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'Not in the business of Nation Building'

We're The Great Old Ones Now

18:31 / 25.09.01

See also http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=5&t=000166

The US is 'not in the business of nation-building', apparently.

According to the UN, there are five million people in Afghanistan who depend entirely on foreign aid for food.

The last time the US involved itself in the affairs of Afghanistan, it was helping the Afghans fight the Soviets. The vaccuum created by the withdrawal of the USSR and the failure of the US to engage in 'nation building' was filled by the Taliban.

In Iraq, the US and the allies destroyed the country's infrastructure and imposed sanctions which continue to starve the common people at least as much as they affect the military and the government, but did not topple Saddam Hussein because it was not their place to interfere in the internal affairs of another nation state.

This half-arsed rubbish has to stop. If you're going to fuck a nation up and you don't want it to get all fundamentalist on you when you leave, you have to engage in 'nation building'. This isolationist idiocy hiding behind a politically correct mask of 'non-interference' in the internal affairs of other nations and international sub-groups is exactly the problem.

Military force will not solve this problem, and it's highly doubtful that it will yield up Bin Laden with any great alacrity or reliability. But if you're going to use military force, you damn well better go all the way and make a country out of the ruins, because there's no such thing as military safe sex. Once you fuck someone, they stay fucked, and what they give birth to is exactly no fun at all.

Nation building, at some level, will have to take place. Islam, like other faiths and political creeds, responds to threats of annihilation (cultural or military) with revision, revolution, and sometimes fundamentalism. It's a faith of success, and the polity is intimately bound up with the religion. All of which means that if we want to live with Islam (and we have no choice), we need to build nations, not rip them up and then get all gun-shy and impotent about taking a hand in the new order.

As someone once said, if we're in the right here, we better stand up and be counted.

I thank you.

10:34 / 26.09.01

yeah.

10:56 / 26.09.01

Isn't nation building, in it's many guises, what globalisation protestors detest most about US involvement in world affairs? If the US installs, somehow, a democratic regime in the place of the Taliban, and props it up for decades with military and monetary support, (which it will have to, given the fact that such a nation will definitely be the odd man out in the region)in't this the colonialism that is much despised by academics around the world?

The other option would be to install the Taliban's opposition,the Northern alliance, described here in the Salon article, Our Scary New Best Friends ,which apparently has an appalling human rights record, and also would be an Islam centered theocracy that would be un-democratic.

If military action is warranted, and in my opinion it is ( I don't support bombing of civilian populations, but I support the insertion of commando teams to hunt down Bin Laden a la "Killing Pablo", or some other similar scheme) some sort of nation-building scheme would have to take place.

Is it possible for "nation-building" that is not colonialist (in the academic sense) in nature? What form would this take? Does the US have the obligation of installing a democracy, when one would be the puppet state of the US, or should they use indigenous power structures that are the anathema to western ideals?

yawn - thing's buddy

13:18 / 26.09.01

the current strategy is looking increasingly shaky afterthe comments of the last couple of days.

Replacing the Taliban is not in the interests of the Western Alliance, supposedly.

Okay: Bomb the shot out of the Taliban, displace (and kill) yer average Joe Afghan, and then walk away.

From an empty country.

17:13 / 29.09.01

quote:Originally posted by todd:
Is it possible for "nation-building" that is not colonialist (in the academic sense) in nature? What form would this take? Does the US have the obligation of installing a democracy, when one would be the puppet state of the US, or should they use indigenous power structures that are the anathema to western ideals?

I've calmed down a bit.

One thing to consider is the kind of environment that promotes tyrrany. And that is horrible conditions to begin with. Helping people get back on their feet in a country whose per capita annual income is about $700 is one step in getting them to satrt thinking about protecting their rights (whatever that means). Food, education, medical treatment... I don't know how much good this would do, but its certainly a start, and would generate a hell of a lot less resentment than some other possibilities.