Bad and worse and why

Bush Two has waged two wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both featured impressive technology. Both quickly routed unpleasant regimes. Both promised positive change for locals and increased security for Americans. Both efforts, undertaken with much bravado, are now in deep trouble.

While getting bad in Afghanistan, things are worse still in Iraq. Simplest concrete measure: attacks on U.S. and allied forces. These are on the rise in Afghanistan, especially in the south. Last week, ominously, the first bomb exploded near a U.S. base up north. Even so, CENTCOM spokesmen are correct in still referring to hostile actions as “sporadic.”

Iraq is another matter. One day last week featured 25 attacks on U.S. forces within 24 hours. And six British troops were shot and killed in a single urban ambush. The warm welcome expected by Bush planners has gotten hot and bloody with – my regretful guess – a good deal more American and British blood to come.

(This column compares two bad situations for American troops and explores why one – Iraq – is worse. But first let’s ask, at least parenthetically, why both initiatives are turning from sweet to sour. What’s gone wrong? )

Whether Republican or Democrat, we need to face this hard truth about Bush administration enthusiasm and expertise: Simply put, these folks are better at war than peace. They find war easier to accomplish and more psychologically satisfying.

And so far – the even more basic danger and tragedy – Bush warmongering with its attendant demagoguery has been a winner with American voters. Prediction: If this trend continues, our American votes will count for less and less. Whether Republican or Dem-ocrat, we’ll find it more difficult to change our own regime. Democracy, as Afghans and Iraqis both know, is extremely difficult to create. We Americans may soon learn how easy it is to destroy. Want details? Read “Towards One Party Rule” by Paul Krugman in the June 27 New York Times.

Why are American soldiers attacked more frequently in Iraq than Afghanistan? Partly because there are more of them: 150,000 on the ground in Operation Iraqi Freedom vs. 11,000 in Operation (Afghan) Enduring Freedom. Also because our soldiers in Iraq are less concentrated and centrally fortified – and thus more exposed – than the bulk of U.S. military personnel quartered at Bagram air base outside Kabul.

But it’s more than numbers and deployment. Much has to do with day-to-day conditions as experienced by local populations – compared with what life was like before the American arrival. Most Afghans are still grateful for U.S. deliverance from the Taliban. Many Iraqis are now concluding the reverse: that, in some mundane but important ways, life was better under Saddam Hussein.

The Taliban were oppressive politically and culturally. They brooked no debate in their ultra-restrictive interpretation of Muslim Law. At first, after two decades of violent chaos, this promise of stability appealed to many Afghans. Civil liberties – different from those in America but nonetheless real – took a back seat to security. (It is exactly this dynamic, manipulated so adroitly by Bush political guru Karl Rove that threatens American democracy in our ongoing post-9-11 traumatic stress syndrome. Our best hope: My fellow Americans, we need to get past 9-11.)

Taliban rule was especially oppressive outside their rural Pashtun ethnic base. In Kabul and across the north, people quickly wearied of “the prevention of vice and the protection of virtue.” Order came at an awful cost: amputations and executions which the (male) public was expected to attend. And, aside from prohibitions, the Taliban had next to no program for economic development, health care or education.

So, except in the rural Pashtun South, American-led intervention has represented at least the possibility for improvement. Both politically and culturally, Afghans can now express themselves far more fully than two years ago. A constitutional process (unfortunately rushed) is under way. Elections (unnecessarily rushed) are scheduled for a year from now. Newspapers proliferate and girls are going to school. And each day brings news of another economic development agreement with the wider world.

True, not much economic assistance has yet reached ordinary Afghans. Equally true, the current political balance is probably unsustainable. Even so – and despite provocations from Islamist militants based along the Pakistan border – most Afghans recognize the value of America’s stabilizing presence. They need us, at least for now, and most of them know it. Many Afghans, in fact, want more of us. I may be going soon.

Now consider Saddam Hussein. Like the Taliban, his regime was politically oppressive in the extreme. Main difference: Secularist rather than Islamist, Saddam didn’t bother to stage his executions and amputations publicly on the Muslim Sabbath. His hideous cruelties were more pragmatic than ideological, more psychopathic than pathological.

Otherwise, however, Saddam was almost what we’d call progressive. Before the start of U.N. sanctions in 1991, Iraq’s economy was more evolved than in most of the Arab world. Public services – electricity, water, phones – worked. Schools and hospitals functioned. Females were comparatively free.

How’s daily life in post-Saddam, U.S.-administered Iraq? Certainly Iraqis are freer to express political opinion. The catch is a recent U.S. decision to appoint – rather than allow Iraqis to select – an initial governing council. Translation: Freedom of political expression amounts to mere words rather than concrete representation. What good is talk, Iraqis ask, if it’s ignored or patronized by American occupiers?

And what about the electricity and the water? Saddam kept them going. What good are the Americans if they can’t at least do the same? Paul Brenner, the second (or is he the third?) U.S. administrative solution for this mess, promises results soon. How soon, Iraqis want to know? When, they ask us, will they have the essential infrastructure and human services they had under Saddam Hussein?

If you can’t get it done, Iraqis say, get out. And if you won’t get out on your own, we’ll get you out. Between paragraphs of this article written on June 27, CNN reports the abduction of two U.S. soldiers north of Baghdad and the killing of another in the Shi’a holy city of Najaf.

Perhaps it’s what comes, karma-like, of taking international law into our own hands. Again, consider the Afghanistan-Iraq comparison. Our October 2001 action in Afghanistan profited from the world’s post-9-11 sympathy in what amounted, truly, to a war on terror. Everybody who’s anybody was on board. Multilateral support continued into the Bonn Agreement of December 2001 and the Loya Jirga of June 2002. The U.N. plays a key role in coordinating reconstruction. An International Security and Assistance Force, comprised of 20 nations with rotating leadership, keeps the peace in Kabul. While the dominant power, America has not cast itself singly in an imperial role.

Our March 2003 invasion of Iraq defied most world opinion. Unable to muster U.N. Security Council agreement, Bush wrecked decades of diplomatic precedent, co-opted a stupified Tony Blair, misled us on rationales for the conflict, paid billions of our tax dollars to a “Coalition of the Billing,” and blundered into military victory and post-conflict quagmire.

Now the future. We’ll probably straggle along in Afghanistan, taking occasional casualties, until the Karzai government takes hold or we get tired. If we get tired and leave – simple cause and effect – al-Qaida will fill the vacuum in a militant Islamist instant. Likely consequence: World Trade Center Two.

And the prospects for America in Iraq? Bush has never had, we now realize, a realistic post-conflict strategy for Iraqi reconstruction. Nor does an exit strategy exist. Nor is the world community involved. Nor has this war as yet yielded progress toward peace between Israel and Palestine. Instead Iraq looks like a long-term drain on American money and blood.

No Baghdad for this American patriot. You’ll next hear from me, inshallah (God willing), from the comparative safety of Kabul.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.