todays NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/world/asia/20karzai.html
The main antagonist, Hashmat Karzai, is one of the security contractors in the first story.
In itself, it's classic vendetta story. I'm just now reading several histories of Florence in the 13th century, and it's exactly the same. Families wait decades to do their revenge killing. And reneging on a marriage contract is one of the primary causes. The most popular legend was that it was exactly such a marriage feud (the insult of rejection leading to murder) that started the entire Guelf/Ghibelline split.
And this is the world into which we're pumping $200M/yr. We're not building a modern world. We're hooking up the old one to a supercharger.
Michael
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