Afghanistan, the Unlearned Lesson

The Russians were in Afghanistan for about nine years at great cost in blood and national wealth. Now Americans (and others, including Canada) are there trying to civilize the uncivilizable.

The American base now called Camp Phoenix, in Kabul, Afghanistan, was a Soviet base in the 1980's. Salem-News.com photo by Tim King

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Unless you were born in Afghanistan and lived there all your life, you would certainly know about James Michener. After a December, 1979 invasion, by February, 1980, the Soviets were having their military adventure in Afghanistan. I was editor of the Airdrie Echo then.

This was before the internet and before detailed information (and misinformation) was at everyone’s fingertips. In an attempt to inform my readers, I published a review of James Michener’s 1963 novel Caravans. Here’s my book review, unchanged, with a 2009 update.

Caravans

The current world tension between the two Superpowers is now focussed on an unlikely land-locked country between India and Iran: Afghanistan. A small country of about 250,000 sq miles and a population of about 28 million [2009] it is noted for its strategic location and nothing else.

Best-selling author James Michener, who gave us The Source, Hawaii and Centennial has also written Caravans—a story of 1946 Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a country of extremes. Heavily mountainous with subzero winters, it also has deserts that sees temperatures rise to 130 degrees (54C) in the summer. There can be no rain for weeks or months, and then so much rain in a short period of time that flash floods occur.

Signs of the Soviet occupation are everywhere you turn in Afghanistan, this is an abandoned MiG-21 fighter at the Bagram Airfield in early 2007. Salem-News.com photo by Tim King

Ellen Jaspar is an American co-ed who rejects her middle class family to marry Nazrullah, an Afghan student. Wishing to escape the “nothingness” of Dorset, Pennsylvania, she says she would “rather die on the sands of the desert than marry some Dorset jerk”.

Does she get her wish? That’s what American embassy official Mark Miller is sent to find out. Ellen has disappeared into the country where women are never seen on the street except in “chaderi”—a shroud.

As the tale moves across the country in search of the girl that hasn’t been seen in thirteen months, Michener sums up the history of the country in one paragraph:

“In Afghanistan almost every building bears jagged testimony to some outrage. Some, like the walled fortress now owned by Shah Khan, were built to withstand sieges, and did so many times. Others were the scenes of horrible murders and retaliation. In distant areas, scars still remained of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Nadir Shah of Persia. Was there ever a land so overrun by terror and devastation as Afghanistan?”

Has there ever been such a land, indeed? Iran is to the west, Pakistan and China to the east. To the north is 700 miles of unguarded border in common with Russia. As the tale moves from Kabul, the capital, to the Russian border, the history of a primitive country is seen in the nomadic tribes that have wandered the same paths for centuries, past villages that have not changed since the time of Christ. Once again, Afghanistan threatens to become the square on which the chess of international terror is played. Michener (as Miller) tells us why the culture, which was once one of the cradles of civilization, has stagnated and virtually disappeared.

Afghan soldier at Ghazni in late 2006 before setting out for an early morning convoy. Salem-News.com photo by Tim King

“At Rome the Imperial ruins had also depressed me, but for only a moment, because it required no great imagination to believe that something of that grandeur persisted. But in Afghanistan my depression not only affected me, it also permeated the land and the culture and the people. It was difficult to believe that civilization had once graced this arid waste or that it could ever return. At miserable Ghazni, at silent Qala Bist, at The City, at faceless Bamian and here at Balkh nothing remained. Were the generations indifferent to history, allowing their finest monuments to disappear while Rome retained hers? Or was it simply that Asia was different, its conquerors so terrible that western man could not visualize their cargoes of horror?”

But the Afghans are hardy. As Michener tells us, those children that survive are so tough that the only thing that can kill them is a bullet. In this setting the question is continually asked: Can a soft American survive in this land of hardship? And if she has survived, can she get away from a land where women are chattels and her husband has the power of life and death over her?

She had even, at the time, given up her American citizenship before she was granted entry into the country.

Once you’ve finished this book, you’ll even ask yourself the question: Can the Russians get out?

The Afghans have apparently been subdued by subterfuge and force. But they have been there a long time and have seen many conquerors come and go. Will it be different this time?

Conclusion 2009

Soviet Tank Graveyard in Afghanistan A Haunting Reminder 2006 Salem-News.com report by Tim King, in Afghanistan

The Russians were in Afghanistan for about nine years at great cost in blood and national wealth. Now Americans (and others, including Canada) are there trying to civilize the uncivilizable.

There is no way to put this gently. The Western leaders are criminals to have invaded Afghanistan. And the crime is not just against the Afghans, but primarily against the soldiers who have been sent there; the families of those soldiers and the citizens of the soldiers' countries who work to produce the billions in wealth that is wasted in this foolish military enterprise.

You don’t need to be a military analyst to notice one thing: The Afghans are not and never have been a threat to America. True, they have succored some who wished harm to North America and Europe, but it’s like discovering that your house has rats living in it. Rather than exterminate the rats, the better strategy is to blow up the house.

Invert the military analogy. Suppose Afghanistan were a powerful military nation and they wanted to save America. They invade and try to convert Americans to the Loya Jirga system of Afghan government. Will they succeed? Not in a century. An alien system could not be successfully imposed on Americans.

Yet Americans are so deluded that they have come to believe that they can successfully impose a Western government, backed by more than twenty centuries of Greek-inspired thinking, on a people who have been living under systems that go back equally far with totally different foundations. We in the west believe in the supremacy of the individual, they believe in the supremacy of the tribe.

The Russians finally got it. Will the Americans? It doesn’t look promising.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place