Playing the goat

BACK IN 1963, WHEN I BEGAN my training program for a Peace Corps assignment, our group was shown a film about Afghanistan. I knew nothing about the country other than its name. Thinking about it today, I only can recall one part of the film--and I remember it vividly. It was about a game that Afghan men play called buzkashi, in which horsemen fide up and down a field with goals at each end but, instead of using a ball, they use a goat, which is roped and dragged up and down the field until shredded, and someone puts what is left of its body through the goal. I came away thinking the game primitive and barbaric. The film left an impression of a country that was exotic, rugged, violent, and stubbornly out of the mainstream of 20th-century modernization. I thought to myself that I never would want to go to Afghanistan and, frankly, tried to put the country and its culture out of my mind. I went to Malaya instead.

At the end of a long Chinese Communist rebellion, Malaya expanded into Malaysia and learned to balance its combined Muslim-Buddhist-Hindu culture. When I arrived, gunfire was remote and infrequent and the insurgency sputtering. The last of Chinese rebels surren dered in 1989 and Malaysia's anti-Communist struggle came to an end. It was the last successful suppression of a violent anti-state war.

Nearby, the Chinese had occupied Vietnam from 111 B.C. to 938 A.D. Despite a long-term concerted effort, Vietnamese culture persevered and the Chinese ultimately were thrown out. Later invasions (1255, 1285, and 1979) by Mongols and the Chinese were repelled. The French intruded in the mid 19th century and, 100 years hence, fell victim in the same way. The U.S. tried to help the French, beginning in 1948, and ultimately went to war, losing more than 58,000 men and women while suffering hundreds of thousands of physical and psychological casualties. We crawled away in 1973 and did not learn a thing.

Afghanistan, though, went on. Afghans were no more controllable by outsiders than their game implied. The Soviet Union invaded in 1978 after failing to run Afghanistan's government indirectly. The USSR's military did not stand a chance against this foreign culture. After fighting in the alleys and crevices for a decade--with their empire collapsing ideologically and economically behind them--the Soviets understood that they had lost and went home. Clearly superior firepower served no good purpose against culture and religion, so CCCP cut its losses.

Still, the U.S. learned nothing. After the Sept. 11,2001, catastrophes in New York and at the Pentagon, the U.S. flew into the fray. It went 'after Al Qaeda's leadership, then based in Afghanistan, with a rush of weaponry. The Bush Administration was so blinded by its own ideology that it thought the Soviets lost the war in Afghanistan because they were Communists; the U.S. would win because it is a democratic republic. However, the Afghans had won the fight against USSR forces precisely because they were Afghans. Culture always trumps physical power. They are winning against the U.S. and NATO today because they still are Afghans and Muslims. Americans are just another infidel foreign enemy.

A report co-authored by Gen. James Jones, former NATO Supreme Commander, argues that the U.S. has tried to win the Afghan war "with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid, and without a clear and consistent comprehensive strategy to fill the power vacuum outside of Kabul." Does that sound familiar? We can substitute the cities of Saigon or Baghdad or New York and quickly see that at least the U.S. has been consistent in its (lack of) strategy formulation. Recent estimates of the number of soldiers and police that would be needed to contain the Taliban in Afghanistan militarily are about 400,000, or roughly twice the number employed at present, and that includes U.S., NATO, and alfied Afghan government soldiers and police.

What about in New York? The war against radical Islamic terrorists is not going well on American soil, either. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell reported to the Senate that, in the six years since the U.S. attacked Afghanistan to get Al Qaeda leaders, Osama bin Laden remains in control; Al Qaeda has "promoted a new generation of lieutenants, it was still producing militants, including new Western recruits, capable of blending into American society and attacking domestic targets ... is gaining strength from its refuge in Pakistan, and is steadily improving its ability to recruit, train, and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the U.S."

Winning in Afghanistan means changing the cultures of the Afghan peoples--stopping suicide bombers, educating women, developing a nonpoppy economy. This process does not involve killing insurgents nor constructing roads and water systems. It is changing a society. Just the military questions on Afghanistan are pretty stark. Is the U.S. willing to spend (10, 100, or 1,000) years in this inhospitable place? Is the U.S. willing--or even able--to send 500,000 or more troops to fight there as it did in Vietnam? Is the U.S. wilting to sacrifice 58,000 or more fives against refigiously motivated and deeply nationalistic warriors? What are the American people willing to give up from their way of life here in the homeland?

This is not a fight against AI Qaeda. AI Qaeda is not a government or a place. It can move its leadership, while its ideology floats across hills, mountains, borders, desserts, and oceans. This is a war against the Afghan Taliban and its adherents on the enemy's own sacred field. Meanwhile, the same game in Afghanistan goes on--except that now we are the goat.

Llewellyn D. Howell, International Affairs Editor of USA Today, is professor emeritus of international management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Glendale, Ariz., and senior research fellow, Asia Pacific Risk Institute, University, of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu.

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