Tony Blair has found a way to insinuate himself into the international debate over Afghanistan, claiming that the US and allied countries should have made a long term commitment, as if 20 years wasn't enough. Blair, as you may know, had initially tried to push Bill Clinton into a war with Iraq, but when that didn't happen, teamed up with George Bush to launch wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kind of like "Global Britain" before Boris Johnson's PR team penned the term. In Tony's addled mind, the important thing is to "hold firm" when times get tough, explaining why such "nation building" is necessary.
Tony was always a globalist. He and Bill very actively promoted the idea of a one world economy, ostensibly to overcome the impact of the Cold War. The only problem was what to do with countries that don't want to play along. No one liked what Saddam and the Taliban were doing, but was it worth going to war over? Both regimes were relatively isolated, and of no real threat to anyone, as long as we kept tabs on them. Unfortunately, George let his guard down in Afghanistan, despite warnings from his national security team, and al Qaeda found a surprisingly low-tech way to send shudders down everyone's spines.
While George's stated mission was to root al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, Tony wanted the US and allied forces to make a model secular country that would served American and British interests. The only problem is that this had been tried before, repeatedly in fact, and failed each and every time. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
The problem with Tony's Utopian thinking is that it may lead to a change in regimes, as we saw with the Arab Spring, but it doesn't necessarily bring the democratic freedoms he imagines. In fact, Egypt is just as much an autocracy now as it was before the US managed to convince Mubarak to step aside in the wake of a bloody insurrection. You find this across North Africa.
The reason is simple, these countries have a fundamentally different way of thinking than we do in the West, and they are not going to ever adopt Western-style democracies. All the modernization that took place in Egypt and Iraq during the 1950s, 60s and 70s was the result of an iron hand, not democracy. Same was true with Ataturk's Turkey in the 1920s. The citizenry was literally forced to adopt the trappings of Western societies without any say in the matter. This was equally true of Nasser's Egypt and Saddam's Iraq. Afghanistan went through a similar metamorphosis in the 60s and 70s, only to become embroiled in a civil war that ultimately led to Soviet intervention with much the same outcome we see today in Kabul.
It is time to get past our Utopian fantasies, and realize that the Islamic world has a very different notion of how it sees itself in a global economy than we do. Additionally, this Islamic world view is not monolithic, anymore than Tsarist Russia's pan-Slavic notion of the world, it is split along sectarian lines, the most noticeable of which is that between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. Their's will always be a more autocratic form of government. It is not to say there can't be individual liberties, but nothing like what we see in the West. For these Islamic nations, the Koran will always be at the center of their governments. This notion of secularist states is pure panacea. I don't profess to know the full reasons why, but I have seen enough to know that these countries will never be like us.
This doesn't mean that they are bad. Far from it. China has already shown a model of state-controlled economy where a large cross section of its citizenry can enjoy the finer things in life. In fact, autocracies can initiate change faster than can democracy, at least when it comes to building new infrastructure. Look at the major efforts in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates to create fully energy sustainable cities, at the same time turn cities like Abu Dhabi into a metropolis that rivals New York's skyline. They do this because the government doesn't have to worry about rival political parties and the constant battle between conservatism and liberalism we see in the West. China just goes about its business of building high-speed rail lines to the tune of 37,900 kilometers and counting, when the nearest Western country to them is Spain with 4200 km. The US has 300 km.
As a notable historic example, Pierre L'Enfant was appalled when Washington and Jefferson suggested Washington DC be built by selling shares and encouraging private development. This is no way to build a city, he roared. It has to be funded by the government. He left and it took over 100 years for Washington to resemble anything like that L'Enfant envisioned, thanks largely to the work of Daniel Burnham, who oversaw the rapid expansion of the city in the 1890s and early 1900s.
This is the trouble with democracy. We quibble and fight over everything. One government starts a massive project, only for another to shut it down. Yet, somehow we eventually get things done thanks to public-private initiatives like those Alexander Hamilton imagined when he wrote his Report on the Subject of Manufactures in 1791. Even still, it usually took a crisis to get us moving in a more rational direction, as was the case of the Works Progress Administration to steer us out of the Depression in the 1930s or the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out of its post-WWII funk.
There was no such WPA or Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. It was an ad-hoc affair subject to how much money trickled into the country at any one point of time, assuming grabby elected officials didn't take it for themselves. Billions of dollars went unaccounted for. Money simply squandered in sporadic efforts to rebuild the country. Progress was made, to be sure, but no permanent foundations were set. Afghanistan has remained in a fluid state ever since we invaded the country in 2001.
Yet, dear Tony would have us believe that if we just stuck with Afghanistan strategically we would have gotten over this rough patch. Of course, that's easy enough for him to say now that he is out of power and heading a think tank under his own name.
We never really cared about the people of Afghanistan, we just wanted to box in Iran, which we view as the most pernicious agent of terrorism in the Islamic world, when in fact the prime culprit has always been Saudi Arabia. They are the ones who export Wahabism and other forms of radical Sunni Islam. Iran supports terrorist groups, but to date is not responsible for anything remotely approaching the scale of 9/11, which we constantly refer to when conducting our War on Terror, yet refuse to acknowledge that bin Laden and most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals.
So, let's be straight for once, Tony. Let's get past all these high-minded ideas and start to find ways in which we can co-exist with the Islamic world without trying to impose our Western liberal ideas on them. We somehow manage to get along with Saudi Arabia, albeit the kind of frenemy you always have to guard against. Why can't we do the same with Iran or god forbid a Taliban Afghanistan? As Donald Trump would say, it's all transactional, baby!
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