In 1979 and 1980, when the decision was made, we were dealing with a powerful Soviet Union that was on a roll. The Soviet Union maintained terrorist training camps all over their country. If the Soviet Union had prevailed then, I can only imagine what the world would have been like subsequently. I am not at all regretful that the Soviet Union collapsed, and one of the reasons it collapsed was because of what we did in Afghanistan. I would not hesitate to do it again.
But there’s something else to be said apropos of the current situation. A public opinion poll recently appeared in the Economist which showed that 80 percent of the people in Iraq would like our troops to leave, but 70 percent of the people in Afghanistan want our troops to stay despite the growing difficulties. That should focus our attention on an important point: namely, that we wouldn’t have that support today in Afghanistan if we hadn’t done what we did beginning in the Carter Administration. The support of the majority of the Afghan people greatly minimizes the threat from Islamist extremists confronting us today. Moreover, the al-Qaeda phenomenon has been much more a Middle Eastern phenomenon than an Afghan one. There are hardly any Afghans among the terrorists responsible for 9/11 and other attacks in Europe and elsewhere. Let me add, however, an additional point: My great fear is that if we over-militarize our current efforts in Afghanistan, we will gradually turn the Afghans against us. They do not care for foreigners with guns in their country.
On the Taliban rise
The fact of the matter is that the Taliban came into the region after ten years of sustained Soviet pulverization of Afghan society, and after at least half a decade of American indifference to Afghanistan after the Soviets left. That’s the backdrop against which to view the Taliban’s rise.American indifference to Afghanistan after the Soviets leave is important in all of this. Americans like to cut and run. We win a war and then forget that building communities, strengthening social frameworks that will allow for markets and democratic governance is a very nuanced and long-term process that must be navigated very carefully. The shoot from the hip cowboy sway that George Bush is famous for amongst his supports is detrimental to long term successes around the globe. And lets face it, with China and India rising the more we waste energy over extending ourselves and not nurturing strong global relationships the more we harm our long term economic success.
The arrival of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan took place, as you say, in the second half of the 1990s, 16 years after we initially decided to prevent the Soviets from prevailing in Afghanistan. So it is a totally ahistorical argument which seems to be premised on the notion, maybe implicitly, that it would be better if the Soviet Union still existed. That way we would not be waging “World War IV”, as some of the crazies among the neocons call it, against Islamofascism.
Islamofascism... I really don't like that word, it generally shows a lack of historical as well as on-the-ground complexities of what is going on.
AI: It’s certainly clear to anyone who’s been paying attention that, as you well know, the forces that issued forth from the mujaheddin experience included not just Muslims who don’t like us, but also the several constituents of the Northern Alliance, who were also mujaheddin but were on our side during the war. This is a complicated part of the world. It isn’t easily divisible into good guys and bad guys. There aren’t just two sides but often three or four sides. Yet Americans seem to approach all these subjects with what S.I. Hayakawa once called the “two-value orientation.” Are we so Manichaean of mind that we can’t understand a conflict with more than two sides?
ZB: I think you’re putting your finger on a major weakness of contemporary America. The weakness is that we’re more democratic than we’ve ever been before, in the sense that popular pressures translate into policy pressures very quickly. And we’re probably as ignorant as ever about the rest of the world, because everybody now lives in a kind of simplistic, trivialized virtual reality in which fact and fiction, impressions and impulses, are mixed up in an incoherent fashion. The public really has no grasp of complexities, no sense of intellectual refinement in judging them, and our political leaders have become increasingly demagogic. The way George W. Bush campaigned for the war in Iraq, with reference to fictitious WMDs, and with sweeping, simplistic, black-and-white generalizations about freedom and tyranny, is a case in point. But he was responding to our increasingly imbecilized societal condition. This is very troublesome. I think the degeneration of the newspapers as a primary source of information, the collapse of serious television news programs, and the emergence of this kind of instant communion between reality and virtual reality creates a collective state of mind that is not derived from rational analysis.
I like his re-direct... that the way George Bush campaigned was a direct repercussion of what the American public will listen to. I like re framing things in ways that make people accountable. Oh.. woe is me the world is hopeless, the masses are ignorant, I'm smart enough to grasp such a complex world, its too bad others aren't as wise as I am!" When you flip a question and make it a form of accountability. Forcing people to look in the mirror the question becomes how do I do things--in a very proactive manner--that can counter-balance the bad things going on in the world. I see them, where many other don't quite grasp it. It is up to me to work with others and do things that can push back on this tide of ignorance and naivety.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat to the United States became more diversified, and related to less tangible and less rational populist, ethnic and religious dynamics. In this third phase, understanding the intellect, penetrating the culture, and relating on a human basis to often non-Western decision-makers has become much more important. In this phase, I think we have been a total flop. We misunderstood what was happening in Iran early on in the 1970s; we failed to grasp the rise of radical populism later on; and most recently, the advent of Islamist terrorism hit us almost completely unawares. The debacle in Iraq with intelligence was just the culmination of this inadequacy. Even the fairly recent seeming reversal of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran—at least in the unclassified version—testifies to the fundamental, politically damaging lack of credibility of our intelligence establishment today. While I am prepared to believe that the most recent update on Iran is probably more accurate than the earlier one, one could also make a plausible case for the opposite being true.Asking questions, wanting leaders who ask questions... true since the days of Socrates and Jesus...
AI: Here’s another example of your point: One outcome of the Iraq war, so far anyway, has been a significant exacerbation of the Sunni-Shi‘a rivalry throughout the Muslim world. When I was in government, I asked several people in a position to know if anyone had studied this issue before the war as a possible concern. The answer I got was of the yes-and-no variety. Yes, there were people in the intelligence community who had flagged this as an issue, but no, no senior decision-maker had evinced the slightest curiosity about it. Therefore, since nobody asked our experts to study the issue, it was never evaluated in-depth. That’s alarming.
ZB: It is, yes, and it all pertains to public statements about conditions in the Persian Gulf in the phase preceding the decision to go into Iraq. The President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense rarely referred to the cleavage between the Sunnis and the Shi‘a or the potential implications of these cleavages. I strongly suspect that when the President announced the decision to go into Iraq, he wasn’t intellectually aware of the ramifications of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide.
AI: But again, it’s not because the U.S. government doesn’t know these things; it’s because our leaders don’t ask the questions, and it doesn’t pay intelligence professionals anymore to work on issues no one demands to know about, no matter how important they may be.
ZB: That’s right, and we may have had a National Security Advisor at the time who wasn’t particularly curious about these things either, and worse, wasn’t determined enough to compel the President to address the ramifications of this issue. After all, one of the jobs of the NSA is not just to coordinate the activities of the different agencies, but also to encourage the President to digest intelligently the available information from the intelligence community.
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