Those minarets

The Swiss outlawed minarets, which seems extreme. My friend V. sent me a hilarious letter to the editor published somewhere in Montreal:

The Swiss are becoming unglued. That's what happens when, as a culture, you think paranoia is a preferred lifestyle. This underlying paranoia has probably been exacerbated by international pressure on their banks to reveal hidden account holders, reduced chocolate sales, insufficient smiling, high altitude hypoxia, wearing lederhosen without soft underwear, eating too many Ricola throat lozenges, skiing into trees, or all of the above. The Swiss should not be taken seriously, as they already do too much of that themselves.

So OK. Except that Canada is vast and orderly and its Muslim immigrants are well educated and eager to assimilate. It's not quite the same in Europe.

Rinus Pennix studied immigrant acculturation in Holland, where different "pillars" or groups had historically been encouraged to keep to themselves, creating a multitude of isolated cultures in the country rather than striving for some cohesiveness. This study was mentioned in The Dutch Model, an article by Jane Kramer, in The New Yorker after the murder of Theo van Gogh. Mr. van Gogh's work was tasteless and provocative and disrespectful, one end of a specter that incited the other and led to his murder.


I'm not sure what the answer is; feeling overrun may be uncomfortable, but alienating entire cultural groups seems dangerous.

Afghanistan

The Nation features an excellent article on Afghanistan by Robert Dreyfuss, who covers national security for Rolling Stone.

I'm going to incorporate it into the long post on Afghanistan (prior).



Ah, we are in the graveyard of empires now.

Kohlberg's stages of moral development

A while back I posted on the Republican view of morality. It seems Republicans are more apt to support moral views that hold society together and less those that would foster disobedience (including civil disobedience) and an unraveling of societal conventions.

Lawrence Kohlberg, a scholar of both psychology and philosophy, developed a model of the stages of moral development. He interviewed subjects and posed the following question:

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that?

The stages are as follows:
1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation.
2. Individualism and Exchange.
3. Good Interpersonal Relationships.
4. Maintaining the Social Order.
5. Social Contract and Individual Rights.
6. Universal Principles.


I so wish I had taken more psychology courses; that might be the very thing I can do now. All I seem to know is some Freudian theory and some Maslow, so I am woefully ignorant in this area.

Afghanistan

If the economy is at the forefront of everyone's mind, we do have two wars going on. I. has some ideas about Iraq: he favors the partition. I don't know enough to have an opinion, but I do want us to stop bothering those poor people and to plan for some reparations as well.

Afghanistan

The Taliban, armed and defending their home to the death
Photo from the Daily Mail

It seems we have been trying to impose a nation-state on a bunch of tribespeople. Hamid Karzai is not much more than the mayor of Kabul. We have 30,000 troops over there. Why? The Soviets failed with hundreds of thousands of troops. OK, so we (and Saudi Arabia) were aiding the mujahideen with buckets of money, materiel and training, but still... wouldn't anyone fight an invader to the death? They might have beat the Soviets eventually, even without our and Saudi aid.

"When you're bleeding to death on the Afghan plains,
And the Afghan women come to cut up your remains,
Just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains,
And go to your Gawd like a soldier."
— Rudyard Kipling

So I've been thinking about this. My feeling is that Realpolitik will win out and we will have to opt for an ugly solution. Now here is a very interesting, very thorny, very explosive, and very long-term problem.


Defining the Problem
First, per a friend's suggestion (thank you, R.!), I present a recent episode of Frontline with some of my own commentary.


Let's begin with Frontline.

Along the Korengal Valley
Photo from the New York Times

[Much, much more to come...]




A Surge?
In Small Wars Journal, a group of military strategists recommend a surge such as the one implemented in Iraq, with twenty troops per 1,000 inhabitants to provide security during an counter-insurgency operation. (I could not make out whether the 20:1000 ratio included troops for a counterinsurgency as well.)

This strategists would have us concentrate troops along the Afghan-Pakistan border — technically Pakistan's NW Frontier Provice that might as well be called Pashtunistan. A surge implemented solely in this region, with, per the white paper, its population of 42 million (14 million in Afghanistan, the remainder in the border region and in Pakistan proper) would require 840,000 troops. Well!

• The writers further recommend securing the border. Am I dense, or is securing a border a largely losing proposition? Let's ask Mr. Lou Dobbs, shall we?
  
  
• The writers also want to control the "road from Peshawar, Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass and onto Jalalabad ... a crucial lifeline for Afghans." Easier, perhaps, although much of this road is very rough terrain indeed.
  
  
• The white paper notes the Taliban's control in rural Pashtun "districts," although what the term means is unclear (at least to me).

"The Taliban understand the importance of coercing or influencing the Pashtun population in the rural districts and focus most of their attention on these areas. In July 2008, the Taliban operated in 130 Pashtun districts and from June to August 2008 temporarily overran 41 districts."

Finally, the paper notes that "Afghan coalescing identity is tied to the district level with bottom-up governance" and is passingly pessimistic about the ability of a national government to form, let alone function.


No Surge; Nation-building
In Foreign Affairs, Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid disaagree with a surge

The crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan is beyond the point where more troops will help. U.S. strategy must be to seek compromise with insurgents while addressing regional rivalries and insecurities.

They condemn incursions into Pakistan's NW Frontier, but still believe that super-imposing a nation-state on the tribes might work: "good governance...effective police and justice systems."

Cross-border attacks into Pakistan may produce an "October surprise" or provide material for apologists hoping to salvage George W. Bush's legacy, but they will not provide security. Advancing reconstruction, development, good governance, and counternarcotics efforts and building effective police and justice systems in Afghanistan will require many years of relative peace and security.

MIT Study of Tribal Rivalries

[Much more to come]

"Thirty years of conflict has fragmented the traditional tribal structure which inhibits the type of broad tribal reconciliation found in the Iraqi Awakening Councils."

In other words, they hate each other.




This map is from the MIT Center for International Studies. The information there is astounding: a lot of reading, but worth it.