Reviewed here: Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, by Terry Glavin; The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, by Chris Alexander
Afghanistan is a gift to writers. Stunning and tragic, at once victim of violence and instigator of terror, hotly debated and often ignored, Afghanistan is the place everyone chronicles and no one seems fully to understand. Come from the Shadows is a collection of sympathetic anecdotes, and an argument for continued Western engagement in a place, journalist Terry Glavin suggests, where “madness, politics and war are often parts of the same conversation.”
In Glavin’s Afghanistan, things may have gone mightily awry, but not everything has gone wrong. As the state has muddled through, progress has been local and personal. The costs are high: War has contributed to increased mental illness, poverty is searing and families can find themselves divided by belief as well as deed. Glavin embraces the whole country with kindness, somewhat in awe of the courage and convictions of individuals who simply will not accept the negative assumptions that outsiders can bring to them and their country.
Just as NATO troops are headed home, and public debate has taken to assuming that less is more, or better, Glavin contends, energetically and emotionally, that Afghanistan needs a strong foreign military presence to become the democratic state it should be, and wants to be. Glavin argues that Afghans want NATO to stay, disputing the prevailing Western view that foreigners are unwelcome.
Come from the Shadows disputes the slippery slopes of Western policies that began with state-building and democracy-promotion and are ending by seeking to reconcile with the same groups against which NATO has been fighting for 10 years. The hapless state will be left to sort itself out. As Glavin wrote earlier in Dissent, “there’s nothing like lowering your standards to make them easier to uphold.”
When world leaders met in Bonn in December, reality forced them to acknowledge the last decade’s efforts and errors, justifications, excuses, laments and, inevitably, questions about a decade that was as much about themselves as about Afghanistan. As Chris Alexander notes in The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, the promise of late 2001, when a new Afghanistan “seemed so tantalizingly close,” remains more than elusive today.
His is an optimist’s take on a place and problems too regularly treated as lost, a reminder of the hopes of multilateralism, and a diplomat’s compassionate history of a decade too often understood only as unremitting war. Earnest and honest, his generous portraits of political leaders and colleagues sometimes betray sympathies that too easily override needed critique. But Alexander’s intent, like Glavin’s, remains clear: As one ally after another leaves an insecure, poverty-afflicted war zone that they all helped to create, he believes that Afghanistan is worth a better investment.
Alexander comes to this task with insight gained as a Canadian and then a UN diplomat in Kabul. When he recites a familiar litany of violence, regrets and stubborn determination, he does so with concern more than accusation. He lauds the process that brought a new government to Kabul, with warm regard for Hamid Karzai and his early cabinet of returned diaspora technocrats, and measured support for the new parliament.
He nonetheless admits that by 2006 rehabilitation was stuck: The state was skeletal, its political legitimacy a veneer varnished by “drugs, warlords, power politics and a culture of payback and vengeance.”
The intricate competition (and occasional collaboration) between extremism and corruption undercut government and politics. “If the military situation was bad,” Alexander writes of the fulcrum months of 2006 when Afghanistan tried to reinvent itself, “governance was worse.” The virus of corruption infected government itself, inviting renewed insurgency and discouraging moderation of any sort. “Even when Karzai acted responsibly” – a telling turn of phrase – “scandal, conspiracy and manipulation seemed to lurk behind every corner.”
But Alexander is loath to blame the government for problems that he and his colleagues believed were sourced elsewhere. Little of his book suffers from the usual invective of writings on the region, but even the ever-generous Alexander seems stumped by Pakistan. His dispiriting descriptions of UN discussions with the Pakistan government reveal some of the thinking behind the military surge of 2009-2010: “If Pakistan wasn’t going to fight the Taliban, the United States and NATO would have to do the job instead.”
A worthy-sounding goal, but highly contestable. Foreign military forces are on their way home, and political transition in Afghanistan is now being turned into negotiations with the Taliban. Although Alexander doesn’t say so, the Taliban at least as dangerous for Pakistan as for Afghanistan; Pakistan believes that some of the responsibility for that lies with Afghanistan.
Both Glavin and Alexander highlight the confusing combinations of interventionism and isolationism that typify the collateral damage not only of 2001, but also of 1991: Post-Cold War, post-Bosnia and post-Rwanda, the maxims on which intervention is based have been murky, and those that support democratic state-building have been hard to sustain. Neither conservatives nor liberals have been clear-thinking; each has sacrificed principle to changeable views of security, stability and opportunism; each has been disappointed; and each has failed in their respective, if periodically unclear, missions.
Diplomats, Sir Harold Nicolson wrote long ago, often progress further than politicians in their views of international conduct. But the most sympathetic diplomats, as Alexander certainly is, are often better advocates than critics of the diplomatic endeavour. The Long Way Back begins an urgent conversation; an even sharper, self-critical analysis of the last decade’s diplomacy should come next.
Paula Newberg is director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, and formerly special adviser to the United Nations in Afghanistan.
