Yesterday morning, I spoke with a friend whose husband is a retired CIA agent, and she and her husband lived in Afghanistan for quite some time several years back. They currently live in Chicago, and I met them because they had built a retirement home on .......... Island and frequented the ..... ...coffee shop.
……said that, what we need to understand is the people in Afghanistan are a very tribal and family oriented culture, and their tribe, and the support they give to it and receive from it, is the ultimate/dominate important thing in their lives. It\"s also a very mountainous and difficult to navigate country, and is populated all over by little pockets of tribes that, are for the most part isolated from each other due to the terrain.
Because of that structure, Afghans identify hardly at all with a central government and have little to no sense of patriotism or deep feelings for any form of government beyond their own tribe. They also gain much of their guidance from the Koran, a very old book that even seems to discourage safe public practices like boiling unsafe water. All of this is why the Afghan army didn\"t fight to uphold their government in the past week. They just took off their uniforms and headed back to their tribes, whose tribal leaders they think may protect them.
In the end, there was never any real hope that we\"d succeed beyond taking out Bin Laden, which, ….feels, is where we probably should have stopped. She did acknowledge that they lived in Afghanistan prior to current cell phone technology, which many in Afghanistan have picked up on, just like the rest of the world. That has allowed some a larger world view, and did give many Afghans reason to try to put trust in their government and do things like allow women to comfortably attend schools and be more out in public. One news story I saw reported on a day or two ago was of the Taliban taking cell phones away from people now. Due to the tribal nature of the country, and the related isolation, it\"s a relatively small percentage of the folks in the country who were willing and able to have this technology and be open to change, and recent developments have probably destroyed the likelihood that they\"ll ever again/soon put their trust in government.
So, where did we go wrong? One statement that Joe Biden made last week was that our purpose there wasn\"t nation building. However, why were we there for 20 years, handing over something like three trillion dollars to the Afghan government, if we weren\"t at all participating in nation building? It appears that his statement on that is in denial of the real, though somewhat hidden, goals and hopes of our country. Where it appears to me we were short sighted is not acknowledging offering nation building assistance is what we were doing,isn\"t necessarily a bad thing, and not placing earmarks on the money we gave them. Along with the funding, we should have been establishing goals and providing advice and assistance to the country\"s government. It was just a free floating situation for much of the 20 years we were there, with little guidance given to the Afghan government and no enforceable goals set for continued assistance. It really looks like poor management of our resources and relationship with an allied government.
Enough said. Being a Vietnam veteran, who was very disappointed with the outcome of that war, I have been really disappointed that Afghanistan feels like a repeat performance of our failure in Vietnam and have been trying to make sense of it all. My guess is that you may have had the same thoughts, so I decided to send this along in hopes that it might help gain perspective. I promise to do my best to keep these mailings few in number, but strongly feel that we\"re at a pivotal point in the future of our nation and the world. Pretty important stuff, especially for generations who follow us and have to exist in the world our generation bore huge influence on.
All the best
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