The way forward in Afghanistan

Steve Coll has a remarkably well-reasoned and thoroughly knowledgeable essay about Afghanistan and our future course in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

The Case for Humility in Afghanistan

"To improve its chances for success, the United States and the international community must bring all of their leverage to bear to ensure the formation of a coalition government in Kabul that incorporates all of the meaningful sources of non-Taliban opposition and sets Afghan political and tribal leaders on a sustained, Afghan-led program of political, constitutional, and electoral reform.

Some analysts have suggested invoking the Afghan institution of a loya jirga to host some or all of this continuous reform process. Whether that specific institution is selected or not, the spirit of this suggestion is critical -- Afghans have many difficult but important political and constitutional issues to negotiate, and political business-as-usual will not carry these negotiations forward adequately at a time when the United States is risking blood and treasure in support of Afghan stability. Issues that require discussion and negotiation among Afghan leaders, both formal and informal, include the future of the electoral system, to ensure fraud on the scale alleged in the most recent election cannot recur; political party formation and activity; constitutional issues such as the election of governors and the role of parliament; and issues of national integrity such as the access of different ethnic, tribal and identity groups to government employment and opportunity in the expanding security services.

Political reform and Afghan-led negotiations of this type must be seen as fundamental to American policy in Afghanistan no matter what choices are made about troop levels and deployments. Such a process would be part and parcel, too, of national program of reconciliation and reintegration designed to provide ways for Taliban foot soldiers to find jobs and for their leaders to forswear violence and enter politics.

This emphasis on political stability through continuous Afghan-led negotiation and national reintegration, as opposed to grandiose state-building or policies premised on the pursuit of military victory by external forces, should not be seen as an adjunct wing of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but as fundamental. It is clear that no realistic level of American and Afghan forces deployable in the foreseeable future can provide security to the population in every village of Afghanistan. Accepting this reality and developing a political-military strategy that best accounts for it will lead, inevitably, to support for Afghan-led political approaches at the national, provincial, district and sub-district level. This is how the late Gorbachev-backed government in Kabul achieved a modicum of stability in far less favorable circumstances.

America's record of policy failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the last 30 years should humble all of us. It should bring humility to the way we define our goals and realism about the means required to achieve them. It should lead us to choose political approaches over kinetic military ones, urban population security over provocative rural patrolling, and Afghan and Pakistani solutions over American blueprints. But it should not lead us to defeatism or to acquiescence in a violent or forcible Taliban takeover of either country. We have the means to prevent that, and it is in our interest to do so."

The only argument I have with Steve's reasoning is that if you read the entirety of this article - which I highly encourage if you care about the fate of Afghanistan and American troops rooting out our Al Queda enemies and their allies in the Taliban there - the only consistent conclusion you can come to from the entirety of that argument - which I largely agree with; the thrust of which being that all of our efforts must make central the political task of a self-determining Afghani effort to reconcile their ethnic and political differences to create a pluralistic, strong Afghani government capable of offering security to its population and developing a process by which its serious divisions can be healed, over time - such an effort cannnot be secured, as Steve suggests in that first line I quoted, with external Western pressure.

To the contrary, the entirety of Steve's article illustrates the successive folly of various outside forces from imposing or pressuring their will externally and how this has bred the mistrust in foreign armies that is now the central problem America is contending with.

Meaning, we are very unlikely to get ourselves out of that mess if we make the same mistakes that caused this mess in the first place.

Americans and the West need to get on the up and up and be cooperating honestly with competing Afghani political parties to work on building a self-determining Afghani government rather than expecting the Afghanis to be patrons of our largesse and subjects to our leverage. As Steve argues well in this article, I believe, both are bad courses, of the long haul.

Instead of Americans focussing on what they can do to stabilize Afghanistan, what Steve is saying well in this article that deserves our attention, I think, is America should focus on what it can do to support Afghanis to address the political divisions and the military strategies, with American help, when necessary, to secure their country and create a pluralistic Afghani future of their own choosing that looks after the interests of all Afghanis, and seeks to destroy, arrest, and, when possible, coopt or moderate the Taliban and their supporters as a necessary prerequisite to looking after those Afghanis' interests.

The way through in Afghanistan and Iraq is to get more honest with ourselves about the extent to which we have engaged these wars more self-centeredly and to get less self-centered in our engagement.

If we want Afghanis to trust us, we need to be trustworthy. And that is the only honest way to success.

Just how far backwards we've fallen

Peter Berkowitz, at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, offers up the most serious case of censorship in the halls of liberal education that I have seen in a very long time. And a testament to just how illiberal we have become.

Academia Goes Silent on Free Speech

"Consider Yale. On Oct. 1, the university hosted Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. His drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban became the best known of 12 cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. That led to deadly protests throughout the Muslim world. On the same day, at an unrelated event, Yale hosted Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen. Her new book, "The Cartoons that Shook the World," was subject in August to a last minute prepublication decision by Yale President Richard Levin and Yale University Press to remove not only the 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad, including respected works of art.

The Westergaard appearance inspired protests. Muslim students condemned Yale's invitation to the cartoonist as religiously and racially insensitive, compared him to Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, and declared his art and utterances hate speech rather than free speech.

Students will be students. It is to be hoped that those who opposed Mr. Westergaard's invitation will learn at Yale that the aim of liberal education is not to guard their sensitivities but to teach them to listen to diverse opinions and fortify them to respond with better arguments to those with whom they disagree.

Mr. Westergaard's appearance did prompt a small faculty-led panel discussion on Oct. 7. It dealt mainly with Muslim reaction to the cartoons, though Prof. Seyla Benhabib said that in Ms. Klausen's position she would have withdrawn the book. But generally the faculty has been unmoved by Yale's censorship of Ms. Klausen's book, which suggests that lessons in the fundamentals of liberty of thought and discussion may be lacking on campus.

To be sure, Yale's censorship—the right word because Yale suppressed content on moral and political grounds—raised difficult questions. Can't rights, including freedom of speech and press, be limited to accommodate other rights and goods? What if reprinting the cartoons and other depictions gave thugs and extremists a new opportunity to inflame passions and unleash violence? Can't the consequences of the cartoons' original publication be understood without reproducing them? Weren't the cartoons really akin, as Yale Senior Lecturer Charles Hill pointed out in a letter to the Yale Alumni magazine, to the depictions of Jews as grotesque monsters that successive American administrations have sought to persuade Arab newspapers to cease publishing? And isn't it true, as Mr. Hill also observed, that Yale's obligation to defend free speech does not oblige it to subsidize gratuitously offensive or intellectually worthless speech?

These are good questions—to which there are good answers.

Rights are subject to limits, but a right as fundamental to the university and the nation as freedom of speech and press should only be limited in cases of imminent danger and not in deference to speculation about possible violence at an indeterminate future date. One can't properly evaluate Ms. Klausen's contention that the cartoons were cynically manipulated without assessing with one's own eyes whether the images passed beyond mockery and ridicule to the direct incitement of violence.

Even if the cartoons exhibited a kinship to anti-Semitic caricatures, it would cut in favor of publication: a scholar would be derelict in his duties if he published a work on anti-Semitic images without including examples. And finally, if Yale chooses to publish a rigorous analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, which affected the national interest and roiled world affairs, then the university does incur a scholarly obligation to include all the relevant information and evidence including the cartoons at the center, regardless of whether they are in themselves gratuitously offensive and intellectually worthless.

The wonder is that Yale's censorship has excited so little debate at Yale. The American Association of University Professors condemned Yale for caving in to terrorists' "anticipated demands." And a group of distinguished alumni formed the Yale Committee for a Free Press and published a letter protesting Yale's "surrender to potential unknown billigerents" and calling on the university to correct its error by reprinting Ms. Klausen's book with the cartoons and other images intact. But the Yale faculty has mostly yawned. Even the famously activist Yale Law School has, according to its director of public affairs, sponsored no programs on censorship and the university.

Alas, there is good reason to suppose that in its complacency about threats to freedom on campus the Yale faculty is typical of faculties at our leading universities. In 2006, even as the police had barely begun their investigation, Duke University President Richard Brodhead lent the prestige of his office to faculty members' prosecution and conviction in the court of public opinion of three members of the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused of gang raping an African-American exotic dancer. It turned out they were being pursued by a rogue prosecutor. To be sure, it was only a vocal minority at Duke who led the public rush to judgment. But the vast majority of the faculty stood idly by, never rising to defend the presumption of innocence and the requirements of fair process. Perhaps Duke faculty members did not realize or perhaps they did not care that these formal and fundamental protections against the abuse of power belong among the conditions essential to the lively exchange of ideas at the heart of liberal education.

Similarly, in 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers sparked a faculty revolt that ultimately led to his ouster by floating at a closed-door, off-the-record meeting the hypothesis—which he gave reasons for rejecting only a few breaths after posing it—that women were poorly represented among natural science faculties because significantly fewer women than men are born with the extraordinary theoretical intelligence necessary to succeed at the highest scientific levels. Before he was forced to resign, Mr. Summers did his part to set back the cause of unfettered intellectual inquiry by taking the side of his accusers and apologizing repeatedly for having dared to expose an unpopular idea to rational analysis. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, the Harvard faculty could not find a principle worth defending in the controversy over Mr. Summer's remarks.

As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven't had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America's professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors' loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?"

If we cannot count on a commitment to liberal education, thought, discussion, and debate on university campuses, where in the hell can we count on them?

We have taken a very dark and seriously wrong turn in the last decade. Our fears about being too liberal, which more than 200 years of experience should have taught Americans, by now, is not possible, have led us down a terribly ugly and small-minded illiberal path, following the lead of our repressive and illiberal brethren in the Middle East and Communist Cuba, China, and North Korea and all of the places in the world where force really is the governing philosophy.

It is bizarre, in the extreme, to watch the liberal world simulataneously take a more illiberal turn all in the name of battle with these illiberal regimes and actors and out of a seriously unhealthy fixation and obsession with making the world finally right with enough capacity to force it to be so.

That is the central obsession of the terrorists and illiberal regimes we are fighting

Why in God's name would we be adopting it as our own as we defend ourselves from the destruction wreaked by these cultures and their terrorist spawn?

Because we are scared. That's why. And it is our fear of our own shadows, not love for liberty that makes us weak.

Our liberty makes us strong. Because it reflects our courage and confidence. In ourselves and in humanity.

And it is the cruel and bitter face of power as a means to finally rid us of our weakness among Al Queda and the likes of Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe that are the truest reflections of weakness and obsession with power and with the dark impulses it is meant to suppress.

Weakness is our failure to face this obsession with our basest impulses.

Strength is our ability to face it and ourselves honestly. And to openly discuss all that fear that debilitates us and makes us believe that we are unfailingly weaker than we might otherwise be.

One thing is for sure. Our lurch into illiberalism, whether it come from the left or the right, is not a movement forward, no matter how much we might like to pretend to the contrary. It has neither made things better nor will it ever, in Iran or North Korea nor in the liberal democracies that should know better.

Because our progress is predicated on our liberty. It always has been and it always will be. No matter how much we bullshit otherwise.

Our biggest waste

I think the capacity to reason is wasted on homo sapiens. I have never, in my life, encountered a species with such infinite capacity for thought so stubbornly committed to weaseling out of using it. Except insofar as it can help them avoid doing so.

It is not that people are incapable of reasoning. It is that they willfully refuse to do so. For fear of overspending their severely limited capacity to ever admit they are wrong about any goddamned thing.