Nation building? Forget it. Not in our power.
Today, on Anderson Cooper’s Blog site I read this comment from Christiane Amanpour:
President Obama’s biggest challenge will be Afghanistan and Pakistan. He wants to beat back the militants, but all the U.S. commanders and officers I have talked to say that cannot be done by bombs and bullets alone. It must happen in tandem with development and promise of a decent life for ordinary Afghans.
What’s your response to this? Mine was, “of course,” but did it need to be said yet once again? For there is no force in the world, let alone the force of arms, that will subdue a people when the threats to the people’s security and livelihood are not removed or substantially diminished by that force.
Haven’t we learned from our own experiences, especially those of Vietnam and now Iraq, that when the people are not convinced that by our superior military forces we are bringing them a better life, that we are making them more secure, haven’t we learned that these people will go rejecting our usually well-intentioned overtures, and turn away from us until we have no other option, as earlier in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia et al., and perhaps soon in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the NorthWest Provinces of Pakistan, than to turn away from them.
The amazing thing to me is that we, or at least our leaders, and in this instance one of our stellar foreign correspondents, seem to actually believe that it is within our capacity to bring the peoples of these countries a secure and decent life.
It’s not. Why, it’s not even in our power to do this for the youth of our impoverished and otherwise disadvantaged inner city populations. The United States desperately needs to take a course to learn what is in its power and what isn’t. The harm that it does in the world, but perhaps most of all to itself, stems directly from its not knowing.
May 22, 2009 at 2:19 am
War is good for science, commerce, renewal of the populations, landscapes, alliances; why to stop war? Morale? The fear of God? The story that we tell in little children? Morale is subjective everywhere on the Earth, God works on another less ambitious project than the man, and the children like the war stories. (Forgive me my french accent)