Even as we draw down the final combat troops from Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan seems more hopeless than ever. The obvious cause of the problems was that we more-or-less forgot Afghanistan for half a decade, continuing to occupy it while pursuing and aggressive (and pointless) occupation in Iraq. But there was another, more subtle, issue with our war on terror strategy. Let us look back to why Iraq failed so badly for so long, and why Afghanistan looks to be even worse.
Throughout the Bush years, there was a trend to our rhetoric, and our strategy, in the "War on Terror." We weren't fighting a methodology (terrorism), or even an ideology (radical anti-Americanism, separatism, fundamentalist religion, whichever motive for terrorism we happened to be battling at the moment). No, we were fighting a unified group of enemies with definite leaders and territory.
In fact, we were fighting World War II.
To the Bush Administration, the war on terror was simple. Invade Iraq and Afghanistan, spread democracy to them, overthrow the dictators. We could go in just like D-Day, win and leave. We would, after all, be "greeted as liberators." The speeches have echoes of the liberation of France. And one reason for the long occupation of Iraq was that our strategy was tailored to World War II. We were overthrowing dictators and making the world safe for democracy.
The problems with this are obvious. First, we aren't fighting organized governments and unified groups of people. Let's start with Iraq. Saddam Hussein was not Hitler, for all that he was, without question, an evil man. And Iraq was not a unified people. "Shock and Awe" achieved what it was meant to: the remains of Hussein's government were easily removed from power.
That was our first mistake. Because we weren't simply dealing with an oppressed populace under the heel of an evil dictator. They were three distinct religious and ethnic groups, with a long history, forced into artificial borders created by the British and French after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. It's worth noting that a large number of the Middle East's current political problems can be traced back to the intervention of European powers, particularly the British and French.
Iraq consists of Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, as well as Kurds, a nomadic Arab ethnic group. In Iraq, Hussein's government supported the minority Sunnis over the majority Shiites. He also committed genocide against the Kurds, but that's sort of par for the course. Everyone in the region has committed genocide against the Kurds. (I'll go over the Kurds briefly later on, they're an interesting side note but not relevant to the central issue).
So, look at the Shi'ia and Sunnis. Removing Hussein and instituting Democracy meant a major change in the balance of power, giving power back to the majority Shi'ia. And the Shi'ia did what an oppressed minority group would do when suddenly given majority power: they began removing rights from the now minority Sunnis.
This made Iraq's attempts to draft a constitution slightly awkward.
Because now, suddenly, we weren't dealing with a secular totalitarian government. The constitution Iraq was drafting for itself was a theocratic one, created by a majority Shi'ia government. This had a couple immediate effects: first, some Sunni Muslims in the majority Sunni territories began to fight a guerrilla insurgent war against the occupying American forces, who they saw as propping up an oppressive theocratic government.
Next, women's rights in Iraq were rolled back a millennium or so. One of the disadvantages to putting in a hard-line fundamentalist theocratic government is that they tend to make all those laws we disapprove of governments like, say, Saudi Arabia, or Iran making. So women suddenly found themselves unable to go to school, losing their jobs, unable to own property or drive vehicles or go out in public.
Oops. Sorry, ladies. Good thing we spread that democracy to Iraq, to preserve human rights.
Finally, the Kurds also began fighting an insurgent war against us in northern Iraq, including the much-contested city of Fallujah in Al-Anbar province. A little aside on the Kurds: the Kurds are, as mentioned above, a nomadic Arab tribe who have lived in lands in present-day Iraq, Turkey, and Iran for thousands of years. They are not, originally, Muslim. After World War I, their lands wound up divided between those three countries, when the British and French started dividing up the former Ottoman Empire amongst themselves. They have not done well since. Hussein committed genocide against them, Turkey considers them terrorists, and Iran's not especially fond of them, since they're not Muslims. They also control the territories with the majority of Iraq's oil. In short, they are constant targets.
[A further aside: Britain and France are basically responsible for every issue in the Middle East today. They drew the border lines between India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, created the Israeli territory, defined the borders of Iraq. The world is still, to this day, trying to recover from the effects of 19th and 20th-century colonialism.]
If the situation we've created in Iraq, overthrowing a secular dictatorship and putting into place a theocratic government, sounds familiar, that's because it is. It is, more or less, what we did in Afghanistan back in the late 70s and early 80s, in order to fight the Soviets. The Taliban was supported and put into place by... the United States.
And, of course, Afghanistan has many of the same problems with occupation that Iraq did, but even further compounded. We have completely destabilized the nation's government, and rather than being three distinct groups forced into artificial borders, Afghanistan consists of hundreds of diverse local tribal powers, not accustomed to centralized government, nor having much of a use for it. We can battle the Taliban all we want, but they're really not the issue. The issue is that we are trying to create a country out of nothing, and doing so not by providing an economic incentive to support a central government (i.e. infrastructure, education, protecting, etc.) but by trying to impose a government through military power, which doesn't really "capture the hearts and minds" of the Afghanis.
And in a roundabout way, this brings us back to our original point: why, despite its incredible inaccuracy and blind stupidity, was the World War II metaphor and strategy so popular? Because America needs a unified enemy to fight. In order to sustain popular support for a war, America needs to be able to say "These are the Bad Guys." But the metaphor we were really hungry for wasn't World War II.
It was the Cold War. And with the New Cold War comes the New Red Scare.
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