Who is seeing the real Afghanistan?
Last week the Washington Post printed two letters from different sources who had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan. They came to very different conclusions about the American presence there.
First, there is the letter from Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who had fought in Iraq and had recently taken a temporary foreign service assignment in Zabul province. One State department official referred to this area as, “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected.” Hoh had developed great misgivings about the war and had become so disillusioned that he chose to resign. Hoh wote in his resignation letter,
I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditure of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war…. The United States presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.
Matthew Hoh has served his country bravely in combat and he has responded to a policy with which he disagreed by making the honorable choice to resign. His observations about the situation in Zabul province merit serious consideration. I wish that many others in the previous administration who had serious misgivings about policy but waited to reveal them until after leaving office had, instead, followed Hoh’s example.
Several days later, a letter to the editor appeared in the Washington Post from Benjamin Joseloff, an American serving as a fellow at the Afghanistan Legal Education Project. This initiative, started by Stanford Law students, is devoted to a helping Afghan universities improve the quality of their legal education. Joseloff writes,
I don’t agree with Mr. Hoh that there is nothing here worth fighting for….I am greeted at work every day by cheerful, 18- to 30-year-old Afghan men and women eager to bring peace, stability and, yes, even democracy to their troubled country.
So, we have two Americans serving in this war-torn country that have come to very different conclusions. Hoh has concluded that we are in the midst of a civil war and that our very presence in the country contributes to the problem. Joseloff has observed an incredible desire by Afghans to change their own society and has argued that all is not lost. Who is seeing the real Afghanistan? My answer is that they probably both are.
When examining the US presence in Afghanistan, it is important to consider the experiences of those who have spent time in this complex country. If a hypothetical pair of foreigners were to visit the United States to study race relations and one visited the post-Katrina ninth ward in New Orleans and another visited an integrated church in Chicago, you would receive quite different reports. What is important to remember is that while individual personal accounts are vitally important and contribute greatly to our understanding of a place, taken alone they are only snapshots.
Claims made by those who say with the utmost certainty that they know the motivations and aspirations of “the Afghan people” should be treated with much scrutiny. Afghanistan is an incredibly complex and diverse country and what holds true in one area may not at all be the reality in another. It will be important to remember this when considering America’s future approach to the conflict there.
The complexity of the situation was further highlighted in a recent story in Christian Science Monitor that described the experiences of representatives from Code Pink. Members of this U.S.-based women’s anti war group traveled to Afghanistan with the expectation that they would hear accounts that would bolster their message of troop withdrawal from the country. They were surprised to receive the opposite. The former Afghan minister of women stated,
It is good for Afghanistan to have more troops – more troops committed with the aim of building peace and against war, terrorism, and security – along with other resources.
As members of Code Pink learned, we must be very careful about the generalizations we draw about Afghans and what they envision for the future of their country.
Related posts: