Imaginary Day

He summed up the differences between Brits and Americans in a memorable way: in Britain, 100 miles is a long distance, and in America 100 years is a long time.

To: The Local Group
From: Roberto Rivera
Date: Why not now?
Re: Imaginary Day

A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a British ex-pat while waiting to buy some popcorn at the ballpark.

He summed up the differences between Brits and Americans in a memorable way: in Britain, 100 miles is a long distance, and in America 100 years is a long time.

Few things are more characteristically American than the conviction that the past should not restrict or limit the present. What has gone before should be available to entertain, soothe, reassure and comfort us when needed, but then it should have the decency and good sense to get out of our way when we decide it’s time to “move on.” When compared to the exigencies of the present, never mind the future, what happened 100 years ago might as well have taken place in the Carboniferous.

Unfortunately, as Faulkner put it, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” Or, as former Chinese Premier Zhou Elai is supposed to have replied when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, “it’s too soon to tell.” Things that happened an unimaginably (at least in our estimation) long time ago are still working their way through the system. Their impact on the present is as large as ours, maybe even more so because, as we should have learned the hard way, they help define the limits of what can and cannot be done.

This is certainly the case in Afghanistan. In an historical sense, the doom of the American involvement in what political scientist Seth Jones calls “The Graveyard of Empires” was written 116 years ago. On November 12, 1893 Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of British colonial India and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan, signed a treaty that demarcated the border between British India and Afghanistan. The “Durand Line,” as the border came to be known, stretches for approximately 1,600 miles and followed two Anglo-Afghan Wars—one of which saw a 16,000-man British force reduced to one. Not one thousand or even one hundred, but one.

No doubt the treaty and the border it produced seemed like a good thing at the time, especially to the British. However, no one asked the Pashtuns what they thought about the Durand Line. That was unfortunate because the line divided their homeland between Afghanistan and British India. (This was, as the expression goes, a feature not a bug: as Jones tells us, the British “divided the Pashtun tribes in order to weaken them, making it easier for the British to pacify the area.”) This ensured that whatever problems and threats emerged from the Pashtun homelands, such as the Taliban and its support for al Qaeda, would affect two nations: Afghanistan and the successor to the British India, nuclear Pakistan.

As one “Pakistani” politician told Jones: “I am a six thousand year old Pashtun, a thousand year old Muslim and a 27 year old Pakistani.” The sentiment is shared by members of the various Pashtun tribes divided by the Durand Line—for them the border doesn’t exist (actually, Afghanistan doesn’t formally recognize the border, either) and the Western distinction between the Taliban’s activities in Afghanistan (home to one-third of the Pashtuns) and its activities in Pakistan (home to the rest) is pretty meaningless. Even if elements of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) weren’t supporting the Taliban, the all-but-non-existent border provides the Taliban a safe haven from which to attack Afghan and NATO forces.

I should be clear: I’m not saying that the Pashtuns are somehow to “blame” for the Taliban or that ethnic divisions are the cause of Afghanistan’s many problems. I’m saying that because the Durand Line cut the Pashtun homeland in two, Afghanistan’s problems become Pakistan’s problem, which, in turn, becomes ours.

Since we don’t have access to a WABAC Machine, the best option would be to try and correct the mistakes we have inherited, perhaps in the ways Ralph Peters has suggested. Since, however, that is only slightly more likely than a talking dog and his boy gifting us with a time machine, President Obama (and the rest of us) is stuck with a choice between a costly effort to “stabilize” Afghanistan whose ultimate success is, as the British and Russians can tell us, far from certain or nervously watching as the whole region descends into chaos and praying that A.Q. Khan's creations are secure, which, in the best-case scenario, still leaves the United States with a resurgent al Qaeda operating from a safe haven in the Pashtun homelands.

Either response is morally defensible—what’s not is regarding the people of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) as an incorrigible “other” for whom bloodshed and chaos the normal state of affairs. Central Asia isn’t Minnesota, but neither is it some anarchic state of nature where war and conflict are inescapable. At the risk of sounding trite, the people of Afghanistan want most of the same things we do—it’s just that historical and political forces, most of them out of their control (the British, the Soviets, the United States and the Pakistani government) have made obtaining them harder in ways that Westerners, especially Americans, with memories measured in, at most, months can’t begin to imagine.

Not that it should be all that difficult to imagine: after all, more than three centuries after the British (sense a pattern?) encouraged Scottish Presbyterians to settle in northern Ireland, we still haven’t sorted out the consequences of that policy. Why should the people of Central and South Asia be expected to resolve the mess they inherited from the same empire in less than one-third of the time?

Eurasia isn’t the only place where the past is, at least for Westerners, a forgotten country. In The New Republic, Christine Stansell described a Central African world created by what she dubbed “reconciliation realpolitik.” In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, a grotesque reconciliation-industrial complex has arisen. As one survivor sums it up, humanitarian organizations “are importing forgiveness to Rwanda, and they wrap it in lots of dollars to win us over. There is a Forgiveness Plan just as there is an AIDS Plan, with public awareness meetings, posters, petty local presidents, super-polite whites in all-terrain turbo vehicles.”

This reconciliation-industrial complex shouldn’t be confused with what my colleague Catherine Claire Larson has written about. The simulacrum of reconciliation Stansell writes about is the product of “[an outside] world that wants to leave the genocide behind” and “move on.” Serious thought about the past might require taking responsibility for its present-day consequences and that’s the last thing anyone (or at least “anyone” whose desires matter) wants. Instead, “unencumbered by any lingering embarrassment over the West’s abnegation of responsibility in 1994, aid workers are happy to instruct Rwandans on how to be good neighbors” today.

Predictably, bad reconciliation seems to be driving out the real thing. It’s producing a Rwanda where “killers [are] incurious about how their victims were faring, and oblivious to what the genocide had wrought,” a Rwanda where “talking too much, [and] compulsively confessing to anyone who would listen” can get you killed. In this simulacrum, “perpetrators and their families pay lip service to reconciliation; and they do so because their ideas of reconciliation are so faint and undemanding, and they have so little at stake.”

In a world where 15 years is all that is needed to “move on” after the massacre of 800,000 people, problems like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan demand more than our attention span and patience are capable of giving. The difference is that, unlike Rwanda, their “not even past” can become our present no matter how much we want to move on.

Roberto Rivera is a senior writer for BreakPoint.