Alan Grayson on War in Afghanistan

The site has been committed to questioning basic assumptions that the media and beltway politicians have made about the War in Afghanistan. Speaking at a panel last week, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fl.) rejected the notion that instead of a military solution, the answer was "more aid":

I think that the basic premise that we can alter
Afghan society is greatly flawed. Afghanistan is simply the part of Asia that was never occupied by the Russians or the English in the Great Game. It's not a country; it's not even a place. It's just an empty place on the map. It's terra incognita. People who live there are a welter of different tribes, different language groups, different religious beliefs.

All over the country you find different people who have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that we call them Afghans, and they don't even call themselves Afghans. They're Tajiks or they're Pashtuns, or they're Hazzaras or someone else. The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.

And the idea that we could transform that society or any other society through aid I think is entirely questionable. I've never seen it happen; probably never will happen. If you go to the Stan countries north of Afghanistan, and I've been to all of them; what you find is that the way that the Russians altered that society was by crushing it. Stalin killed half a million Muslims in Kazakhstan, in Turkmenistan, in Kyrgyzstan, in Uzbekistan.

He simply sliced off the head of that society in order to remake it in the image that he wanted. And I think that we would have to do no less if we wanted to remake Afghanistan in our image. We'd have to destroy it in order to save it, and I don't think the American people are ever going to do that to anybody. So I think that the underlining premise is simply wrong.

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Whether or not you agree with Grayson that Afghanistan's lack of national identity should preclude us from sending aid and investing in infrastructure, the lack of a cohesive identity will continually make the process of sending aid extremely complicated. This is a country where loyalty to tribe trumps up all, and I don't know how we would keep all the tribes happy all the time. Ultimately, it would be nice to rebuild Afghanistan, but America does not have the stomach or dollars to do it properly. The sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner a debate on a real strategy can proceed.