Has Obama done right on Afghanistan?
Michael Cohen and I had a go-round on Bloggingheads about Afghanistan:
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Tags : Afghanistan, United Nations, United States
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All this talk of the U.S. coming up with a political settlement for Afghanistan might not have made me so uneasy if I hadn’t just started reading that Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies you recently recommended. It’s now apparently the received scholarly wisdom that the violent breakup of Yugoslavia was an (almost) inevitable delayed response to the arrangements made with such high hopes by the Great Powers for the formation of Yugoslavia (and the events of WWII, which stemmed from it). Even after the wars had started, outside observers were still saying that a few tweaks – a multiparty system, more or less decentralization, democratization – would be enough to hold the country together. As coincidence would have it, newspapers in ex-Yugo have been publishing the results of polls done recently on how people in the region view the breakup. Serbian views and the views of people in Slovenia, Croatia and BiH differ sharply – the non-Serbs say a violent breakup was inevitable, and that they’d do it (declare independence) all over again, even knowing the cost. (The Serbian reports headline that the other respondents agree that the standard of living was higher in the SFRJ.)
So, if outside Powers and observers weren’t able to get it right in the Balkans, there on Europe’s doorstep, I have my doubts about the results of our high-minded attempts to solve the problem of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Scientific American in Jan 2010 had an article on the results of a local nuclear war between Pakistan and India – the sun would be obscured for a decade (by the particles from the annihilation of a few cities ejected into the troposphere), the result being the starvation of a large percentage of the world’s population. (The specific point being that a Russia-US war isn’t necessary for a nuclear winter.) So instead of worrying about Afghanistan’s pre-medieval politics and how they treat their women, it might make more sense to work on ensuring that we are able to gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear devices if necessary.