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Yon: The Brits Are Losing Helmand

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zombie8/31/2009 1:30:45 pm PDT

Two passages in this report from the incomparable Yon which bear highlighting:

“The stories of foreign invaders do not explain away the great walls built around nearly every home and every mind. The problem is not the terrain. The problem is not that Americans and others supported the Mujahadin when they fought the Soviets. The problem is not the artificial boundaries penciled in by the British all over Asia and the Middle East. The people are backwards and many want it that way. You can fly over a compound in the desert, miles from the next compound, and still it will have walls. Afghanistan is the land of a million Alamos.”

…and…

“The [British] women are medics, and they brave the combat just like the infantry soldiers. But again, they will never get the credit they deserve, and so we joked that they should just let people think they spent the entire tour at Camp Bastion. Who would believe that they were out there in the thick of it? On this day, an Afghan man showed one of these medics a rash on his arms, but the medic carried no such medicines out into the fighting. When medic Evans said she had no medicine, a young man picked up a big stone and was preparing to hit her. Rhian instantly pointed the rifle at the man who put down the rock.”

This is the core of the problem: The people themselves. They are pre-Enlightenment. Pre-Renaiisance, even. It’s hard for us to even grasp the backwardness of their worldview, much less understand it and sympathize with it.

In the San Francisco Bay Area there is a city called Fremont, which has a large Afghan expatriate community. If you go there and hang out, or just watch news stories filmed there, you’ll find that the Afghan-Americans are pro-America, educated, friendly, etc. How can this be? Because all the Afghans who fled to America were the educated ones, the forward-thinkers, the progressives, fleeing the mujahideen and the Taliban in the ’80s and ’90s.

The end result is that Afghanistan itself is now exclusively populated by the “left-behinds,” the ignorant, modernism-hating tribalists.

Missionaries in the 19th century to various far-flung parts of the globe would sometimes despair that the “natives” in their particular outpost were simply beyond redemption.

I think we’ve got one of those situations here.