It’s a convincing argument the Financial Times makes, Christopher, when it refers to the recent bombing in Kabul as, above all, a psychological event.
It seems to me that in some ways, this chaos is like the chaos on September 11. Its location is important above all, even more important than the identities (or identifications) of those who are killed, or the number of casualties. The attack is on the place itself, the place as an idea, and the people are collateral damage.
Kabul as an idea means nationhood. Its opposite is uncontrollableness and anti-unity, and that idea is represented by Kandahar, where I reported from briefly in 2003.* When Obama claimed recently that the United States has largely reached its goals in Afghanistan, this claim struck me as absurd. It’s always seemed to me that the basic American goal has been to make Afghanistan more like Kabul and less like Kandahar—and this bombing is an exclamation point to the contrary: It declares that Kabul is like Kandahar, that Kandahar is winning.
*The News Tribune makes linking impossible. Sorry. I published long segments here.
@2: There is no conflict between what I say and what you say.
“It’s always seemed to me that the basic American goal has been to make Afghanistan more like Kabul and less like Kandahar” – ok, this is, I suppose, the main question – is this really our goal, and should it be our goal? Why are we there to begin with? I would love for Afghanistan to look more like Kabul (even corruption is organization and at odds with pure anarchy). The real question is whether it’s within our power to do so, a question where I’ve always had my doubts, and anyways, I don’t feel like I’ve ever really understood what our real mission – as opposed to fondest desires – is in Afghanistan. It seems like a mission should pertain more to concrete objectives and less toward something as vague and open-ended as bringing order to chaos.
Nationhood?
Are you serious?
Afghanistan has never been a nation, other than in name.
At least for this millenium and the one prior.
Shit, I hate it when a reporter gets embedded in a war zone for a month or two and thinks he knows what he’s talking about. They make wide, overarching oversimplifications like this one, call it a day, fly home, and sleep in their warm beds.
I’ve spent 26 months of my young life in Afghanistan (and will be returning next year), and I still know little, but I know enough not to try and categorize it one way or the other, not to refer to a bombing as a “psychological event” or put some other stupid label on it. Reporters talk about nation building in these broad political strokes, while all I remember about Afghanistan is children begging in the streets, opium addicts passed out in door ways, and blood. There was a lot of blood.
I know more than this reporter about Afghanistan, and about it’s people. God knows I killed enough of the latter.
Its location is important above all, even more important than the identities (or identifications) of those who are killed, or the number of casualties. The attack is on the place itself, the place as an idea, and the people are collateral damage.
I see what you’re trying to say in this post and agree with most of it, but I have to disagree with this concept. It’s only because we look at massively violent events as things other than the destruction of individual lives and the lives of their families that we allow things like the invasion of Iraq or drone attacks to occur. They become merely talking points, political matters even, and therefore, up for debate.
Whereas, if the U.S. government decided that drone attacks were the best tactic to use against enemies in the U.S., that would stop being debatable the first time a group of U.S. civilians was accidentally blown to pieces.
The very first and most important thing a massive, violent attack should represent is the actual, objective suffering and death of individuals and their family members.