Go-o-od night, Afghanista-a-a-an!

by David Benjamin

“So the British chose plan B — the insane one; they decided to abandon Kabul and march out of the country over the Hindu Kush on foot in January. They left on the 6th… a long column of 4,500 active troops and about 12,000 wives, retainers, servants, camp followers, and whatnot… A few were taken as hostages and eventually released, but of the group that left Kabul on that terrible day, only one European made it to Jalalabad to tell the world what had happened…”
— Tamim Ansary, Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan

MADISON, Wis. — Adrian Cronauer comes to mind. In one of his finest roles, Robin Williams depicted Cronauer’s service as a DJ on Armed Forces Radio in Saigon during the rapid U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam. With the exception of his signature tagline (and the movie’s title), “Go-o-od morning Vietna-a-a-am!”, the film substantially fictionalized Cronauer. But, in one important aspect, it illuminated vividly the American dilemma in Vietnam.

In pursuit of a beautiful girl, Williams’ version of Cronauer befriends her brother, Tuan (played by Tung Thanh Tran). Later in the story, Tuan rescues Cronauer and his hapless chaperone, Garlick (Forest Whitaker) from a Viet Cong ambush. Cronauer only learns later that his life was saved because Tuan was an agent of the guerrilla VC. Cronauer is outraged at Tuan’s betrayal of their friendship but comes to realize that he’s the spokesman of an occupying foreign military force.

Cronauer shouts, “I gave you my friendship, and my trust. And now they tell me that my best friend is the goddamn enemy!”

Tuan replies, “Enemy? What is enemy? You killing my own people so many miles from your home. We’re not the enemy! You the enemy!”

After this, Tuan slips away and — identical to every other “little Vietnamese” — disappears into the swirling Saigon throng. He is a soldier indistinguishable as a soldier, just as — after U.S. combat forces swept through Afghanistan, ousting Al Qaeda and overthrowing the Taliban regime in Kabul — the Taliban melted into the villages and neighborhoods of a country that’s not a country in any sense that most Americans can understand.

We didn’t understand — or try to understand — Vietnam, which was a Cold War prize for the U.S. State Department and a golden opportunity for the Pentagon to practice a military fallacy called counterinsurgency. That counterinsurgency failed absolutely — killing 58,000 American kids and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians, mostly civilians — is a fact. It failed again during interventions in Central and South America, in the Horn of Africa and in various outposts of the Middle East. But this did not deter the Pentagon from taking another crack at counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

As is S.O.P. for the military minds of the DoD, no one bothered — before descending on it like an avenging psychopath — to delve into the tortured history and unique sociology of Afghanistan. Nor, before us, did “conquering” armies from Britain and the Russia bother to crack a book and bone up. If they had, they might have noted that even native conquerers, like Abu’Rahman in the 19th century and Amanullah in the 1920s, could not long sustain a discernible central government. As Tamin Ansary explains in his eminently readable history, Games Without Rules, Afghanistan has long been a polity without politics. “Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it’s intervening in ‘a country,’ but it’s actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.”

The criminal folly of invading Afghanistan — whose prevailing cliché defines it as “the graveyard of empires” — blended ignorance with a level of arrogance that should have been shamed out of the USA by Ho Chi Minh. Ansary notes that “During the presidential election campaign of 2000, when George Bush was asked about the Taliban, he thought the interviewer was asking about a rock band.”

Former president Trump actually had a better read on the Taliban than his forebears. After cutting a secret deal to pull out U.S. troops, he gushed with self-congratulation. “We’re dealing very well with the Taliban,” he said. “They’re very tough, they’re very smart, they’re very sharp.”

What Trump perceived is that the Taliban are gangsters, part of a global trend toward Mob government that stretches from Russia to Turkey to Hungary and elsewhere. Trump is not only a casino bankrupter and New York real estate grifter whose career required regular parleys with made men. He admires and emulates mobsters. He spent four years trying to transform the U.S. government into his own personal Cosa Nostra. He actually succeeded with the Supreme Court. The Taliban — whose tools of the trade are murder, drug trafficking, terror, murderous loyalty and issues with their hair — are Trump’s kind of guys.

Trump’s problem was, of course, that the Taliban are real gangsters, whereas he, all his life, has only been a poseur and a wannabe. So Trump’s “negotiators” got pantsed from the start, when they agreed to exclude the Kabul government from a deal that guaranteed this year’s chaotic U.S. extrication from the quagmire.

Despite the U.S. failure in Afghanistan — which has devolved into a vast pastiche of human and family tragedies among Afghans who put their faith in the rich and modern Americans who promised to lift them from their peasant atavism — it’s unfair to suggest that the occupations of the country by great foreign armies has not had some impact. Afghanistan’s culture retains remnants of every invader it has patiently frustrated, sniped, nipped, harried and humiliated. Historian Tamim Ansary notes that the Soviet Union, for example, spawned the mujahedeen guerrilla force, which became a sort of Islamic Animal House, which in turn served as a macho model for the Taliban.

Ansary explains the effects. “At the height of the Soviet occupation, Afghanistan became a country in which the tempering effects on men of living as members of families, clans, and communities dropped away. Millions of men went through years of living solely in the company of other adult men in some of the toughest conditions imaginable. They were members of a militia in a land devoid of women, children and elders. That experience changed the soul of the country…”

In 2001, Afghanistan, like Vietnam seventy years ago, was torn, divided and bloodied. It was fresh from ousting an invader that had commanded a mighty army with vast resources and state-of-the-art weaponry. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan harbored a guerrilla army that could slip invisibly into the populace, hide there and bide its time ’til the occupiers — inevitably — grew weary of the waste, death, corruption and discomfort of their dubious conquest. It was a place — it is a place — full of kids like Tuan, smiling, speaking broken English, sharing the native cuisine and making friends… until you turn your back.

The Taliban, as far as anyone’s knows, have no evident political skills. They’re good at shooting and killing, burning stuff down, scaring the hell out of people — especially women — and enforcing the Dress Code. They likely cannot govern, but they don’t need to. Afghanistan has never been an actual nation subject to orderly management. Its prevailing norm of low-grade chaos has always been the secret of its stubborn survival. Sooner or later, some Great Power, regarding this bunch of peasants, shopkeepers, clerics and comic militants as easy pickings, will decide to take charge and help Afghanistan live up to its potential.

Then, to paraphrase Santayana, the fun will begin all over again.