In Afghanistan, however, that is not the case. There was a certain set of allowable things. The Taliban has since been overthrown. The set of allowable things is larger than it was under the old government. Women, overall, are better off now. Yes, there are still women in the country just as bad off. There are still men in the country just as bad off. Overall, however, things are better. The set of allowable things is larger than it was.

As I’ve already said, if the best thing you can manage to say is “it wouldn’t have been any better under the Taliban,” you’re basically not saying much of anything. Speculation about what the “possibilities” might or might not have been under the Taliban is even more nebulous and less convincing.

Try thinking of it this way. Say someone were to topple George W. Bush’s administration, killing several thousand people in the process, and then proceeds to govern the US more or less as incompetently as Bush. The excuse they offer for their actions is that at least America isn’t worse off and now the “possibilities are wide open.” What do you say to those people? Does their argument impress you?

Had we not overthrown the Taliban, life in Afghanistan would be the same in 2006 as it was in 2000.

If you don’t feel that that is a safe assumption, I’d like to know why. It’s the basic assumption I make when I compare Afghanistan now to Afghanistan in our alternate world where we didn’t invade.

It seems to me that the possibilities for Afghanistan are open wide, now. Before, under the Taliban, the possibilities were much more limited.

If you don’t even think that those assumptions are warranted, it’s no wonder we’re talking past each other.

You have the problem backwards. If someone wants to claim that Afghanistan was helped by the war, but can’t really demonstrate this, saying “it would have been the same under the Taliban” is irrelevant, and trying to claim that those of “the Left” who opposed it were crazy or morally incoherent for doing so is cmopletely unconvincing. If the best you can manage on that score is “well gosh, it wouldn’t have been any better under the Taliban,” you don’t have much of a case.

Unless and until that changes (and hopefully it does), the only relevant consideration to me—and the reason I’m not yet convinced that those who opposed the action in Afghanistan were right to oppose it—is the operational justification, its efficacy in breaking up and deterring terrorism. On this score I still think it’s possible that those who opposed the Afghan invasion were mistaken. I don’t think they’re crazy or hypocritical, and I don’t think the case is open and shut; I just hope that they’re wrong.

I am saying that it looks like much of the carping on “The Left” is not helpful.

If they want to say that Afghanistan was not helped by the War (as it seems that you are implying… at least, you’re saying that we don’t have a way to measure whether it’s better), then it’s fair to ask them what we should have done otherwise.

They tend to react to such questions the way war supporters react to questions about why they haven’t enlisted.

As for the refugees, I am not saying that every single person who went back did so voluntarily… but it seems to me that there are much fewer people desperate enough to try to walk to Pakistan on foot the way that there were under the Taliban. Had the Pakistanian/Iranian refugee repatriatization programs been more vigorous than the Taliban’s Refugee Creation program, it would have shown up in Amnesty International or HRW or something. It hasn’t.

This is not “cheerleading” the war in Afghanistan. It’s recognizing the political realities that followed 9/11, looking at the realistic options that were on the table, and being thrilled that we’re actually able to discuss whether Afghanistan is better off, rather than wondering when it will once again be habitable. More than that, the argument that Afghanistan is MUCH better off in places and merely “just as bad” in others is a defensible one.

More than that, I think that it’s a lot more likely now that Afghanistan will be in a better place in 10 years than if we had done nothing.

There are still problems… but I have not seen a suggestion that would not have problems after implementation. I don’t see how these problems are worse than the ones left by sanctions, say.

As for measuring what is going on, my problem with your solution is the same as my criticism of failing to give the US the benefit of the doubt. Had we done nothing in Afghanistan, do you think that any of the problems you mentioned (“corruption and impunity by regional officials, rampant criminality, a thinly-stretched infrastructure and a short-term dependence on the unsustainable poppy cash crop”) would be lessened if we left the Taliban in charge? Maybe the poppy “problem” (though I still don’t understand why the poppy “problem” is a problem).

An example from the report:
“Power, roads, water, and dependable communications are inadequate, especially in rural areas in Afghanistan.”

Exactly how is this any different than how the country would look under the Taliban? It seems to me that now that the Taliban is gone, there’s actually a real shot at improving infrastructure where there wasn’t before.

Is pointing that out “cheerleading”?

Actually, that’s a good question. I think the most convincing approach I’ve seen has been this one. (According to CSIS some things have improved since the war, but corruption and impunity by regional officials, rampant criminality, a thinly-stretched infrastructure and a short-term dependence on the unsustainable poppy cash crop remain serious problems.)

People are finding work! They’re cultivating a product and selling it! Hurray!

And you were trying to accuse “the left” of being superficial?

Jesus.

Can we say that since fewer people are walking miles and miles in crappy shoes to get to crappy camps for an indefinite period of time in order to stay alive that the people in the country think that they’re better off?

I don’t see what’s so difficult to grasp about this. If you’re going to use the refugees as a means of talking up how wonderful things are in Afghanistan, you have to be able to speak accurately about why they moved back, and why they stay where they are. If people are merely staying put in Afghanistan because they were forced to leave Pakistan and have the foreknowledge that an attempt to return would be futile, or worse than futile, then what can it possibly mean to call them “better off”? If the “number of refugees” was reduced because Iran and Pakistan seized on the war as an opportunity to repatriate them and to call the repatriation “voluntary,” then what can it possibly mean to call this a metric of “success”?

Similarly, if in one instance we have boilerplate rhetoric from Ruud Lubbers, in another research that indicates a considerable anti-refugee push in the two main countries concerned, and in another reportage from Afghans in the provinces that things really haven’t changed all that much… then we have at least some reason to believe that Lubbers’ fine speeches about the number of people UNHCR has repatriated are papering over some more complicated realities.

I realize this is inconvenient for the cheerleading, which of course is what you’re really looking for and which I suspect is the standard by which you judge whether this or that member of “the Left” is being unfair to America. But not to put too fine a point on it, that’s your problem. My problem is to figure out, from limited means and sources, what exactly is going on in Afghanistan, and that’s not going to happen by using numbers of refugees as some kind of magic rhetorical balm.

Saying that The Taliban was bad but the Warlordism is just as bad doesn’t seem to measure anything at all. Pointing out the poppy fields as a sign of decline in Afghanistan doesn’t particularly move me either… at least not in the negative direction. (People are finding work! They’re cultivating a product and selling it! Hurray!)

Can we say that since fewer people are walking miles and miles in crappy shoes to get to crappy camps for an indefinite period of time in order to stay alive that the people in the country think that they’re better off?

If we can’t even say that, then what useful metrics are there?

To be clearer, I find it difficult to assess, with the information I have, the relative weight to place on positive and negative accounts of current conditions in Afghanistan and the degree of accuracy that can be attributed to, say, outgoing High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers’ speeches. Given the push-factors plainly involved from both Pakistan and Iran, however, I’m simply not convinced that raw numbers of repatriations are a useful metric in themselves.

The pressure had been building for some time—Iran, for instance, had suspended government benefits to Afghan refugees in the mid-1990s as part of a general push-back—but the article pertains largely to events following the toppling of the Taliban and the pseudo-”voluntary” repatriation programmes that resulted. (The border closures did precede this by a few months and would probably have happened whether or not the Taliban regime had folded.)

Again, I’m not denying that the UNHCR has done the best it can in the circumstances it has to work with. But that’s a separate question from whether the number of repatriated refugees is a viable measure of success in Afghanistan.

Is the issue really one as simple as “we killed the Taliban but it’s 2003 and the country isn’t stable yet!”

Actually, from what I can glean from the human rights reportage that periodically emerges, it’s 2006 and the country isn’t stable yet. At least if one believes those provincial Afghans who are periodically quoted as saying their lives have not materially improved and they hate the warlords (see numerous examples from a few months ago here for instance). Which one would think is something of a problem, yeah, and perhaps a problem that derives from the decision to empower and legitimize a group of drug-dealing warlords as the de facto government for the bulk of the country.

What were the alternatives to doing so? Well, it might have been nice if that much-ballyhooed Marshall Plan for Afghanistan had actually materialized instead of, say, the Iraq War. Of course, that would have taken serious planning, follow-through and a commitment of both human and material resources—not to mention some of those pansy liberal virtues like learning about and working within Afghan culture—and we know the Bushistas don’t do that sort of thing, so it’s basically moot to bring it up. Given that, the real redeeming feature of the action would be the operational value of its breakup of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The jury remains out on that, since we really don’t know enough about the Global War and Struggle on Terror and Against Violent Extremism (or whatever it’s called these days) to assess how necessary full-scale war really was to such an objective or how significant Bin Laden’s apparent escape really was.

And the war actually reduced the number of refugees, it didn’t increase it.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11505&Cr=afghanistan&Cr1=

Indicates that 3 million out of 4.6 million refugees have returned home. That’s 2 out of 3.

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/2/428EBE73-0D51-4C9C-B0A7-A53236A41A4D.html

says:

“We are still not 100 percent there, but to a large part, Afghanistan is becoming safe enough to return to,” he said. “We have seen last year, again, substantial repatriation. In round [figures], 300,000 to 600,000 from Iran, 300,000 from [Pakistan]. It adds up to three million people [since the fall of the Taliban regime].”

UNHCR figures show a proportional fall in the number of Afghan asylum seekers in the West.

Is the issue really one as simple as “we killed the Taliban but it’s 2003 and the country isn’t stable yet!”? What would you have seen as a reasonable, attainable timetable for making Afghanistan more livable than under the Taliban? A year?

If, before the war, you were told that one of the costs of the war would be a country that the UNHCR wouldn’t find safe enough to return to for 3 1/2 years, would you find that price too high?

It seems to me that it’s taken a little over 4 years to make Afghanistan a country that is tolerable for millions, rather than one that is intolerable for millions.

I ask “what should have been done instead?”

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t deny that many probably did return, at least in the initial instance, out of genuine optimism. And as pathetic as the Mayor of Kabul’s standing may seem, at least Kabul is a reasonably secure centre in a way that can’t be said of, say, Baghdad. But if I’m not prepared to completely condemn what’s happened in Afghanistan, I’m not waving my pom-poms just yet, either. Sorry.

With regards to Iraq, remember the 400,000 refugees that our war over there was supposed to create in the first few months?

Yeah. I also remember people predicting that the Iraq War would lead to chemical weapons attacks on Israel which would retaliate with nukes etc. Didn’t happen.

Speaking of failed predictions: Remember the WMDs we were supposed to find? The oil revenues that were supposed to pay for rebuilding? The stable pro-Western democracy that was supposed to emerge in “cakewalk”? The civil war that wasn’t supposed to happen, but is?

After we started killing the Taliban in earnest, the refugees started flooding back in to Afghanistan.

They willingly left Afghanistan because they thought that life in a crappy refugee camp would be better than life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Once we got rid of the Taliban, they came flooding back.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/refugee.map.html has one of the maps for this.

Pointing out that getting rid of the Taliban resulted in warlords and opium and other bad things seems to ignore the HUGE difference that was made: People ran away for their lives leaving everything behind because of the Taliban and they did so by the millions. The warlords and the opium and the other bad things have not done so.

If our policies result in millions of refugees being created (when, before, there were none), then that will mean something significant with regards to the success/failure of what we are doing.

With regards to Iraq, remember the 400,000 refugees that our war over there was supposed to create in the first few months?

I couldn’t honestly do so, since I support intervention in Darfur along with broadly supporting the measures that HRW has been recommending for months. (Admittedly how the US fits into this is much more of a question mark for me now than it would have been in the Nineties.)

Opposing militarism does not mean opposing all applications of the military. Do you understand the difference?

Do you mean to say that we should not have overthrown the Taliban?

I’m not nearly on the point of disavowing the mission in Afghanistan, but this is mainly because of the close ties the Taliban regime had with al-Qaeda, not because I see the present state of affairs as all that promising. I’m simply saying that opposing it was not a sign of obvious madness. Should the Afghan mission end in strategic failure— which isn’t impossible—it could prove unfortunately prescient.

When I think of “The Left”, I’m a lot more likely to think of Kos/Drum/CT than The Nation.

Then your remarks are even more disingenuous.

soru: Can I ask what country you are talking about?

No specific country, since “clash of civilizations” enthusiasm crosses national borders, though emphases and specific dynamics vary.