This is the fourth in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.
Thinking of something that George W. Bush did right is something of a brainteaser, but there are things he did right.
Bush signed more free trade agreements in his 8 years in power than any other president before him.
Free trade allows for the transfer of wealth between the rich and the poor through the means of commerce, and I find that fundamentally something very agreeable.
It has lifted millions out of poverty and has created a new international middle class all over the world, and holds more promise yet. In principle, it is noble without wanting to be noble. Fundamentally, it is mercantilism which is amoral but not necessarily immoral.
George W. Bush was a great proponent of it. Speaking at Lima, Peru at the APEC summit in November 2008, he summarized his thoughts on the matter: "free trade, free markets, and free people."
Of course, free trade isn't the panacea that's going to solve poverty around the world.
Bush's dogmatic adherence to free-market ideology partly sparked the global credit crisis in 2008, but it wasn't all his fault.
He was merely running with the baton Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher started in the 80s: the trend of government deregulation and privatization. Smaller government, controlled spending, more power to the market to make its own decisions.
Every president in the US has been carrying on that mantra since, and not just in the US. Deregulation and trade liberalization is what brought China out of the doldrums to face a brave new world. India's "Hindu rate of growth" of 2% is now a distant memory. These economies now "slow down" at 6 to 9 percent GDP growth.
As far as the promise of alleviating poverty goes, it fairs decidedly mediocre. Despite almost three decades of this ideology slowly spreading, the only country in the world that can boast an absolute reduction in the number of people living in poverty is China.
India has a decreased proportion of people living in poverty, but it has a swelling population and so roughly the same number of people are suffering this scourge.
In addition, a lot of the countries with whom a country may trade freely with may not truly be "free" themselves. It is no small thing that China keeps its currency the Yuan, artificially weak compared to other currencies, or that it has lax rules on compensation for employees, or that it generates most of its energy from cheap and dirty coal power or dammed rivers at the expense of local ecology.
But it is part of the solution. Free trade encourages people-to-people contact. It encourages engaging with people, even if you may differ with them. It opens new horizons and business opportunities, and offers new perspectives. And last but not least, it offers people a good chance to make some moola.
In this George W. Bush was where it's at. It is truly unfortunate he wasn't right more often.
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
The End of the Bush Era: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
This is the third in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.
It was in 2000, under the stewardship of Bill Clinton that Yasser Arafat and the then Prime Minister Ehud Barak were on the verge of a political agreement. Clinton, ever the diplomat, hashed out some good solutions on Jerusalem, control of religious sites, and Israeli settlements, that were workable on the ground. As is typical in politics, "painful concessions" were on the table, but the reality is that 2000 was a turning point for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where they simply failed to turn.
Yasser Arafat eventually backed down saying the solution was untenable with the Palestinians, the talks broke down, the Second Intifada began, and George W. Bush stepped into the Whitehouse in 2001.
The Second Intifada started just a few months before he stepped into office in September 2000, so he was, in all fairness, inheriting a very difficult problem.
His 8 subsequent years in office saw the bloodiest attacks by Israel on the Palestinian territories during 9/11, then subsequently upon Lebanon, and then more recently the Gaza Strip.
Granted, Israel was consistently provoked during this time, but these completely disproportional "outbreaks of violence" are representative of the blank cheque handed to Israel by the US government to basically do as it pleased.
As they bombed Lebanon with extreme prejudice, the cries around the world for moderation were nearly unanimous, barring the US. When they bombed the Gaza Strip, the cries again were nearly unanimous, barring the US who eventually relented by abstaining from the UN Security Council vote.
Let's be fair, though: Israel had legitimate enemies and targets in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Iran has been fuelling both these fires and has a big hand in destabilizing the region and continuously provoking Israel.
That being said, 1,300 civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, of which a third are children, and the 1,200 civilian casualties in Lebanon, is simply unacceptable.
Consider for a moment Israel's casualties: 44 civilians in the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese War, and 3 in the 2008-2009 Gaza Strip Attacks.
When asked about the disproportionality of the numbers, we're told not to play the "numbers game." But really, we would see who would play the numbers game if, let's say 1,300 Israelis were killed, a third of which were Jewish children.
And all this happened while Israel's special partner, the United States, stood idly by. And that really was the hallmark of the Bush presidency when it came to Israel and Palestine. A policy of muted disengagement, but stalwart support, while actually doing nothing on the ground to help either the Israelis or the Palestinians.
When you think of the Middle East conflict during the Clinton years, you remember the historic meeting of Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton during the Oslo Accords in 1993. You remember the 2000 Camp David Summit with Ehud Barak. It's a history of engagement.
Bush, however, undertook no such personal diplomatic drives during his term. Instead, he insisted the Palestinians have elections out of no better reason than blind ideology ("spreading freedom"), and voters overwhelmingly voted for Hamas and sidelined the secular, moderate, yet corrupt, America-backed Fatah, sowing the seeds of the recent Gaza Attacks.
Palestinians are more numerous today than they were in 2000, and the conflict has made no steps forward, and has rather made negative progress. Israel underwent two wars, one of which it lost to the Lebanon, and has lost a lot of face to the international community for its heavy-handed tactics. There were protests in London and New York against the recent Gaza Strip bombings, and people are tired of hearing about the Middle East. Public sentiments are slowly turning against Israel as reports of their bombing schools and hospitals spread. Just a few years ago, criticisms of Israel were silenced with accusations of anti-Semitism.
It's nice to finally see the world acquire a more nuanced worldview.
Arguably, the best thing that happened to Israel in the era of Bush was Ariel Sharon's unilateralism.
The Palestinian response is and always has been impotent, as is evident from Israeli casualty numbers. Oh no, I do play the numbers game, as do most rational people. A lower overall casualty rate means lower risks, which means a lower threat level. The numbers don't lie: if you're a Palestinian, you're far more likely to die than if you were an Israeli.
These wars weren't cheap for Israel, and in the face of massive balance of trade deficits, the Israeli economy is kept alive on the life support of American aid. This is as sustainable as the Gulf-Arab countries' economies are dependent on oil. Today it's there, tomorrow it isn't. Granted, the US will support Israel with its dying breath, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of such an arrangement or the confidence the world now has in America's capacity to handle such expensive "special arrangements" with two wars and a recession on its plate.
In all fairness, the failure of the Bush administration isn't a direct failure. Nobody disputes how much of a colossal mess the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, how sticky a problem it is, and how difficult and painful the resolution will be for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Their tack on the Middle East was almost a perverse extension of their laissez-faire, market-driven economics: letting the "market forces" of massive American military and economic subsidy for Israel fight it out with the Irani-backed Palestinian and Lebanese militants, with innocent Israelis, and a lot more innocent Palestinians stuck, and dead, in the middle.
An indirect failure, and a failure he shares with his predecessor, and will in all likelihood share with his successor, but a failure nonetheless.
But hope, as they say, springs eternal.
Monday, January 19, 2009
The End of the Bush Era: Iraq
This is the second in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.
The reasons for why the Bush-Blair coalition went into Iraq for Gulf War 2 is going to remain one of the great mysteries of our generation.
A lot of answers are on offer, but they are at best only a piece of the puzzle, and at worst, dismissive of exactly how convinced these gentlemen were (and remain to this day) that we needed to bomb Iraq.
Oil is not a good enough a reason. Iraq was a net importer of oil for years after the invasion in 2003, and it couldn't have been expected to be any different. Oil is a capital-intensive venture, and most of the infrastructure was crumbling in Iraq, after more than 12 years of sanctions. Today, after 5 years, Iraq's contribution to global oil production is still nothing to write home about.
It may be a combination of oil and one-upping his father, who very prudently went in with certain objectives, achieved them, then moved out, but then subsequently lost his re-election in 1991.
The reasons for why the Bush-Blair coalition went into Iraq for Gulf War 2 is going to remain one of the great mysteries of our generation.
A lot of answers are on offer, but they are at best only a piece of the puzzle, and at worst, dismissive of exactly how convinced these gentlemen were (and remain to this day) that we needed to bomb Iraq.
Oil is not a good enough a reason. Iraq was a net importer of oil for years after the invasion in 2003, and it couldn't have been expected to be any different. Oil is a capital-intensive venture, and most of the infrastructure was crumbling in Iraq, after more than 12 years of sanctions. Today, after 5 years, Iraq's contribution to global oil production is still nothing to write home about.
It may be a combination of oil and one-upping his father, who very prudently went in with certain objectives, achieved them, then moved out, but then subsequently lost his re-election in 1991.
It could have been the Cookie Monster, I don't know. The truth is, nobody does. Despite the numerous books that have come out on the Bush presidency, the real inner core of interactions are covered in a fog of war, and subject to conjecture. Everyone's got a guess, and an opinion, but nobody really knows.
If you ask Bush and Blair about it, they go into moral platitudes about how they "believed" it was right, as if you're asking them if they believed in Jesus or Buddha, and then fall back to the ridiculous argument that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.
Well, it would be a better place without Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, and my annoying university roommate in 2006. Invade them too, why don't you, and make the world a "better place"? It's a cop-out.
It is a decision perplexing in its stupidity and awe-inspiring in the scale of disaster it has rained down upon Iraq and the world.
I still remember watching "Operation Shock and Awe" on CNN from Abu Dhabi in March 2003. It indeed was both shocking and awful.
The skyline of Baghdad was glowing orange in the night time as it rained fire. The domes and palm trees, such a familiar site for me, (having lived and grown up in the Middle East myself) silhouetted against the flames. To see it burn like that, it touched me really deeply. People shouldn't be allowed to do things like that without due cause.
Everyone outside of the Western intelligentsia informally knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Iraq was under weapons inspections, stricter sanctions or bombings for the past 12 years at that point, and this combination of UN-administered soft and hard diplomacy was doing a pretty decent job of containing the Iraqi threat. Al Qaeda loathed Iraq and wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
Hans Blix, the UN Weapons Inspector, a diplomat and academic, made the most logical observation: we don't have enough information to draw a conclusion safely, and more inspections are required. The US and the UK ran an unsuccessful smear campaign to completely destroy the man's reputation in a bid to overturn his opinions so they could start bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age.
I interviewed a certain Dr. Joseph Nye (a Distinguished Service Professor at the Kennedy School of Public Policy in Harvard) while I was in NUS in 2004 for my university publication, after it had become obvious that there were no weapons. In true academic humility, the man admitted in all honesty he was very surprised Saddam Hussein didn't have any weapons, because, and I remember his exact words, "we knew he had them."
This has to be one of the world's biggest "Oops!" Billions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, thousands of coalition casualties, a resurgence of localized Al Qaeda (where previously there was none), and an eruption of brutal, horrific sectarian violence resulted.
They underestimated so completely how difficult it would be to tackle a country so diverse and violently communal, that it genuinely baffles the mind as to what exactly they were expecting. "To be greeted as liberators" is part of the refrain they had stuck to, another indicator of how blinded by ideology and an over-simplistic worldview the Bush administration had to be.
Mr. Blair, in the meantime, had nought say in the failing strategies being implemented by the Bush administration. Iraq is a blemish on Tony Blair's record; he has arguably been one of Britain's most successful Prime Ministers since Winston Churchill, but how can one not give him the unfortunate moniker of "a poodle" after so submissively allowing George Bush to first spear-head a campaign against Iraq on such flimsy evidence, and then completely botch up the ground operations?
The post-invasion failures are summed up by the one very stupid thing they did: they went on and completely disbanded Iraq's security forces.
So they released men trained in handling arms and the arts of war to fend for themselves in their ethnic enclaves in a deeply schismatic region of the world that had suffered many years of painful dictatorship, and liberated only after war and bombings. Were they expecting grace and sensibility?
But the world collectively drank the kool-aid. The press was so sparing in their criticism and scepticism of their campaign against Iraq, one wondered if they were complicit. Honestly, where were the "analysts" and "experts" when the drums of war were being beaten for no apparent reason?
Most of the American senate voted for the war in Iraq, Democrats and Republicans alike. Most of the Americans supported the war, even after it was found to be under false pretence, much to the world's dismay when they re-elected George Bush for a second term in 2004, vindicating him that he was on the right path.
It was only in the last 2 years of Bush's presidency that people started losing complete faith in the man.
So it only took 6 years for them to catch on that this man had no clue what he was doing. It is remarkable how enduringly short-sighted and over-simplistic the American people are when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Instead of looking inward after the attacks of 9/11, they looked outward for something to bomb. And one country wasn't enough, they had to find a second one to empty their ordinances in.
The troop surge in 2007 eventually worked, something Bushites claim is a great victory, because he did it when everyone was against the idea, and it actually worked (much to everyone's surprise).
But even then, this success cannot be credit to him. It's like saying, I'm sorry I axed your fingers clean off your hand, but look, I managed to sew a couple of them back on again. I'm great, aren't I?
The thought that went into the troop surge and its associated policies under David Petraeus should have been the name of the game from the get-go. In fact, what game? There shouldn't have even been a war!
I don't see why he should claim the credit for ameliorating a planetesimal problem that he created. Iraq today has only "tolerable" levels of violence, where "only" 20 or so people die in bombings everyday, where previously it was 10 times as much. He set the bar of expectation so low that a success like this looks like a defining moment in his presidency.
Iraq is an epic, unprecedented failure that George W. Bush and his complicit allies are entirely responsible for. It outsizes all of his other failures, of which there are many, by at least an order of magnitude.
Despite what minor successes he may have had in his time, the scale of human and capital loss the world has incurred under this man's leadership, it would be small justice for Iraq to define his presidency, and for him to be remembered as one of the worst American presidents in recent history.
If you ask Bush and Blair about it, they go into moral platitudes about how they "believed" it was right, as if you're asking them if they believed in Jesus or Buddha, and then fall back to the ridiculous argument that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.
Well, it would be a better place without Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, and my annoying university roommate in 2006. Invade them too, why don't you, and make the world a "better place"? It's a cop-out.
It is a decision perplexing in its stupidity and awe-inspiring in the scale of disaster it has rained down upon Iraq and the world.
I still remember watching "Operation Shock and Awe" on CNN from Abu Dhabi in March 2003. It indeed was both shocking and awful.
The skyline of Baghdad was glowing orange in the night time as it rained fire. The domes and palm trees, such a familiar site for me, (having lived and grown up in the Middle East myself) silhouetted against the flames. To see it burn like that, it touched me really deeply. People shouldn't be allowed to do things like that without due cause.
Everyone outside of the Western intelligentsia informally knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Iraq was under weapons inspections, stricter sanctions or bombings for the past 12 years at that point, and this combination of UN-administered soft and hard diplomacy was doing a pretty decent job of containing the Iraqi threat. Al Qaeda loathed Iraq and wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
Hans Blix, the UN Weapons Inspector, a diplomat and academic, made the most logical observation: we don't have enough information to draw a conclusion safely, and more inspections are required. The US and the UK ran an unsuccessful smear campaign to completely destroy the man's reputation in a bid to overturn his opinions so they could start bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age.
I interviewed a certain Dr. Joseph Nye (a Distinguished Service Professor at the Kennedy School of Public Policy in Harvard) while I was in NUS in 2004 for my university publication, after it had become obvious that there were no weapons. In true academic humility, the man admitted in all honesty he was very surprised Saddam Hussein didn't have any weapons, because, and I remember his exact words, "we knew he had them."
This has to be one of the world's biggest "Oops!" Billions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, thousands of coalition casualties, a resurgence of localized Al Qaeda (where previously there was none), and an eruption of brutal, horrific sectarian violence resulted.
They underestimated so completely how difficult it would be to tackle a country so diverse and violently communal, that it genuinely baffles the mind as to what exactly they were expecting. "To be greeted as liberators" is part of the refrain they had stuck to, another indicator of how blinded by ideology and an over-simplistic worldview the Bush administration had to be.
Mr. Blair, in the meantime, had nought say in the failing strategies being implemented by the Bush administration. Iraq is a blemish on Tony Blair's record; he has arguably been one of Britain's most successful Prime Ministers since Winston Churchill, but how can one not give him the unfortunate moniker of "a poodle" after so submissively allowing George Bush to first spear-head a campaign against Iraq on such flimsy evidence, and then completely botch up the ground operations?
The post-invasion failures are summed up by the one very stupid thing they did: they went on and completely disbanded Iraq's security forces.
So they released men trained in handling arms and the arts of war to fend for themselves in their ethnic enclaves in a deeply schismatic region of the world that had suffered many years of painful dictatorship, and liberated only after war and bombings. Were they expecting grace and sensibility?
But the world collectively drank the kool-aid. The press was so sparing in their criticism and scepticism of their campaign against Iraq, one wondered if they were complicit. Honestly, where were the "analysts" and "experts" when the drums of war were being beaten for no apparent reason?
Most of the American senate voted for the war in Iraq, Democrats and Republicans alike. Most of the Americans supported the war, even after it was found to be under false pretence, much to the world's dismay when they re-elected George Bush for a second term in 2004, vindicating him that he was on the right path.
It was only in the last 2 years of Bush's presidency that people started losing complete faith in the man.
So it only took 6 years for them to catch on that this man had no clue what he was doing. It is remarkable how enduringly short-sighted and over-simplistic the American people are when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Instead of looking inward after the attacks of 9/11, they looked outward for something to bomb. And one country wasn't enough, they had to find a second one to empty their ordinances in.
The troop surge in 2007 eventually worked, something Bushites claim is a great victory, because he did it when everyone was against the idea, and it actually worked (much to everyone's surprise).
But even then, this success cannot be credit to him. It's like saying, I'm sorry I axed your fingers clean off your hand, but look, I managed to sew a couple of them back on again. I'm great, aren't I?
The thought that went into the troop surge and its associated policies under David Petraeus should have been the name of the game from the get-go. In fact, what game? There shouldn't have even been a war!
I don't see why he should claim the credit for ameliorating a planetesimal problem that he created. Iraq today has only "tolerable" levels of violence, where "only" 20 or so people die in bombings everyday, where previously it was 10 times as much. He set the bar of expectation so low that a success like this looks like a defining moment in his presidency.
Iraq is an epic, unprecedented failure that George W. Bush and his complicit allies are entirely responsible for. It outsizes all of his other failures, of which there are many, by at least an order of magnitude.
Despite what minor successes he may have had in his time, the scale of human and capital loss the world has incurred under this man's leadership, it would be small justice for Iraq to define his presidency, and for him to be remembered as one of the worst American presidents in recent history.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The End of the Bush Era: Afghanistan
This is the first in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.
Afghanistan
It surprises me how much the war in Afghanistan is still supported by Americans.
I understand it was UN-approved, but the US lobbied very hard for it, and nobody wanted to question them at the time. They had many allies in its totally preposterous war in Iraq, so I can see why many naysayers may have bended the American way in 2001, after being shocked by 9/11 and then shivering in fear at what the sleeping giant would do now that it awoke. Other countries, perhaps legitimately, also saw the scale of the attacks and didn't want to fall prey to anything similar.
For my part, though, I still think the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong, both morally and strategically.
What has come of it? Tens of thousands of civilian lives have been lost. What little infrastructure Afghanistan had was pommeled. A country in need of rehabilitation after generations of warfare is seeing yet another war. Drug production has increased many-fold and the black market for opium is flooded with Afghan produce. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are still blogging from their mountain hills, and the Hamid Karzai government has no implementation capacity to distribute and spend the billions of dollars it is receiving in foreign aid.
The Taleban are now back, and the government is now considering negotiating with them.
Why could they not have negotiated with the Taleban back then? Before the lives were lost, before you emptied billions of dollars of missiles and ammunition onto a poor patch of mountainous dirt that's seen enough violence already? Before the Taleban was radicalized any further, like they weren't already radical enough?
The Taleban offered to try Osama bin Laden in their own courts in 2001. The religious council actually politely asked Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan before the invasion, because as much as Osama bin Laden was their guest, they didn't want to get bombed for him.
Don't tell me there was no room for negotiation with those people. They may not have been the paragon of progressive thinking, but violence was not a foregone conclusion.
There were senior, aged members of the Taleban who would see some inkling of reason back then. Most of them are now dead or sidelined by the new hardline extremists who don't have a moral problem in selling drugs to make money like the pre-invasion Taleban did. They will be much harder to negotiate with, if they want to negotiate at all.
Yes, these are the same people that blew up Buddhas out of spite, and wouldn't let girls go to school, but they are also the same people who offered their own forces in support of the operations to free Air India hostages that landed in a hijacked plane in Kandahar in 1999.
They are the same people that destroyed 95% of Afghanistan's poppy culture, on nothing more than the principle of the thing (a fatwa was issued that said taking drugs was forbidden in Islam.)
Consider, for a moment, that the illegal drug trade in Afghanistan was one of their only sources of income. It brought in billions of dollars in informal revenue to an otherwise impoverished country under chronic and crippling sanctions for many years. The worldwide supply of Afghan-made drugs was destroyed almost literally overnight.
The hatred for the Taleban in progressive circles is very strong, the term "Talebanization" is a cuss, representing prudishness on an astronomical scale and the curtailment of individual freedoms. Rightly so. And I must say this: I'm not defending the Taleban. I'm defending empathy, the sanctity of human life, the willingness to negotiate even with someone you have deep differences with, and the use of force only as a last resort.
When the Taleban removed the Northern Alliance from control over Afghanistan, many Afghans breathed a sigh of relief. They didn't like the Taleban any, but they sure were a whole lot better than the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The men were forced to wear beards, and women were barred from many public engagements, but they were still better than the random injustice of the warlords. There was a semblance of order in the country.
Afghanistan has no precedent for an organized government in its recent history (something Iraq has, and so is cause for very cautious optimism there). It is still living in the Dark Ages socially, with feudal lords roaming the countryside, and unaccompanied women in public at genuine risk of grievous harm. Building any kind of civil institution in a region like Afghanistan is going to be difficult.
I wish it the very best. I still remember CNN's Nic Robertson reporting from Afghanistan in 2001 before the invasion, taking great pains to point out that the Afghans have a rich tradition of chivalry, to a fault, in seeing Osama bin Laden as their guest in remembering the aid he rendered them during the Soviet invasion.
Looking forward, though, from my vantage point, all the data points toward one very likely eventuality: the continuation of hostilities. I do very much want to be proven wrong, though.
America was looking for something to bomb after 9/11, and that's a stupid reason to go to war. But this is emblematic of the Bush presidency: twisted, belligerent, and arrogant ideology, mixed with a complete divorce from reality.
I understand it was UN-approved, but the US lobbied very hard for it, and nobody wanted to question them at the time. They had many allies in its totally preposterous war in Iraq, so I can see why many naysayers may have bended the American way in 2001, after being shocked by 9/11 and then shivering in fear at what the sleeping giant would do now that it awoke. Other countries, perhaps legitimately, also saw the scale of the attacks and didn't want to fall prey to anything similar.
For my part, though, I still think the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong, both morally and strategically.
What has come of it? Tens of thousands of civilian lives have been lost. What little infrastructure Afghanistan had was pommeled. A country in need of rehabilitation after generations of warfare is seeing yet another war. Drug production has increased many-fold and the black market for opium is flooded with Afghan produce. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are still blogging from their mountain hills, and the Hamid Karzai government has no implementation capacity to distribute and spend the billions of dollars it is receiving in foreign aid.
The Taleban are now back, and the government is now considering negotiating with them.
Why could they not have negotiated with the Taleban back then? Before the lives were lost, before you emptied billions of dollars of missiles and ammunition onto a poor patch of mountainous dirt that's seen enough violence already? Before the Taleban was radicalized any further, like they weren't already radical enough?
The Taleban offered to try Osama bin Laden in their own courts in 2001. The religious council actually politely asked Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan before the invasion, because as much as Osama bin Laden was their guest, they didn't want to get bombed for him.
Don't tell me there was no room for negotiation with those people. They may not have been the paragon of progressive thinking, but violence was not a foregone conclusion.
There were senior, aged members of the Taleban who would see some inkling of reason back then. Most of them are now dead or sidelined by the new hardline extremists who don't have a moral problem in selling drugs to make money like the pre-invasion Taleban did. They will be much harder to negotiate with, if they want to negotiate at all.
Yes, these are the same people that blew up Buddhas out of spite, and wouldn't let girls go to school, but they are also the same people who offered their own forces in support of the operations to free Air India hostages that landed in a hijacked plane in Kandahar in 1999.
They are the same people that destroyed 95% of Afghanistan's poppy culture, on nothing more than the principle of the thing (a fatwa was issued that said taking drugs was forbidden in Islam.)
Consider, for a moment, that the illegal drug trade in Afghanistan was one of their only sources of income. It brought in billions of dollars in informal revenue to an otherwise impoverished country under chronic and crippling sanctions for many years. The worldwide supply of Afghan-made drugs was destroyed almost literally overnight.
The hatred for the Taleban in progressive circles is very strong, the term "Talebanization" is a cuss, representing prudishness on an astronomical scale and the curtailment of individual freedoms. Rightly so. And I must say this: I'm not defending the Taleban. I'm defending empathy, the sanctity of human life, the willingness to negotiate even with someone you have deep differences with, and the use of force only as a last resort.
When the Taleban removed the Northern Alliance from control over Afghanistan, many Afghans breathed a sigh of relief. They didn't like the Taleban any, but they sure were a whole lot better than the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The men were forced to wear beards, and women were barred from many public engagements, but they were still better than the random injustice of the warlords. There was a semblance of order in the country.
Afghanistan has no precedent for an organized government in its recent history (something Iraq has, and so is cause for very cautious optimism there). It is still living in the Dark Ages socially, with feudal lords roaming the countryside, and unaccompanied women in public at genuine risk of grievous harm. Building any kind of civil institution in a region like Afghanistan is going to be difficult.
I wish it the very best. I still remember CNN's Nic Robertson reporting from Afghanistan in 2001 before the invasion, taking great pains to point out that the Afghans have a rich tradition of chivalry, to a fault, in seeing Osama bin Laden as their guest in remembering the aid he rendered them during the Soviet invasion.
Looking forward, though, from my vantage point, all the data points toward one very likely eventuality: the continuation of hostilities. I do very much want to be proven wrong, though.
The End of the Bush Era
This is a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.
Al Gore was drab, uncharismatic, indistinguishable from Bush, and represented the status quo, and his pick of Joe Lieberman for Vice President didn't sit well with Muslims, who, for better or ill, saw in Mr. Lieberman someone who may not bode well for Middle East peace, being a Jew.
"Our candidate" won in 2000, so we got our way. Christian conservatism has a lot in common with Muslim conservatism, so socially, we swing generally the same way. The backing for John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 by the Muslims is largely because we've decided gay marriage is a far less significant issue than say, prisoner abuse, or illegal invasion.
Bush very quickly lost Muslim and (for slightly different reasons) other Americans' backing, and I remember in 2004, there was a campaign out called "ABB." Anybody But Bush. Not really a clear endorsement of John Kerry who was on the Democratic ticket, but representative of how quickly and deeply his support evaporated.
I was in university at the time, in Singapore, and I watched the elections very closely. I was working for the school paper at the time, so me and a friend of mine arranged for a non-scientific poll: we approached people at the bus stops in NUS and asked them questions about the election. Most people didn't really care about the elections, thinking they're untouched by them.
How wrong they were. Bush got the popular vote that year, and set the world on a course to further disaster.
The American elections affects everyone. They are the world's largest economy by far, and they are truly a superpower. This is both hard power (military) and soft power (economic and diplomatic). They are also a source of innovation and (despite what may have happened these past 8 years), I still believe, generally a source of good in the world.
Most of the game-changing innovations come from the United States, and they still take the majority of Nobel Prizes in the sciences. As recently as last year, they dominated the Nobel Prizes, bagging the awards for Economics, Chemistry and Physics.
It's American companies like Microsoft, Apple and IBM that fuelled the IT revolution which has created millions of jobs and incomes worldwide, and it's an American company that has made the first fully viable electric car. We use American ingenuity and know-how in every facet of our lives today.
Let's be fair: the world rides on America's innovative coat tails.
If the Nazis won in World War 2, or Soviet Russia during the Cold War, we'd be in a very different world, and, I think, not a better one.
The fact that I even have to consider what the world would be like had the Nazis or the Soviets won is indicative of how badly the past 8 years under George W. Bush has been. The world is left reeling from failure after failure after failure of the Bush administration, and we're soul-searching. What just happened? How did it come to this?
How can one man be so brazenly incompetent, yet so enduringly popular among his people, and manage to remain in power so long, and do so much damage?
Far better politicians have failed for far fewer and graver faults.
What follows is a series of posts on all the things I believe Bush did right, and all the things I believe he did wrong. One of these lists, I get the feeling, is going to be longer than the other.
Other articles in this series:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
About Me
.jpg)
- Ifty
- Singapore
- I write essays in my spare time on things that are important to me. The ones that I feel are any good, or make any sense, I put them up here. :)