Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Defeats in war are always a good time to whack leftwing strawmen for things they aren't saying

I came across this article by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale in a polemic to which I'll say more below. It's from a left-leaning site called Anne Bonny Pirate, Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation 08/17/2021. (The site is named after a famous 18th century female pirate.) A German version appears on a site called Marx21 (whose namesake is pretty obvious), Rückkehr der Taliban - Das Ende der Besatzung 08/18/2021. (For what it's worth, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung regards the adherents of Marx21 as an "extremist group.")

Lindisfarne and Neale draw the following six lessons from the current state of the Afghanistan War:
First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.
This is true. There is a larger international context, of course. The Taliban receives critical support from Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. And though the US carried the lead, the US operation was actually officially a NATO mission, and other NATO countries including German did take part in combat operations. But the basic point is correct: The Taliban defeated the US.
Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.
Also true. Lindisfarne and Neale expand on this point: "The fact that more people have chosen the Taliban does not mean that most Afghans necessarily support the Taliban. It means that given the limited choices available, that is the choice they have made. " They are not claiming that this was some kind of peaceful transition based on free and competitive elections.
Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.
Yes, the occupation was in practice "cruel and corrupt." But it was also a foreign occupation. Even if the local loyalties are more ethnic and religious (or "tribal" to use the dated word we still hear a lot) than what we usually think of a "national" loyalty, they were locals. The NATO countries dropping bombs, blasting people with drone strikes, and knocking down doors in search of "terrorists" were foreigners. This is important. Those nationalist sentiments are very much connected to the particulars of the politics. But it also matters in itself.

History never repeats itself exactly, of course. But there is a history that earned Afghanistan the nickname "graveyard of empires." That history includes events like the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842. Also the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1879. And the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919.
Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.
And that's been the case for years. Unlike the US foreign policy establishment, the public has wanted the US to pull out of Afghanistan for a long time. And that's true, even though the bizarrely negative current US media coverage of the withdrawal may have some short-term effect in the polls.
Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.
While technically true - in the international context mentioned above - it's unclear in what way it will "weaken the power of the American empire." As Stephen Walt noted on Twitter:


Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.
This two-sentence point is a big generalization about an obviously very complicated problem. But they do expand on this as on all the other points at greater length in the article. Lindisfarne actually did anthropological research in northern Afghanistan, which she reported (as Nancy Tapper) in the book, Bartered Brides: Politics and Marriage in a Tribal Society (1991). So they aren't just shooting from the hip on this point. She argues that since both the Soviet and American interventions made women's rights a prominent policy and justification for their military actions.

It's also the case that nobody anywhere judges a particular regime, or its foreign allies who may be bombing and running drone strikes in support of them. They write:
How do you think most Afghan women feel about another invasion, this time by the Americans, justified by the need to rescue Afghan women? Remember, those statistics about the dead, the maimed and the refugees under Soviet occupation were not abstract numbers. They were living women, and their sons and daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.
How much those Afghans who identified themselves as feminists in some sense - presumably most human rights activists and professional women like judges did so in some way or other - were particularly identified by the general population with the bombing and drone strikes, I don't know. But it is clear that the current situation is not only a "tragedy for feminists" but a tragedy for Afghan women and girls, as well.

This is a continuing risk in the politics and practice of "humanitarian intervention." In Iraq, there was a broad recognition that however dictatorial and evil Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was, women in Iraq had as much or more legal and practical equality than any other Arab country. That doesn't justify crimes on Saddam's part. Nor does it mean that Iraqi women were wrong to oppose Saddam's regime. But the US invasion clearly empowered an Islamist-oriented politics in Iraq that is not particularly enthusiastic about gender equality. War is complicated business. Including imperial and neo-imperial wars. Bombing and drone strikes kill women as well as men and children.

Are critics of the Afghanistan War romanticizing reactionary Islamist politics?

Going back to Stephen Walt's point, the US did not have a pressing and immediate, aka, "vital" interest in keeping the pro-American and pro-India government last headed by President Ashraf Ghani in power via a military conflict with direct US participation. It's a very practical point of which we shouldn't lose sight. The Taliban, decisively aided by the Pakistani ISI, has won a victory against an America operating without a vital US interest at stake.

I came across the Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale through an article criticizing it by Moheb Shafaqyar, an Afghan immigrant to Germany associated with the German Left Party (DIE LINKE), Das Ende der Besatzung Der Freitag 24.08.2021. Shafaqyar singles out their article for criticism on the grounds that it romanticizes the Taliban.

I'm sure there are plenty of nuances in German Left Party debates about foreign policy that I don't understand. (The national party co-chair Janine Wissler was at least until recently associated with the Marx21 group.) But I don't see the alleged romanticization he criticizes. In fact, he seem to be resorting to oppo-research type arguments to make his case. This argument, for instance, is not only refuting something that Lindisfarne and Neale did not say but is also pretty much indistinguishable from stock neocon arguments against anyone criticizing a foolish military intervention:
This idea [of a socialist-led Islamist movement] and the resulting narrative of an oppressed class that has just been able to defeat imperialism leads to this narrative: The Taliban actually just have the wrong ideology, but a victory against imperialism and thus against one of the most aggressive forms of capitalism is still a victory – and therefore somehow edifying. Raise a fist, or, as I had to read in a comment column discussion among people in a not unimportant position of left-wing organizations: Toast to it first! For revolutionaries in Europe and America, the young people falling out of the planes are above all images on screens, so they are quickly hidden. After all, when was the last time people in this country raised their glass of Lambrusco to toast the overthrow of an order? [my emphasis]
This could have come from Butcher's Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney's favoirte historian Victor Davis Hanson.  Is This really how pro-intervention people in the German Left Party make their arguments? Lindisfarne and Neale do make the point that the Taliban was able to win the support they did among poor Afghans (and there are lots of poor Afghans!) by being a domestic force fighting against a foreign invader who capitalized on the abuses of the NATO-backed government:
[A]ny movement that has fought a twenty-year guerrilla war and defeated a great empire is anti-imperialist, or words have no meaning.

Reality is what it is. The Taliban are a movement of poor peasants, against an imperial occupation, deeply misogynist, supported by many women, sometimes racist and sectarian, and sometimes not. That’s a bundle of contradictions produced by history.

Another source of confusion is the class politics of the Taliban. How can they be on the side of the poor, as they obviously are, and yet so bitterly opposed to socialism? The answer is that the experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class. But it did not change the reality of class. No one has ever built a mass movement among poor peasants that took power without being seen as on the side of the poor.

The Taliban talk not in the language of class, but in the language of justice and corruption. ...

None of this means that the Taliban will necessarily rule in the interests of the poor. We have seen enough peasant revolts come to power in the last century and more, only to become governments by urban elites. And none of this should distract from the truth that the Taliban intend to be dictators, not democrats. [my emphasis]
I guess if any mention of "anti-imperialist" is taken as a marker of leftwing ditzyness, Shafaqyar's argument makes some sense. He also oddly complains that Lindisfarne and Neale's position is "starkly dominated by geopolitics." Say what? A 20-year war in Asia by the United States and its European allies as part of a "global war on terror" is, you know, a geopolitical event. What would be a non-geopolitical way to think of that war? Calling it a purely "tribal" conflict with no broader international significance?

Lindisfarne and Neale's article may appear on a website called Marx21. But there is nothing in it about some ideal of socialist-led Islamist movements. Nor any mention of capitalism, for that matter. I "ellipsed" these two comments out of their quote just given: "[The Taliban] themselves, or their parents or grandparents, were killed and tortured by socialists and communists [during the period of the pro-Soviet government]." "[T]he experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class."

Isolde Charim in the Vienna weekly Falter has a good summary of the war's immediate outcome (although it admittedly may also suffer from a "geopolitical" perspective):
Twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan have not been enough to fight terrorism, nor to build a democratic state and enforce (or, what, “plant”?) democratic principles. Twenty years have not been enough for the acceptance of human rights. Human rights are considered blasphemous by the Taliban. [Here she inserts a sarcastic dig at a statement by Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer that implied it was unacceptable for Austria to be restrained by human rights law in its treatment of refugees.]

Twenty years have also not been enough to implement women's rights in society. What about Zarifa Ghafari, the first Afghan mayor of a city near Kabul? From a Western point of view, her appointment was a step forward, an achievement of equality. For her, however, the social non-acceptance of a female politician was life-threatening from the very beginning. She has since fled Afghanistan. [my translation]
I think I'll stick with the more pragmatic-oriented, practical "geopolitical" view of the Afghanistan War.
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