President Barack Obama’s new war strategy for Afghanistan is unconvincing. He says that winning the war requires a “stronger, smarter and more comprehensive strategy”. Nobody would disagree with that. The war is slowly being lost. There is a desperate need to change tactics.
The trouble is there is no evidence that he has come up with a stronger, smarter and more comprehensive strategy than the Bush administration. His new plan is not a rethink. It is a straightforward rehash of what had already been said. There is no difference between his troop surge and President Bush’s. The only difference is who is saying it and the way it is being said.
The “new” policy is going to be as stymied as the old one. Although Obama talks of taking aid to where it can make a real difference — agriculture, education, communications — there is the same old patronizing attitude toward Afghanistan and Pakistan that crippled the Bush administration’s efforts. It may have displayed it more arrogantly but it is still there. Washington knows best. It knows what Afghanistan and Pakistan need and it will decide what is to be done and who is to do it. The very fact that voices in Washington have been discussing if President Hamid Karzai is up to the job or whether there needs to be a prime minister who can shoulder some of the responsibilities shows that all too vividly. It considers it is running the show. But the political make-up of Afghanistan or what should be spent on civil projects there or in Pakistan are not issues for the Americans or anyone else other than the Afghans and Pakistanis respectively to decide. Obama may say that American forces should not be in Afghanistan to “control that country or dictate its future”, but that is how it comes over.
The other Obama mistake is the continued belief in military muscle. You cannot fight your opponents by shooting them, especially if they are willing to die. Every time the Americans and their allies shoot, they strengthen their opponents’ cause that wants to see itself as the victim. The only way forward is to change this mindset. That means talking to them. Obama needs to understand that the insurgents referred to as “Taleban” in Afghanistan and on the border areas in Pakistan have not taken up arms because they are wedded to a fundamentalist religious cause. The conflict is much more prosaic. There is a long history, going back long before the creation of the Taleban, of local, tribal resistance to central government in both places.
The Taleban label is now applied to them. They may use it themselves, but they are first and foremost local tribesmen who resent anyone telling them what to do. Although foreign forces are particularly disliked, all the more so if non-Muslim, there should be no underestimating the rejection of government diktat. These are the facts of life in Afghanistan and Swat and Waziristan.
Given that these “Taleban” are primarily disgruntled tribesmen, talking to them should not be too hard. But even that is not America’s job. It is the Afghan government’s, the Pakistan government’s. America’s role is to facilitate them. A military presence — and now an increased military presence — only fuels resentment.
Springtime for Mao Zedong
Excerpts from an editorial in The Boston Globe on Friday:
You can’t make this stuff up. In China, where the economy is built upon a ruthless version of capitalism, they are planning to stage a musical version of Karl Marx’s masterwork — Das Kapital.
We hope the producers — imagine Chinese variations on Mel Brooks and Zero Mostel — have figured out a way to make oodles of money from a box-office bust.
Director He Nian is promising to fuse aspects of the Broadway musical, Las Vegas floor shows and Japanese animation in a show that entertains while it educates the masses about Marxist theory.
To make sure there is no deviation in book or lyrics from Marxist orthodoxy, an economics professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University has been hired as consultant to the production.
The truth is that professor Zhang Jun, the consultant, will be superfluous. There may be a few octogenarians left in the Politburo who remember the finer points of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought, but among the masses those old notions are as outmoded as the Red Guards, mandatory self-criticism sessions and the iron rice bowl.
The show’s plot may or may not prove entertaining, but it does sound relevant to current conditions in China, where factories are closing daily and laid-off workers are protesting in the streets.
In the musical, workers discover that their boss has been exploiting them and then learn about Marx’s surplus theory of value. Some react by passively accepting their fate. Others organize and use their collective strength to bargain with the boss. A third cohort mounts a revolt, only to cause the entire business to fail.
The moral of the story — that today’s workers must not revolt against the new ruling class — would give Marx apoplexy. But so it goes when the dialectic is set to music.
