Nation Building

Last Sunday's New York Times ran an article about a young man and woman in Afghanistan who were caught riding together in an automobile. They were unmarried and may or may not have been having an affair. They were pulled from the automobile by someone, perhaps police and a crowd gathered and learning of their offence surrounded the star crossed possible lovers, determined to stone them to death. Some government officials, possibly some sort of police arrived, intervened and hauled the couple off to jail, the woman going to a woman's jail.

When the father, an illiterate laborer arrived to visit his daughter in jail, he was in tears, not because of the trauma of what had nearly happened to his daughter, but because he had to agree with his neighbors she had to die. She had dishonored her family. She may have been promised to someone else.

This is a fascinating ethnograph, a description of a culture, its values and had I read it in college, I would have finished the story with sadness for the couple, but telling myself not to render judgment on another culture.

The problem is, this is a country where American men and women are serving, dying and suffering for the sake of establishing a stable society, to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven for training jihadists. Our soldiers, men and women, may be having affairs of their own while they are deployed and they are fighting so that other men and women can be stoned to death for the same behavior?

This is the problem with "nation building" which is to say, the problem of trying to establish a little American out of a country which is not really a unified country in the sense we know it. We are trying to unify a land of tribal passions, stirred with a violent strain of Islam and we are operating on another planet, from a cultural point of view. We cannot and should not try to intervene. We cannot impose a Pax Americana on the heathens. We have actually never succeeded in doing this, whether you are thinking about our efforts to "civilize" the Indians of the Great Plains (in particular, the Comanches) or to pacify the South after the Civil War, which clearly did not happen, with an armed guerrilla movement, (The Klu Klux Klan) and Jim Crow persisting for 100 years.

So, if you cannot legislate morality, you certainly cannot impose America on unwilling populations.

All of which is to say, we should get out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) yesterday.