Some questions for Mr Obama

When General Stanley McChrystal was hired by President Barack Obama to run the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I thought how interesting the appointment might prove to be.  Why him, I asked myself. The only justification I could think of was that perhaps McChrystal was employed to reduce civilian casualties by killing more precisely than in the past. That may have been Obama's idea but it did not work because under McChrystal's leadership, civilian casualties (especially in Pakistan) seem to have risen — although it is hard to be precise because there is so much ignorance, compounded by misinformation, about non-western casualties. Civilian casualties have not fallen since McChrystal's appointment. Maybe that was the source of friction between Obama and him. Maybe McChrystal was not doing what he was hired to do.

But why did Obama tolerate McChrystal’s excesses for so long? My guess is that McChrystal claimed the killing was necessary to 'weaken' the Taliban before ‘negotiating’ with them. That would be the textbook account. But unfortunately for American-trained generals and some of their unimaginative and historically ignorant advisers, Afghanistan and Pakistan do not fit textbook theory, nor did Vietnam. The reasons are so simple that they seem to elude the ‘experts’.

For every Afghan civilian killed, a multiple of those killed become willing to die to avenge their deaths. The process softens up no one, it increases the intensity opposition to the foreign invaders. That seems to be obvious to all Afghans, and to most Pakistanis, but invisible to most Americans influential in the occupation of a country not their own.

Another thing Americans have found incomprehensible is that the people they are trying to oppress are often willing to die to defend their rights. They do not engage in cost-benefit analyses, as game theory would predict, so they do not fit the definition of rationality favoured by most contemporary, and especially American, political theorists. They behave irrationally. They give up their lives to get rid of the oppressors, no matter what incentives they may be offered to roll over and surrender. Added to all the historical reasons why Afghans will not tolerate foreign oppressors, their religion forbids them from tolerating non-Muslim invaders. This fact is one no British newspaper has, to my knowledge, been willing to print (I have offered it to all of them).

Afghans and Pakistanis are not engaged in a bargaining strategy, they are obedient to an absolute prohibition laid down firmly during hundreds of years of religious tradition and buttressed by their belief that it is their sacred duty to oppose oppressors, especially if they are not Muslims. Why is it so difficult for non-Muslim strategists to grasp this and adjust their thinking intelligently instead of thinking that if they kill enough people, sooner or later those people will simply give up? They won't. And the belief that they will is a form of culpable blindness, a cultural egocentricity that has had exceedingly brutal consequences for the Afghans and for many Pakistanis ever since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The strategy of bombing, starving and poisoning a people into submission is grotesquely immoral.

President Obama should do more than sack General McChrystal for insubordination. He should have intelligent, culturally imaginative and well-informed people, free of the arrogance that seems to afflict most Americans, figure out an Afghan strategy that actually takes the welfare of Afghans seriously. While the US spends billions of dollars a year enriching the leaders of its war industries, children are starving on the streets of Kabul and young boys, to save their families from starvation, are selling themselves as male prostitutes to the Afghan warlords whom Uncle Sam has installed to run the country, the mineral wealth of which is why they are there. Meanwhile, we are told that western forces are there to increase the security of western nations and to save Afghans from the excesses of the Taliban. Mr President, if you believe that, you are a fool. But you are not a fool. Who will save the Afghans from the excesses of the American's and their allies? That is the question we should be asking.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 2^nd, 2010.