13. AMERICA STUMBLES

THE HUNT FOR THE 9/11 JIHADISTS ... AND BUSH'S NATION-BUILDING

In short, the Bushes were now focused on "nation-building" in Afghanistan – a much, much bigger process than simply bringing bin Laden to justice.

While such talk impressed many Americans and Westerners, it also impressed many in the Muslim world – except in the very opposite manner.  Americans find it virtually impossible to understand that not everyone else in the world goes at life, or even wants to go at life, the way they do.  Muslims understand that the good life comes from a universe in which everyone finds a place of submission to the larger order of things, children to their parents, wives to their husbands, families to their elders or community leaders (from tribal sheiks to religious mullahs), regional community leaders to their ruling or presiding princes, amirs, kings and ayatollahs, and all of them ultimately to Allah.  The central idea in Islam is "to submit."  Muslims are "those who submit."

American (especially Boomer) talk about pursuing full personal freedom from any and all authority shocks Muslims, appearing to them as something very dangerous to human order, to the good life, especially to the pleasure and blessings of Allah himself.  Thus when Americans go invading a Muslim country to bring "democracy" as part of a new nation-building venture, this is not destined to work the way Boomers believe it is supposed to.  "Freedom of choice" to Muslims means the opportunity to show ever stronger support for those in authority, not infrequently in opposition to other groups seeking to do the same.  If this is not handled carefully, such "democratizing" can easily plunge a Muslim society into a horrible state of civil war among local groups that have found no higher personality to unite around.  Thus dumping Muslim "dictators" is a very dangerous program in the Muslim world.

And America was soon to discover this.  And once again, America would also fail to take note of the actual dynamic – instead simply pushing ever-harder to make their version of social dynamics work in a setting where there was no natural inclination of the people themselves to go the way Americans thought things should go!  Therefore, things would get very brutal, very fast.

With the decision to go to full nation-building in Afghanistan the operation was taken out of the hands of the CIA and put under direction of Donald Rumsfeld and his Department of Defense – that is, the American military establishment.  But of course the U.S. military was by no means battle-ready at a moment's notice for such an operation, and would need weeks of preparation, during which time bin Laden naturally slipped into the mountains – and then probably back into Pakistan.

And there in Pakistan, where the Americans had no authorization to pursue him, he would be safe from the American military's effort to hunt down him and his organization. Because Pakistan was a supposed American ally, and because it was a nuclear power, and because Pakistan made it very clear that they too would under no terms give bin Laden and al Qaeda over to the Americans, Pakistan was one place – the key place in fact –where the Bush Doctrine did not apply.  Thus in terms of political reality, the "Bush Doctrine" had no real meaning.

But in any case, the "democratization" of Afghanistan would supposedly justify any and all American political and military operations in Afghanistan – even if all that ultimately had nothing to do with bringing bin Laden to justice.

This would prove to be a major American foreign policy distraction –along the lines of Johnson's Vietnam program – one which would prove very costly to the Americans, and to the Afghans.  And it had strikingly similar qualities to the (failed) Soviet efforts earlier to bring Afghanistan into their political orbit.  But Bush took no notice of the dynamics that made his program there look extremely costly – with little real political benefit likely to come from the effort.

But oddly enough, America had the rather substantial assistance of a number of its European NATO allies, in part due to the fact that they too had lost some of their own citizens in the Twin Towers tragedy.  But what that had to do with Bush's program of democratizing Afghanistan was just as remote for them as it was for America.