After the Quagmire

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Lo! the intrepid Afghan Taliban fighter of warrior lineage ancient. He who has vanquished countless foes, unassailable in his mountain redoubts, imbued with fanatical resolve, possessed by suicidal courage—and currently running around Mazar-i-Sharif getting his beard shaved and playing Uzbecki pop music on his boom box, and using Mrs. Afghan Warrior's burka for a bedspread in the guest room, soon to be rented to foreign aid workers.

The fighting in Afghanistan was so brief that CNN's Headline News had to delete three bars from its "Target: Terror" theme to keep the music from outlasting the hostilities. The Soviet Union fought the Afghans for ten years and gave up in ignominious defeat in 1989. What were the Soviets using for weapons—cafeteria buns and rolled-up locker room towels? The United States dropped a lot of cafeteria buns—or something very like them—on Taliban-controlled areas. Exposure to American school-lunch food may have been the deciding factor in the radical Muslims' demoralization. A country that can make something that dreadful from mere flour, yeast, and water is a country not to be defied.

However it was that we achieved victory, achieve it we did, although to what end remains to be seen. One effect of victory has been to make America's elite sanguine about armed conflict for the first time since 1945. "SURPRISE: WAR WORKS AFTER ALL," read the headline on the Week in Review section of The New York Times for Sunday, November 18. That same day The Boston Globe Magazine ran a cover story titled "The New Patriots": "College students support a country at war—and so do their Vietnam-era parents." Of course, there's always the possibility that the revived fighting spirit among America's elite has nothing to do with Afghanistan but is, rather, a collateral result of Harvard's first undefeated football season since 1913. I believe that Harvard played Mount Holyoke, Smith, Li'l Dickens Day Care Center, and several Pop Warner teams, but I haven't checked that. At any rate, the word "quagmire" suddenly disappeared from the lexicon of pundits, savants, and mavens and has been replaced by ...

It's uncertain what the successor term for "quagmire" will be. In view of previous Western involvements with Afghanistan, "up the garden path" is a suggestion. "Please, no nation building!" says my friend Mike Schellhammer, an Army major. Mike was deployed on such missions in Haiti and Bosnia. "We're the Army—we break things on the battlefield," Mike says. "We didn't study nation building in college." Maybe that was the problem the Soviets faced in the 1980s. They weren't trying to scare and scatter Afghans, after all; they were trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, industrialized, educated, socialist nation. Maybe we should let the Russians try again (hold the socialism). That would make Vladimir Putin feel like a member of the Great Power Club and would keep him too busy to fiddle in the Balkans, prop up Belarus dictatorships, or pester Latvia about NATO expansion.

Meanwhile, what's next for us? Do we behave as we did after the Gulf War and just go home, have a recession, and elect Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as the next President of the United States? Or do we finish the War on Terrorism?

Go to the U.S. Department of State Web site and print out the "Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism" (from Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000) released by the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism last April. Opportunities to achieve closure would seem to abound.

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism ... It provided increasing support to numerous terrorist groups, including the Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) ... Syria continued to provide safehaven and support to several terrorist groups ... Sudan continued to serve as a safehaven for members of al-Qaida, the Lebanese Hizballah ... Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the PIJ, and HAMAS ...

Or am I wrong? Because I've heard that all these nations are helping us to fight terrorism now.

Anyway, we are told, this is not a war between Western civilization and the Muslim world. There is, nonetheless, interesting reading to be done in Freedom in the World, a survey of political rights and civil liberties issued annually since 1955 by the nonpartisan organization Freedom House. Among countries whose populations are predominantly (60 percent or more) Muslim only remote Mali and tiny Benin are rated as "Free." On a scale of 1 (Canada) to 7 (god-awful), no other Muslim country receives a score better than 3 in political rights and 4 in civil liberties.

But perhaps these ratings are out of date. The world has changed so much of late. For example, a peace vigil is now held each Saturday at noon outside the town offices in Peterborough, New Hampshire. According to the November 15 edition of the Monadnock Ledger, "One week, when it was rumored that CBS might cover the protesters, 45 people showed up." By Saturday, November 17, the peace protest had in effect turned into a victory protest, and eight people were present. There was one sweet-faced, white-haired old lady and then another, so much older that she looked as if she might have been doing this sort of thing since the Hitler-Stalin Pact. There was a middle-aged man with hair that was both very long and gone from half of his head, a middle-aged woman on whose features smugness had made an extensive and permanent settlement, a young man whose devil-may-care sideburns clashed with his go-to-hell golf pants, and a tweedy professor type who spent the whole vigil reading a magazine. Plus there was a mom in hand-knits trying to keep an eye on a rapidly fidgeting eight-year-old, and an Asian woman of college age who carried a sign reading RETALIATE WITH WORLD PEACE. Considering how world peace has gone in many places for the past fifty-odd years, that's a harsh sentiment. After a while the Asian woman wandered off to window-shop.

Most Peterboroughians were ignoring the vigil with the perfect obliviousness to all incongruity that has been a New England hallmark since Henry David Thoreau went off to live a hermit's life at Walden Pond but continued to have his mother do his laundry. Only one fellow, flannel-clad, stopped to argue with the pacifists. "What do you do," the fellow asked, "when they strike the homeland? What if they roll right in here with tanks?" I was just about to think Good for you when the fellow went on to say, "But I'll tell you one thing, I've refused to get the anthrax shots."

So we see at what level debate about a just war and a natural right of self-defense is being conducted these days. The next morning, in a further sign of the times, Boston's WBZ Radio played a recorded segment by Martha Stewart detailing the intricacies of flag etiquette. The New York Times "Sunday Styles" section could not resist a bow to the New Seriousness—or an Afghanistan hook—even when reviewing the stupidest possible television show.

First, network news programs broadcast images of Afghan women removing their burkas ... A few hours later ... models had peeled away their clothing and were showing off thong panties as ABC broadcast the Victoria's Secret fashion show ...

And the November 20 edition of The National Enquirer had a feature headed "EVEN PETS ARE STRESSED OUT FROM TERRORIST ATTACKS." Here are some of the signs that your dog, cat, or hamster may be suffering the aftereffects of 9/11:

Sadness or glumness.

Constant fighting with other pets.

Lapses in toilet training.

Pet is more needy and constantly seeks attention.

Speaking of constantly seeking attention, Bill Clinton showed up to give a talk at Harvard on November 19, perhaps to share anecdotes about his being a star quarterback on the intrepid Crimson gridiron squad of warrior lineage ancient. The Boston Globe didn't mention his football heroics but did give Bill two fulsome stories and a teaser: "Fans flock to Clinton in Hub visit." Bill "blamed himself for not building stronger ties with the Muslim world during the 1990s," according to the Globe. "He said he should have worked harder ... to support overseas 'nation building.'" In these days of flux and transformation there is comfort in knowing that some things stay the same. It's still all about Bill. "America can exert influence, he said, by admitting its own faults." Interesting source for that advice. "We cannot engage in this debate," Bill was quoted as saying, "without admitting that there are excesses in our contemporary culture." Whether the ex-President was referring to himself or to the Victoria's Secret fashion show was not made clear.

During a question-and-answer period Clinton said that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. This may be a better idea than he realizes. Now that Iran, Syria, and Sudan are on our side, the Lebanese Hizbollah, Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and al Qaeda will need someplace to go. Having them all in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would certainly narrow the focus for air strikes by the anti-terrorism alliance and allow multi-national ground-troop operations to be conducted in a compact area with well-mapped terrain and an excellent road system. As long as the Israelis don't get involved. We don't want anybody on our side who was guilty of premature anti-terrorism.