This column became an inevitability when it became clear that President Biden was serious about exiting Afghanistan. Well, the post 9/11 Afghani government that the U.S. backed is out and the Taliban is in. The press is doing its usual thing. Republicans are doing their usual thing. Even Democrats are, to a great extent, doing their usual thing. Most of what is out there at the moment is hot air. President Biden is being criticized. He deserves some of it. But he doesn't deserve most of it.
Rather than piling on, I am going to take a longer and wider perspective. My interest in Afghanistan goes way back. I started writing this blog in 2010. In 2011 I posted this: Sigma 5: Pakistan. It was my first foray into a subject I would often return to. One line in that post summarizes it nicely: "Lots of countries have an army. Pakistan is an army that has a country".
Understanding Pakistan is key to understanding Afghanistan. And Pakistan is not a real country. It's motivating concept is "we are not India". That's not enough. So, what Pakistan has done is work the foreign aid grift for its entire history. One way or another, it gets billions from various countries. This is the only thing that keeps the country afloat.
But unfortunately, most foreign aid these days is of the military kind. As a result, the military, and it's closely associated Spy Service, the ISI are not under the control of Pakistan's civilian government. Nor are large swaths of what is labeled "Pakistan" on maps. These swaths are euphemistically called "autonomous regions". In reality, the central government of Pakistan exerts little or no control over these regions.
In spite of the fact that it is not a country, Pakistan has imperial aspirations. Specifically, it aspires to make Afghanistan a vassal state. Their vehicle of choice is the Taliban. Pakistan, through the ISI, has provided material, financial, logistical, and other kinds of support to the Taliban since its formation decades ago.
Pakistan has also provided safe havens for both the senior leadership and the rank and file of the Taliban. These safe havens have mostly been located in the autonomous regions. But a lot of Taliban infrastructure is located in the parts of Pakistan that the government does control. Bin-Laden lived peacefully for years in such a place. The Taliban is Pakistan's cat's paw, or so the Pakistanis hope.
I discussed a related topic, counterinsurgency, here: Sigma 5: Counterinsurgency. The occasion for the post was the end of U.S. military activity in Iraq. Unfortunately for all of us, that got reversed not long afterward. The mission in Afghanistan was counterinsurgency. Go in. Root the bad guys out. Leave. That's the idea. But it is very hard to do. The post includes my thoughts on how it should be done.
The very next post (Sigma 5: Iraq) includes a link to how an "expert" says it should be done. General David Patraeus was, for a time, a wunderkind who was an expert on Counterinsurgency. He was responsible for the U.S. Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the "how to" manual that guided the U.S. military's approach to counterinsurgency missions. I included a link to the manual in that post but it no longer works. Here's an updated link: The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (freeinfosociety.com).
Patraeus got into trouble a few years later and fell out of favor. One reason for this was that his vaunted "expertise" did not produce results in Afghanistan. For whatever reason, it looks like the military has since replaced Patraeus's document with something else. I haven't read the new version.
Anyhow, I had some good things and some bad things to say about the manual Patraeus produced. They are included in the post. And I followed this post up with another post: Sigma 5: Afghanistan. In that post I promised that it would be the last one on counterinsurgency. It was my last post in my "Counterinsurgency" series, but not my last post on Afghanistan.
I think my analysis of the situation as it was back then (2012 - 11 years into the war) was good. I said this: "Progress under Obama seems limited to me". So far so good. But I also said: "I think politics in Afghanistan will combine with politics in the U.S. to result in a nearly complete U.S. withdrawal in 2014, if not sooner". That, of course, turned out to be completely wrong. U.S. political conditions made exiting Afghanistan impossible. As a result. politics in Afghanistan turned out to be irrelevant.
I did, however, demolish the "ten more years" argument. I said: "There is very little evidence that we could fix Afghanistan in those ten years given the situation both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan." And it turns out that we didn't. We didn't even seriously try.
The next post that is relevant to this discussion was: Sigma 5: Vietnam - Lessons Learned. Unlike pretty much everybody else, I felt it was important to review the U.S. experience in Vietnam to see what could be learned from it. Unfortunately, few others bothered to do the same. And, unfortunately, Vietnam should have taught us the lessons we needed to learn in order to get Afghanistan right. Here is the bottom line.
For complicated reasons Vietnam got partitioned into a North and a South. We got deeply involved in South Vietnam, from its creation to its ultimate demise. We felt that it was important to stand up an anti-communist government there.
Unfortunately, even though we tried several times, we were never able to stand up an honest, competent government there. As a result, it never garnered significant support from the people it governed. The opposition, operating out of North Vietnam, was honest and competent. The North Vietnamese government was also seen as being run by native Vietnamese. Our government, the one running South Vietnam, was seen as the puppet of foreign interests. Never underestimate the power of nationalism.
Things actually ended up moving at about the same speed in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. We got seriously involved in Vietnam in about 1955 and the U.S. backed South Vietnamese government fell twenty years later in 1975. The military rout played out a little more slowly in Vietnam (months rather than weeks) but it was equally decisive.
You can check out Sigma 5: ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now, and Sigma 5: The Art of the Deal, if you want to. They are at least marginally related. As, I supposes are Sigma 5: Middle East Update, and Sigma 5: Balance of Power. But it's okay if you skip them. Directly on point, however, is this recent post: Sigma 5: The ISI War. That is one you want to review.
Looking forward, what now? Well, as I indicated in my "ISI War" post, things now get interesting. The gridlock that has constrained U.S. policy in Afghanistan has now been broken. We no longer have to tiptoe around the delicate sensibilities of the old Afghan government. It doesn't exist any more. One excuse the Biden Administration has put forward for publicly downplaying the rate of advance of Taliban forces is that they didn't want to further undermine a government that was already teetering on the brink.
The U.S. is now moving forward rapidly. They moved in and seized control of the Kabul (capital of Afghanistan) Airport. That would have been an unthinkable move a couple of weeks ago. They have also frozen assets to cut the Taliban off from whatever money was left behind by the old government. They are also cutting off the money fire hose that has flowed into Afghanistan for twenty years with nary a pause.
Control of Kabul airport has made it possible to start moving refugees and foreign nationals out of Afghanistan at a rapid pace. The Biden Administration has been rightly chastised for not moving more quickly and more effectively to get Afghanis who have been friendly to our cause out of the country. They are now doing their best to get on track.
In the mean time the Taliban is now in control of the entire country. The sixty-four dollar question is: how are they going to comport themselves? Are they going to be the bad old Taliban they were when a U.S. led operation staffed almost entirely by Afghans drove them out of the country in six months? This was possible because the Taliban had managed to make themselves extremely unpopular.
The Taliban claims that it has learned its lesson. This time around, they say, they will be kinder and gentler. They will also focus more heavily on governance. There is some evidence that they are serious. But the preponderance of the evidence is that this is a pretense they plan to only maintain for a short time in order to make the transition go more smoothly. I think that it is very likely that it is a pretense. But let's assume for the moment that it is not.
In the post-Vietnam era I looked into why some governments succeed and others fail. I am a pro democracy guy. But sometimes democracies fail and sometimes undemocratic governments succeed. I have found that the keys to success are not democracy or openness or any of that. Instead they are honesty and competence. Is the government reasonably honest and reasonably competent? If so, then it has a good chance of success. If not, the only way it can succeed is if there is an outside power propping it up.
A classic example of this is the Castro government in Cuba. When Fidel took over the country was impoverished. It is still very poor. But he put in a good education system, a good medical system, and he has kept the infrastructure operating, if only in the most basic way. No one starves in Cuba, or lacks for clothes on their backs, or a roof over their heads. As a result, the Castro regime has remained relatively popular over a period spanning many decades.
"Communist" China is another example. The economy got an early boost when they first took over due to the ending of the Japanese occupation and a return to peacetime conditions. Things went backwards during the Cultural Revolution period. They later bounced back with the ascendency of technocrats primarily interested in boosting the economy. Over a period of decades China has gone from being an economic basket case to being the second largest economy in the world. It continues to have a higher economic growth rate than the U.S. does.
All countries feature a certain amount of corruption. All countries feature a certain amount of incompetence when it comes to their government officials. But governments that are extremely corrupt are incapable of being competent. And that means that the economy goes backwards. And that makes people unhappy.
The Taliban have shown themselves to be both honest and competent. But the Taliban suffers from ideological problems that may interfere with its ability to boost the economy. Their adherence to a rigid ideology will make it impossible to make some moves that are good for the economy.
Castro's Cuba faced similar problems to a lesser extent. But Cuba was very poor when they took power. It didn't take much economic growth to make things better for their people. It also helped that they were heavily subsidized by Russia for the first couple of decades of their existence.
The Taliban faced a similar situation when they first came to power. Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world. Not much economic improvement would have translated to a lot of public support. But they hewed closely to their ideology and the already bad economy got worse. That made them very unpopular. It didn't help that many of their ideologically driven policies were wildly unpopular.
So, they stand a chance. Afghanistan is still very poor. Very little economic improvement would be necessary for the populace to see progress. But things have changed since the last time around. When the U.S. first moved in after 9/11 the amount of aid we poured into Afghanistan was greater than the GDP of the country. Sure, corruption was rampant. But even if 80% or 90% of the money we poured into Afghanistan was siphoned off, that still left 10% or 20% going in to build the economy up.
Construction jobs abounded. Security jobs abounded. A large Afghan army and multiple government police/security organizations were stood up and paid on time. This led to an increase in retail. And services like banking, accounting, legal services, and the like, grew. This put a lot of money into the pockets of ordinary Afghanis.
And a lot of Afghanis found they liked the open society approach of the Americans. Finally, there are more guns in the hands of Afghani civilians than are in the hands of Americans, if you measure things on a per-capita basis. That's a lot of guns pre-positioned into the hands of ordinary Afghanis all over the country. If you can recruit them then you have an instant well armed guerilla force.
So, the Talban could follow the Cuban model, if they chose to. They could even follow the modern Chinese model, if they chose to. But will they? The modern Chinese model is antithetical to their entire ideology. Even following in the footsteps of the Cuban model would require a radical direction change, ideologically. That seems unlikely in the extreme.
And they have a much higher hill to climb. They start with the Afghan economy as it was a few weeks ago. If everything remains the same then they will get a bump from the cessation of the fighting. But, if there is anything Americans know how to do, it's juice up an economy.
The Taliban won't have to deal with the incompetence and corruption of the old government gumming things up. But they lack the natural instincts necessary to promote economic development. But it gets worse.
The Chines had thousands of years of cultural history as a mercantile society when Chinese leaders turned to boosting the economy as their top priority. Afghanis have never had anything resembling a decent economy. And they have long standing cultural norms that stand in the way of developing one. (They are not as bad as the Taliban norms. But they are bad.) Even Cuba had a long capitalist tradition that preceded the Castro takeover. But it is even worse.
Unlike twenty years ago, the Afghani economy is now an artificial one. It is almost exclusively organized around the idea of absorbing all of that money flowing in from the U.S. and other foreign countries. The U.S. is shutting the money spigot off as quickly as it can. Many countries will do the same. That will leave only a few countries like India, Russia, and China, that might want to step in to fill the vacuum.
Under the best of circumstances things would look grim for the Taliban on the economic front. Assuming, for the moment, that they actually intend to focus on economic development. It is impossible to imagine Russia, China, and India stepping up and replacing most of the money that will be lost.
Neither Russia nor India can afford it. And I don't see China wanting to make that level of commitment. Money will continue to flow. But it will be, at most, 20-30% of what was coming in before. At worst, the flow of money into the country, other than to buy Opium, could drop to near zero.
On the other hand, the Taliban may soon revert to Taliban 1.0. This will cause the economy to crash quickly and hard. And part and parcel of Taliban 1.0 are the harsh (by western standards) social policies that they previously implemented. Another possible scenario has the Taliban trying Taliban 2.0, having it fail, and then reverting to Taliban 1.0.
All roads, except the Taliban going with Taliban 2.0 and managing to somehow make it work, lead to the same place. Some roads just takes a little longer to get there than others. How is the Afghan populace likely to respond to this? Not well. But at that point it will not be our problem.
We got into Afghanistan in the late '70s and early '80s in an effort to tweak the Russians. it worked. And we got out. We got into Afghanistan in the post 9/11 era in order to put down Osama bin-Laden. Then we let him escape into Pakistan. Then we decided to remake Afghanistan.
The British have described Afghanistan as "the place empires go to die". The American empire, such as it is, will not be killed by Afghanistan. But recent American efforts to remake Afghanistan into something it isn't and doesn't want to be, did die.
We did push the people who had designs on doing grievous harm to America out of Afghanistan. We pushed them into Pakistan. That's where bin-Laden was when we finally killed him. That's where the Taliban has been headquartered with the aid and the assistance of the Pakistani Spy Service, the ISI.
The Taliban are busy relocating back to Afghanistan. That will turn the problem of keeping an eye on them from a hard one to an easy one. It will be easy to see, for instance, if they keep their promises. One promise they made was to stay out of the business of harboring terrorists bent on doing harm outside of Afghanistan.
And that leaves Pakistan. Pakistan has long had a knife to the American jugular. They arranged things so that anything the U.S. wanted to deliver to Afghanistan (U.S. soldiers, arms, humanitarian aid, both human and material) had to go through Pakistan. The Pakistanis have been able to extract very high tolls from us year after year after year. But the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan soon. That removes the knife from our jugular.
There will no longer be a reason for us to put up with that. As soon as we are out of Afghanistan we need to completely turn off the money spigot that feeds Pakistan. Let Russia and China take up the slack. Based on Pakistan's unblemished track record, a dollar invested in Pakistan is a dollar wasted. So, let's hope they waste a lot of them. India has a long standing hate-hate relationship Pakistan, so they can be counted on to have nothing to do with any effort to prop up Pakistan.
And stopping the money flow to Pakistan opens up an opportunity. At the beginning of the Cold War the U.S. adopted a policy of dividing the world into two camps. There was camp USA and camp Russia. Countries were expected to join one of the two camps. Hopefully, most would join camp USA and few would join camp Russia.
That would make it easy to "contain" Russia. (The threat of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction stemming from the use of large numbers of nuclear weapons - took the preferred option of wiping them off of the face of the earth, off the table. So containment was the next best option.)
The problem was that India didn't want to play along. They decided that they were part of the "third world", neither rich nor poor, but more importantly, neither camp USA nor camp Russia. That pissed the U.S. foreign policy establishment off. So, they looked for a way to put pressure on India.
The British had been forced to devest themselves of India in the late '40s. Portions of what was then India had populations that were, for the most part, Muslim. But in most of India Muslims constituted at best a small percentage of the population.
So, what became Pakistan decided to split off from India as soon as the British were gone. (Another heavily Muslim section also split off at the same time. It eventually became Bangladesh.) This caused a civil war.
Pakistan was successful enough, given that they only had to contend with India at this point, to win independence from India, both for themselves, and for what eventually became Bangladesh. This was the foundation of the hate-hate relationship between the two countries. (India and Bangladesh get along just fine.)
The U.S. saw an opportunity. The Pakistanis were happy to play along in exchange for a large bribe in the form of foreign aid. And thus began the Pakistani foreign aid grift. They have not victimized just the U.S. They are an equal opportunity victimizer. They grifted the Chinese out of the technology necessary to create an atomic bomb. They grifted other countries into making large contributions of one kind or another for one reason or another.
At the beginning they grifted the U.S. our of large quantities of foreign aid by pretending to be team USA. This annoyed India, which was the point of the U.S. doing it. Pakistan reliably voted with the U.S. in the U.N. general assembly. Frankly, I don't know how much else the U.S. got out of the deal. But they deemed the deal successful enough that they looked the other way when China was turning Pakistan into a nuclear power. And, after that, Pakistan was a nuclear power, so were due a certain amount of respect and deference.
The successful U.S. effort to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan that happened forty years ago was run out of Pakistan. That got Pakistan some more brownie points. By the time Pakistan put the squeeze on the U.S. by temporarily shutting down trade into Afghanistan about fifteen years ago, it was too late. We were well and truly stuck in Afghanistan. And that meant we were well and truly stuck putting up with a whole lot of bad behavior from Pakistan.
But that all ends as soon as the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends. Then the Pottery Barn rule ("If you broke it. That means that now you own it.") will apply to them, not us. Pakistan will own Afghanistan. Whatever happens there will become Pakistan's responsibility. And they will have to manage Afghanistan without having all that lovely U.S. money and arms flowing their way.
Meanwhile, the U.S. will be in a position to substantially improve their relationship with India. Looking forward to the middle of the twenty-first century, the smart money sees three great powers: The U.S., China, and India. India is far more valuable to the U.S. than Pakistan ever was. India is a democracy. It is a bit shaky these days. Modi is not the greatest believer in democracy that India has ever had. But he could be tossed out by unfavorable election results at any time. Still, there is a lot to build on.
In effect, switching Pakistan for India is a big win for the U.S. And India and China are rivals. So, a strong relationship with India strengthens our position with respect to China. That too is a plus for the U.S. And let China be stuck with the likes of Afghanistan, North Korea, and Pakistan. It's not a good look for them.
And maybe we can finally do something about the Jihadi pipeline. Not all terrorist groups are closely tied to a nation state. But it is a mistake to believe that large and long standing terrorist groups can exist without substantial and consistent backing from a nation state or two.
And this is doubly true for Muslim terrorists. And the location of the head waters for many of them is no secret. Everybody who has spent any time seriously studying the problem knows what the story is. It is just politically inconvenient to say so publicly and directly.
I have gone over this several times before, so I am going to keep it short and sweet. Another "not a real country" is Saudi Arabia. The case is not as extreme as it is with Pakistan. As far as I know, Saudi Arabia controls all of the land that a map says belongs to them. But in other ways it's all smoke and mirrors.
Saudi Arabia is run by the "House of Saud", a large, extended family of people connected by blood or marriage. Normally a country like Saudi Arabia would need a nation state sponsor to stay in business. It turns out that large fields of oil that is cheap to extract are able to stand in for a the support of foreign country.
The Saud family maintains control of the country by using the massive revenues its oil fields throw off to buy off the population. Luckily for them, the native population of Saudi Arabia is relatively small, so the problem remains manageable. The gusher of money oil produces also allows the Saud family to import foreign labor to do everything the natives can't do or don't want to do.
They have managed to retain control for close to a hundred years. But the control the Saud family maintains is tenuous. Early on they brokered a deal. The deal was with the religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect of Islam. Like Christianity, Islam comes in a variety of flavors from moderate to extreme. The Sunni flavor is relatively moderate. The Shiite sect is more extreme. The Wahhabi sect is much more extreme than the Shiite sect.
If what happens in Saudi Arabia stays in Saudi Arabia, none of this would matter. But it doesn't stay in Saudi Arabia so it does matter. Money and power unchecked by something like regular and fair democratic elections leads to, among many things, hypocrisy. The rich and powerful in Saudi Arabia are not religious. In fact, many of them are libertines. The way they get away with their bad behavior is through bribery. They make large donations to Wahhabi institutions.
Not being immune from hypocrisy disease, the religious leaders take the money and look the other way. "It's for the greater good", they tell themselves. And, there is something to what they say. Because they spend the money on missionary work. Specifically, the fat contributions they rake in enable Wahhabi officials to build and maintain a large number of Madrassas all around the world. A Madrassa is a compound containing a mosque, a school, and frequently a social services center.
The school teaches the three r's, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. But the curriculum also includes mandatory religious instruction. And the religious instruction is, what else, the extremist Wahhabi form of Islam. In many parts of the Muslim world, and definitely in Pakistan, the public school system is terrible. Poor parents end up choosing between sending their children to Wahhabi Madrassas and their children getting no education at all.
Some parents and children are able to resist getting sucked into the extremist aspects of Wahhabi, but many aren't. If you want to know where all the Islamic extremists come from, the main source is Wahhabi Madrasas spread all across the poorer (either economically poorer, or poorer in terms of good government) Muslim countries. And it all comes from the internal dynamics of Saudi Arabia.
For many decades the west has been dependent on oil. And the oil supply has been tight a lot of the time. This has put Saudi Arabia in the cat bird seat. That has forced U.S. officials, and officials from all over the developed world, to cast a blind eye at what has been going on. Muslim extremists are just an unavoidable part of the price we pay to run our economies on oil.
But we are better positioned than we have been in more than a hundred years to break the cycle. We don't need Saudi Arabia the way we have in the past. And that means that we have the capability to deal with Saudi Arabia as it is, rather than Saudi Arabi we are forced to pretend exists.
One problem is that even if we were able to get Saudi support for Madrassas to end immediately, the problem will drag on for many years. Many Madrasas will likely continue in business for some time after Saudi support is cut off. And they have been turning out crop after crop of extremists for many years now. It will take twenty to forty years for those extremists to get old enough to age out of their extremism. But, as they say, step one is to stop digging.
With that let me turn to Iran. The U.S. and Iran go back to the '50s. Back then a democratically elected government was going after the British oil concession. The British turned to the U.S. for help. The U.S. elbowed the British out of the picture, and engineered a coup d'état that replaced the democratically elected government with the Shah. This is only one of several examples of the U.S. engineering the downfall of democratic governments for one reason or another.
Anyhow, decades later a home grown revolution kicked the Shah out and put the current religiously based government in control. Needless to say, there was bad blood on both sides by this point. Like the Chinese, Iran is based on an ancient and long standing culture, the Persians. And no culture endures without knowing how to build and nurture an economy.
The largest component of the current Iranian economy is oil. But, unlike the Saudis, Iran has a large population and a multi-faceted economy. Iran has supported extremists in many parts of the Middle East. But here it is in furtherance of a long term goal. Iran aspires to be a regional power, just as Persia has been at many times in the past. And these periods of regional dominance sometimes lasted for a century or more. That's how the Great Game is played, if you are dealt a hand like the one the Iranians have been dealt.
Do I like a lot of the things Iran has done and is doing? No! But the right question is: can we work with them when our areas of interest align? I think we can. One reason is that the Iranians know how to govern and they know how to keep corruption within bounds. The popularity of the current government has waxed and waned, mostly in synchrony with how well the Iranian economy is doing. They have maintained firm control through it all.
And they did a nuclear deal with the U.S. They kept to the terms of the deal until Trump unwisely cancelled it. It may not be possible to put the Humpty Dumpty of the deal back together. That will likely eventually result in Iran becoming joining the club of countries that control nuclear weapons. This possible outcome, and the history of conflict between the U.S. and the current regime, has supposedly been the reason the U.S. has been unwilling to work with the Iranians on anything outside the nuclear deal.
One consequence of that stand has to do with Afghanistan. Shortly after 9/11 the Iranians offered to help with the Taliban problem. We said "no thanks". Iran shares a border with Afghanistan that is of some length. And they have been a consistent foe of the Taliban. They haven't been able to do much. They keep them out of Iran. But they also do not operate on Afghani territory. That was in deference to the large U.S. presence in Afghanistan. That will soon be gone.
That opens up the possibility of the U.S. moving closer to Iran. There are many reasons people will object to this. Let me start with the nuclear objection. Horrible things are supposed to result if Iran gets the bomb. But Pakistan has had the bomb for a long time. Bad things have happened. But they are the result of non-bomb related activities of the Pakistanis. Yet we have somehow managed to remain allied with Pakistan.
Then there is North Korea. They have had the bomb for several years now. Whatever bad things you can think of to say about the Iranians (or the Pakistanis, for that matter), they apply double or triple to North Korea. Yet somehow they have the bomb and life goes on. And the fact that both the Pakistanis and the North Koreans are members of the nuclear club has not really changed the regional balance of power in either of their spheres.
I conclude from this that joining the nuclear club is vastly overrated. I think that Iran joining the nuclear club will turn out to be far less consequential than any of the "experts" predict. I think it will be a big nothing. It used to be that being a nuclear power was a big deal. I don't think it is any more.
Then there is the much more serious problem, the fact that Iran has been, and continues to be, a supporter of various extremist groups around the Middle East. I do NOT like this behavior by them. But I have spent a long time documenting the sins of our "allies" Pakistan and Saudi Arabia at this point. Are the Iranians really so much worse?
Yes, according to the Israelis. No, according to me. And, if we give them a chance to be economically successful by removing sanctions, and by taking other steps, then they might find it worth while to change to tactics we find less problematic. And they are natural opponents of Saudi Arabia.
Iran aspires to be the leader of the Shiite faction of Islam. Saudi Arabia aspires to be the leader of the Sunni faction of Islam. The Sunnis are much more populous, but the Saudis are such poor leaders they haven't been able to gain a definitive advantage. And, as far as I can tell, Iran is not building and supporting the horrible Madrassas that the Saudis are so fond of.
Just like I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our relations with India, I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our elations with Iran. We need to "trust but verify", but I think there are deals to be had. I think we can trade away opposition to the Iranian bomb for a lot. And, since we can no longer stop it anyhow, we are trading away something of very limited value.
Finally, let me address the Afghanis, and to a lesser extent, the Pakistanis. Afghanistan has been governed badly for more than a century, and perhaps far longer. The Taliban is now in control. If, as most people expect, they will go back to their bad old ways then they will soon be wildly unpopular in Afghanistan. And, if we cut off the money spigot to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, this will put Pakistan under tremendous pressure.
What that means in the short run is that they will find it hard to continue to support the Taliban. That will make it more likely that they will fail at governance, and especially at stewarding the economy forward.
In relatively recent times, the Russians tried to impose change on Afghanistan from the outside, and failed. The Americans tried to impose change from the outside and succeeded. But they immediately withdrew. The Pakistanis tried to impose change from the outside. They succeeded then failed as the Taliban was driven out of power after 9/11. Then the Americans tried again. They again initially succeeded, but this time they stuck around. That caused them to eventually fail. The Pakistanis are at it again when it comes to imposing change from the outside. What do you think their long term prospects are?
How about trying to initiate change in Afghanistan from the inside? What if a home grown opposition to the Taliban grows up in Afghanistan. Trying to impose regime change from the outside fails. But working with and supporting a true indigenous uprising has a good track record of success.
One of the reasons the U.S. succeeded forty years ago was that the Afghans did all the fighting and dying. If an indigenous opposition comes into being. And if it is honest and competent. And if it can find Afghanis who are willing to die (finding Afghanis who are willing and able to fight is easy) then many things become possible.
We will have to wait and see. If is possible that the Afghanis will decide that they are okay with the Taliban running things. And if they are not okay with that, no competent and honest opposition movement may arise. And even if it arises failure is always a possibility. But this approach provides the best chance for a good outcome for Afghanistan in the long run. It is important to remember that there are many difficulties ahead. And one or another of those difficulties may turn out to be insurmountable.
And all of this pertains to Pakistan, although to a lesser extent. Pakistan is closer to Iran in that it does have a diverse economy. But the largest component of the Pakistani economy is the one dedicated to the siphoning off of foreign aid/investment and diverting it into the pockets of the rich and powerful. If the foreign money spigot gets turned off then I don't know how much of a functioning economy will remain.
So, I do feel a sense of long term optimism as a result of the U.S. exiting Afghanistan. The short term result is truly horrendous for many if not most Afghanis. But we have been heading toward this day of reckoning for a long time. I think it has been unavoidable for something like fifteen years. And I refuse to let the Afghanis dodge blame for much of what is now happening. They have worked long and hard to avoid standing up an honest and competent government.
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