OldSolduer said:
The way I see it we have two options:
1. Withdraw now. Pull all the troops out, put them in KAF and fly them home with ALL the kit we have there, right down to the last pencil. That is not a very good option is it?
2. Put the pressure on Karzai, and let the ordinary Afghan know this is NOT the way the world operates. But I forgot, we can't shove our beleifs down their throats right? :rage:
There isn't alot of outrage over this in Canada is there..... it saddens me to think Canadians will go along with this crap. Is this what we have become?
But,
Old Solduer, the fact (and it is a fact) is that we
cannot – are not able to – change people’s
culture quickly or easily. We can try but
I am as certain as history can teach me that we will fail.
Culture is a deeply ingrained mix of family/clan
custom or habit, ‘folk’ influences like music and nursery rhymes, religion (almost as important, culturally, as nursery rhymes) and, in a measure related
directly to “communications,” outside influences.
The European
Reformation took about 150 years to “complete” (from 1517 when Luther hammered his
Ninety-five theses to a church door until 1648's Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War). It went at breakneck speed in small, largely literate, Scotland – from 1546 when Wishart
et al murdered or executed, take your pick, Cardinal Beaton at Saint Andrews until 1560 when Scotland was, by and large, a thoroughly protestant society. But the norm for religious reform is a few generations – say a century. Other cultural influences, like nursery rhymes, last much, much longer than most religious practices and have a
greater deeper impact – they, like your
“milk tongue” (the language you learn at your mother’s breast in the first year of your life), reside deep in our brains and are never erased, even by our professed beliefs.
Modern communication (newspapers and magazines, radio, movies and, above all, TV)
can exert a great and powerful influence IF they are carefully used. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s a bunch of American entrepreneurs (mostly Jewish immigrants – refugees – from Europe) created and propagated a wholly fictitious but entirely believable “America” through cinema. Arguably they and their “products” did more to change Europe and Japan than did all of the policies of e.g. Lucius Clay or Douglas MacArthur, more even, perhaps, that did George C Marshall. But this form of insidious “soft power” needs to be
administered slowly, and gently – people have to seek it, not have it provided to them.
(The Chinese film industry is, right now, using this technique – producing attractive films with excellent production values - to tell a consistent “story” to China and the world. They are replicating the work of the
early Hollywood moguls).
A good friend told me this story: in China, in the 1980s, language students listened assiduously to the BBC World Service – which was not jammed – for its excellent language lessons but also for it’s other broadcasts. They
chose it over e.g.
Voice of America (also not jammed) because it had “better” programmes – more interesting, more “attractive” to Chinese teen agers and young adults. With those really first rate language lessons – orders of magnitude better than anything the Americans offered – those Chinese also got a big dose of quiet, understated, British propaganda. It worked. To this day my Chinese friend is, largely, unaware that many of her attitudes were “shaped” by the British. (She was a university teacher, not yet even an associate professor, when the Tiananmen Square protest took place in 1989 – she carried food to the students and barely missed the massacre. Later that year she was accepted for a “visiting scholar” programme in Canada – and later, in the 1990s became a Canadian citizen.)
All that to say that we can, and should, use our “soft power” to try to start
provoking a “reformation” – a long, long process that will still be going on when you and I are dead and buried. We can provoke, we can explain, we can cajole, we can teach and we can propagandize but we
cannot force changes. Nothing we did, since 2002, nothing we do now and nothing the CF will is going to do will do much, if anything, to change Afghans' culture – only they can do that. We can, probably will, force Karzai to amend the law. That will do nothing, not one little thing; Afghanistan will not change. Some Afghans will think us bullies and they will dislike us and even more and reject our “advice” even more strongly, but most will just go on, oblivious to our ambitions.
Cultures take a long time to change – generations, centuries. It is foolish to think that we, the US led West, can “bring democracy” to e.g. Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else for that matter.
(Democracy is a fine system, eminently useful for modern industrial economies where a strong respect for and implementation of the rule of law is necessary for commerce. It is not quite so useful in feudal societies. Democracy is an especially hard sell in Muslim societies because “good” Muslims
believe that absolutely everything one needs to manage a society is in one book: the Koran.
Magna Carta, the
English Bill of Rights, the
British Constitution, the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution (which includes the US Bill of Rights in its first 10 articles) are all worthless, inferior to the “rules” set forth in the Koran – all that Muslims
must believe are necessary to run a state because, apparently, Mohammed never said “render unto Caesar” etc.)
What we can bring to Afghanistan, before we leave, is enough “know how” and infrastructure to allow the legitimate government of Afghanistan to provide enough security so that the people of Afghanistan may make their own decisions (decisions we may not like at all) in their own ways (ways we may not like, either) for themselves. If try to “bring” more we will fail.