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Air Force crews unleashed eight years ago on the then-Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan kept with the proud air bombardment-tradition of scrawling colorful taunts on the shells of deliverable military hardware. If, in the time that’s elapsed since those first air strikes, some clever chief has figured out a way to turn the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into a pithy, bomb-appropriate one-liner, we hear at Unfit have yet to hear about it — and that makes us kind of sad: Fact is, lost in all of the 9/11-revenge rhetoric that spawned the initial popular support for the United States’ first effort against Al Qaeda and its allies (not to mention, about a billion snappy chalk messages), what quickly became the real reason for the country’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan sits, awaiting deeper critical and popular light. (Or at least some kind of shell-side acknowledgment.)

Here’s the thing: Nation-building is, to the U.S. government — and many of their NATO counterparts — a noble pursuit. So, gifted with the military and economic prowess afforded to so many of the western-descended powers,  the argument goes that such might should be spent in the effort to establish democratic institutions. The trouble comes when democracy doesn’t make for a good fit. Then, in the instance that majority rule is ill-fitted for or unwanted by the political entity that it is being visited upon, shit gets ugly. This begs the question: Is it in the best interests of the western powers to try and force a place into voting submission?

General Stanley McChrystal would say it is. On October 1, he spoke to, as the New York Times reported, “an audience of military specialists at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies.” There, he laid out his argument for broad U.S. involvement in Afghanistan based on the concept of stability. According to the Times, he told his audience that “[a] strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.” Here, thanks to his repeated calls for a larger force, and his lobbying against a truncated, counter-terrorism-centered campaign, we can guess that he means for stable to be synonymous with democratic.

The trouble with Afghanistan (among other places) is that NATO-force-backed visions of a unified, democratic nation rising from the ashes of a theocratic dictatorship whose toppling was followed by eight years of war is nothing more than an educated assumption. Which is to say that, just because the United States thinks it knows what’s best for the region — a notion based solely on ideals that just don’t fit in some places — doesn’t necessarily mean that it does. Sure, the western forces currently in Afghanistan have deposed what looked, to their eyes, like an unholy example of  backward ideology forced upon a tortured populace. And, having done so, they’ve managed to install a friendly, nominal (at least) democracy. But the reality is that the thing may not be tenable outside the limits of Kabul (or, indeed, even within the city itself) — and the last legitimate government to have any sort of function, nationwide, was the very one that had been deposed in the name of what McChrystal terms “stability.”

And, as if that weren’t enough, the U.S. and its allies are so invested in the success of this particular project that, when faced with evidence of widespread voter fraud by the executive, Hamid Karzai, who owes his post to their support, it took them almost two months to face that fact. Worse, a high-ranking U.N. diplomat was forced out after he accused his organization of engaging in a cover-up of the mess in order to keep Karzai in power. The western-style Afghani democracy is, apparently, so important that it warrants its own neglect.

Of course, the argument could be made that this latest development is more about securing a friendly nation in the heart of an increasingly unfriendly region than it is about securing democracy for that nation’s people. And this may be true. Still, thanks to the history of the character of the United States’ imperial ambitions, the two things are virtually inseparable. So even if we can’t come up with a nifty, Rousseau-inspired insult to chalk on the side of various rounds of munitions, for better or worse (in this case, most likely, the latter — for all parties) the true force behind our efforts in Afghanistan descends from his ideas: force the people to be free, it would appear, at all costs.

TAGS:9/11, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, democracy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Taliban, U.S. Air Force

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