Recovering from Punitive Expedition in Afghanistan
The Price of the Question
Russia’s skeptical and apathetic reaction to the deadlock over the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan is easy to explain. We remember our country’s experience too vividly and see Americans make the same mistakes. We made more serious mistakes, though.
Moscow had no valid reason to meddle in Afghan affairs. Besides that, we did not think that the West would oppose the intrusion so fiercely and make a fatal mistake by nurturing Islamists. Americans had more than just a valid reason to crash the Taliban – Osama and 9/11. Another mistake that the United States copied from us was trying to administer Afghanistan with the same ideological order as in the home country whether be it “people’s democracy” which we were building or “just democracy” that Americans are trying to establish with Karzai. “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old,” said Rudyard Kipling. He got it wrong. The West – Russia inclusive – successfully influenced those parts of Asia which created centralized states by both peaceful and not peaceful methods. The trouble of Afghanistan is that it can be ruled successfully only when the ruler in Kabul does not meddle in business of tribal and feudal aristocracy.
“Efforts to occupy and rule Afghanistan usually ended in disaster,” British historian Sir John Keegan wrote. “But straightforward punitive expeditions were successfully on more than one occasion.” This is a true observation, though useless because you can punish a certain king or a ruler but he will be succeeded by another one of the kind or even a worse one because the feudal and tribal society cannot appoint a better one. One would say that Americans could have simply bombed the Taliban regime, thought the skyscrapers avenged, and left. But they also learn out lessons realizing that a king will be followed by Communists, then Islamists, then monsters Talibs. Who’s next? We can be happy that this time we don’t have to stay in Afghanistan condemned to a disaster after a successful punitive expedition.
By throwing support behind the anti-terrorism coalition we hoped to strengthen our cause in relations with the West and East alike. Instead of this, we got a still restive Afghanistan, America’s reckless war in Iraq, and growing drug trafficking, which is essentially the best business of an Afghan tribal chieftain. We got hurt by these problems and started reacting too abruptly to anything that Americans do in other parts of the world from Kosovo to Kyiv. At least we have enough sense not to repeat their biggest mistake of nurturing opponents. However, it no longer seems impossible that the phantom of American missiles outside Herat, which dragged us into a reckless intrusion in 1979, may return to the minds of our decision-makers.
Russia’s current position on Afghanistan has different reasons and feelings behind it, ranging from a persistent hangover after our own disaster in Kabul to relief that finally someone else will have to drink the cup of woe in Afghanistan. But we must not forget that if the West ends up in a disaster in Afghanistan, we will not be safe either. A drug-producing, radical Islamite Afghanistan stuffed with arms is too dangerous a neighbor.
Boris Makarenko, first deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 21, 2007
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