Someone Who Cares

This is excerpted from No Stranger to Strange Lands: A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, and Far Flung Places

In light of the recent Wikileaks of the Afghan War Logs, I am posting this segment from my book (which will be available VERY SOON) regarding the mess in Afghanistan.

Talk about someone who cares: Bill Moyers had an inspiring interview on his show, Bill Moyers Journal, last night, with Sarah Chayes. She used to be an intrepid journalist for National Public Radio, but was moved to action after the United States attacked Afghanistan to supposedly topple the Taliban, which, of course, we had originally empowered during the good old Cold War days to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union's occupation of that country. She had been reporting from there, and decided to do something to try to actually help the beleaguered people of Afghanistan in some little way. So she opened a small natural soap factory, putting people to work on a sustainable product that gives them an alternative to poppy farming that is so prevalent there. Her company is called Arghand, and the all-natural hand-crafted soaps are available in the United States and Canada. The woman is a goddess of strength, love, intelligence, and determination, and Bill Moyers asked her great questions about what is really going on over there. The poppy business, she reports, is not being conducted by any criminal enterprise, nor by the evil Taliban, as our government likes to claim, but by regular businessmen, who are the only entities in the country to dole out any kind of credit to farmers, and so that is what they farm. Their business dealings are only slightly more complicated than any other business there by having to pay more bribes than usual. The term 'criminal' has no real meaning there, because everyone in the entire society is forced to be 'criminal' because of the lack of any kind of oversight or system of accountability. Everyone is forced to pay bribes up and down the line to get anything done, and to skim resources like development aid money just to survive, because a lethal combination of inflation and unemployment is crushing families there. She says that the Afghans don't want handouts, they want jobs and a government that functions. She draws a metaphorical picture of a town in the Wild West, where the sheriff needs to catch some bad guys, so he hires a posse, which is probably made up of some criminals willing to go and catch those bad guys for money, but when the feat is accomplished, the sheriff does not then put the posse in charge of the town. In Afghanistan, however, that is exactly what United States did. They placed real criminals in charge of the government, except for Karzai, who was the only one elected by the people, but who is powerless against the hugely corrupted system he oversees. Now, the U.S. claims that the Afghan people had their democratic vote, and it is up to them to hold their government accountable, which, of course, is impossible because they are being shaken down by their own government, not helped by it in any way. She is the only foreigner that people there see doing what should be done, which is to help rebuild the economy through business investments that offer jobs that will help them get back on their feet.

On Pakistan, she says, “It's been very clear to me, watching since 2002, that Pakistan has been buying us off, by a well-timed delivery of an Al Qaeda operative, which has then caused us to look the other way about the Taliban.”

On why the southern part of the country is so important, she says, “It's kind of like the marrow of the country's bones. Afghanistan was founded in Kandahar. Later the capital was moved to Kabul. It was really the capitol, the Taliban's capitol. It's also the part of the country that the Pakistani government has been able to control most successfully by-proxy. So, this is why 99 percent of the people in Kandahar believe that we are allied with the Taliban. Everybody thinks that America is allied with the Taliban.”

On the nature of the Afghan government, “We keep hearing in the West, about the democratically-elected Afghan government. And, oh, no, we can't get in there and interfere with any of these people, because they're the government of a sovereign country. Well, you could have fooled the Afghans. The Afghans – the only person who's really elected, who has any power, is president Karzai. But every other government official that Afghans interact with on a daily basis, they didn't elect. And they don't have any recourse. They've got no way of lodging a complaint against this person. Or nobody who can put any leverage on them... We're only fooling ourselves when we talk about this democratically-elected Afghan government.”

And on why Afghanistan is so important to the future of the entire world, "There are a lot of people, I think, both in the West and in the Muslim world, who believe in clash of civilization, who want to see the world as a place dominated by two irrevocably hostile blocs. I don't want to live in that kind of world. I think that we live in an interconnected world full of rich, flawed, varied civilizations that are inextricably intertwined. And, so what I'm doing in Afghanistan is working for that intertwined world."

In that sense, George Bush and Osama bin Laden are on the same team. Also, I would note that Afghanistan is in a state of true and absolute free-market capitalism, the kind that Milton Friedman had wet dreams about. That is the true result of that type of system – an unfettered, unregulated, free-for-all, where everyone has to fend for themselves, and only the strong and powerful survive. Lovely, isn't it? Maybe Grover Norquist would like to move there and see what it is really like to have a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

see: No Stranger to Strange Lands Chapter Outline

other book excerpts: Studs Turkel, King Marketing and His Queen, Pursuit of Happiness, and Three essays from No Stranger to Strange Lands in which the topic ineluctably turns into an Ayn Rant