Crawling from the Wreckage (2 page)

It is Hobson’s choice, and I am almost glad I do not have a vote in this election: it saves me from the responsibility of choice. If I were an American, however, I would probably abandon all these “tactical” voting calculations: one look at Vice-President Dick Cheney and you know that it’s just not worth the risk.

Sin comentario
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Looking at that extraordinary electoral map of the United States with all the liberal, quiche-eating, Kerry-supporting states of the northeast and the west coast coloured Democratic blue, while the “heartland” and the south are solid Republican red, the solution to the problem suddenly occurred to me: “Blueland” should join Canada.

It is getting harder for the two tribes of Americans to understand or even tolerate each other. Once again, as in 2000, the country is divided with almost mathematical precision into two halves, one of which adores President George W. Bush while the other loathes him. And it goes far deeper than mere personalities or even the old left-right split; the clash now is about social norms and fundamental values, about which few are willing to compromise.

Opinions on the foreign issues that seemed to dominate the election—the war in Iraq and the “war on terror”—just mapped onto that existing cultural division. People who go to church regularly and oppose abortion and gay marriage were also far more likely to believe that U.S. troops had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein had sponsored the terrorists of 9/11, so they voted for Mr. Bush. People who don’t hold such beliefs, didn’t.

“Irreconcilable” is the word that springs to mind. Two separate populations have evolved in the U.S., and they are increasingly unhappy living together.

One subspecies,
Homo canadiensis
, thinks universal health care is a good idea, would rather send peacekeepers than bombers, and longs for the wimpy, wispy liberalism enjoyed by their neighbours to the north. The other breed,
Homo iraniensis
, prefers the full-blooded religious certainties and the militant political slogans—“Death to [fill in the blank]”—that play such a large and fulfilling part in Iranian public life.

It is cruel to force these two populations to go on living together, especially since American political life has lost its centre and now pits these two irreconcilable opposites directly against each other in a winner-takes-all election every four years. Since the pseudo-Iranians slightly outnumber the proto-Canadians, the obvious solution is for the latter group actually to go to Canada—and indeed, I have lost count of the number of American friends who have told me that if George W. Bush wins again, they are going to move to Canada.

There are problems with this solution, however. A mass migration northwards would leave large chunks of the U.S. virtually empty, and the parts of Canada where people can live in any comfort are pretty full already. Besides, the winters in Canada really are severe, and Californians might not be up to the challenge. Then, looking at the two-colour map
of the electoral outcome, the solution hit me. You don’t have to move the people; just move the border.

It would all join up just fine: the parts of the U.S. inhabited by
Homo canadiensis
all lie along the Canadian border or next to other states that do (although the blue bit dangles down a long, long way in the case of the Washington-Oregon-California strip fondly known as the Left Coast). True, the U.S. would lose its whole Pacific coast, but we could arrange for an American free port in, say, Tijuana. Plus, lots of Canadians could move to a warmer clime without actually having to leave their country.

At the global level, everybody else would be quite happy with a bigger Canada and a smaller United States. That smaller U.S. would have to pull in its horns a bit, as it would no longer have the money to maintain military bases in every country on the planet, but it would retain enough resources to invade someone every year or so. And the new Canadians would be free to have abortions, enter into gay marriages, do stem-cell research and engage in all the other wickednesses that flourish in Canada. They could even speak French if they wanted to.

No solution is perfect: there would be limp-wristed liberals trapped in the U.S. and God-fearing rednecks who suddenly found themselves in Canada, so some degree of population exchange would be necessary. It’s even possible that a few right-wing bits of Canada—parts of Alberta, for example—might prefer to join the U.S. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and think how happy every body will be when they are living exclusively among like-minded people.

Fast-forward four years, and the Bush era is finally stumbling to a close. A man we had barely heard of four years ago is heading for the White House, and we are all trying to figure out whether he can really make a difference. How much of the disaster has been the personal fault of Bush and his friends, and how much is implicit in the system?

It is now a near certainty that Obama will be the next American president. The media will try to maintain the illusion of a race for the Democratic
nomination until Senator Hillary Clinton finally retires from the race—which may not be until the convention in August—because such an illusion helps to fill the awful gap between the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the actual amount of news available. But, as leading independent pollster John Zogby put it on Wednesday, “To all intents and purposes the race for the Democratic nomination is over.”

Having seen off the Hard Man of the Democratic Party, Obama must now defeat the Hard Man of the Republican Party in November. (Senator Hillary Clinton promised to “obliterate” Iran if it attacks Israel; Senator John McCain has threatened North Korea with “extinction.”) But it will be hard for Obama to lose while the United States is plunging into a deep recession and the Republican candidate is still shackled to the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So Obama gets the presidency—and then what? He will probably be able to depend on solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress but he will inherit a ravaged economy and two lost wars, so he has little room for expensive domestic reforms or dramatic initiatives abroad. Also, he will not be able to cut bloated U.S. military spending, so there is no early “peace bonus” waiting for him on the fiscal front.

Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama will ultimately have the job of repairing the huge budget deficit bequeathed to him by his Republican predecessor, but the only step he can take in the short run is to roll back the huge Bush tax cuts for the rich. So what else can the Democrats do in the meantime that doesn’t cost too much?

Obama has said very little about this during his campaign (and Hillary Clinton, haunted by her failure to reform health care in her husband’s first term as president, has said even less). But the fact that one-sixth of the American population has no access to high-quality medical care is an astonishing failure in a rich democracy, and Obama has travelled enough to see it for the scandal that it is. He may be unconvincing as a gun-loving, truck-driving, fast-food-addicted son of toil, but he is the candidate of the American poor, even if many of the white poor don’t recognize him as such. No single reform would do as much to improve the lives of poor Americans as a fully comprehensive health-care system that is free at the point of delivery. Obama has given us few clues about his intentions but my money says that this will be his first priority in domestic affairs. He might even succeed.

Well, I got that right. I just never imagined that it would take up a full year of congressional time, while everything else had to wait. Neither did he. But I’m a much happier camper now. Let nobody tell you that the United States doesn’t matter anymore
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As expected, I found lots of pieces on Afghanistan when I surveyed the five years’ worth of articles for this book. But there weren’t many I could use, because they all said essentially the same few things. You can do endless colour pieces full of human stories: as a private soldier wrote home from another war half a century ago, “Men are never so loving or so lovable as they are in action.” But that doesn’t change from one war or one army to the next, and it doesn’t change the fact that the war will kill or maim many of those soldiers in the end, so we owe it to them to talk about the politics and strategy of the conflict they find themselves in. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot to say about the war in Afghanistan at the political and strategic level, except that it is unwinnable and unnecessary
.

1839, 1878, 1979, 2001: four foreign invasions of Afghanistan in less than two hundred years. The first two were British, and unashamedly imperialist. The third was Soviet, and the invaders said they were there to defend socialism and help Afghanistan become a modern, prosperous state. The last was American, and the invaders said they were there to bring democracy and help Afghanistan become a modern, prosperous state. But all four invasions were doomed to fail (although the last one still has some time to run).

When Britain deployed 3,300 troops to Helmand province early last month, then defence secretary John Reid said: “We hope we will leave Afghanistan without firing a single shot.” But six British soldiers have been killed in combat since then, and the new defence secretary, Des Browne, announced on Monday that the British force is being increased by another nine hundred soldiers to cope with “unexpected” resistance.

The story is the same across southern Afghanistan. The Canadian army has lost six soldiers killed in action in Kandahar province since late April, and may soon face the same choice between reinforcing its troops or pulling them back.

A country that has been invaded four times in less than two centuries is bound to know a couple of things about dealing with foreign conquerors, and the first thing Afghans have learned is never to trust foreigners, no matter how pure they say their intentions are. There are probably no people in the world more xenophobic than the Afghans, and they have earned the right to be so. If there was ever a window of opportunity for the current crop of invaders to convince Afghans that this time is different it closed some time ago.

The other thing Afghans know is how to deal with invaders. Invaders will always be richer and better armed, so let them occupy the country. Don’t try to hold the cities; instead, fade back into the mountains. Take a couple of years to regroup and set up your supply lines (this time around, mostly across the border from Pakistan), and then start the guerrilla war in earnest. Ambush, harass and bleed the foreigners for as long as it takes. Eventually they will cut their losses and go home.

It has worked every time, and it will work again. Des Browne remarked plaintively last week that “the very act of [British] deployment into the south has energized opposition.” But the reality is that the rural areas of Helmand province, like most of the Pashto-speaking provinces of the south and southeast, have been under the effective control of the resistance for several years. The arrival of foreign troops in these areas simply gives the insurgents more targets to attack.

The endgame is beginning, even in Kabul. Hamid Karzai, the West’s chosen leader for Afghanistan, is now starting to make deals with the forces that will hold his life in their hands once the foreigners leave: the warlords and drug barons. In April, he dropped many candidates who had been approved by the “coalition” powers from a list of new provincial police chiefs, and replaced their names with those of known gangsters and criminals who work for the local warlords. He will also have to talk to the Taliban before long.

The “Taliban” that Western troops are now fighting in Afghanistan is more inclusive than the narrow band of fanatics who imposed order on the country in 1996, after seven years of civil war. The current Afghan resistance movement includes farmers trying to protect their poppy fields, nationalists furious at the foreign presence and young men who just want to show that they are as brave as previous generations of Afghans. In other words, the Afghan fighters have the usual grab bag of motives that fuels any national resistance movement.

Nor should we assume that the regime that eventually emerges in Kabul after the foreigners have gone home will resemble the old Taliban, a Pakistani-backed and almost entirely Pashto-speaking organization. The foreign invasion overthrew the long domination of the Pashto-speakers in Afghanistan (about 40 percent of the population), and it is most unlikely that Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen will accept that domination again. Their own warlords will have to have a share of the power, too, and even Karzai might find a role.

Post-occupation Afghanistan will certainly live under strict Islamic law, but there is no reason to believe that it would export Islamist revolution of the al-Qaeda brand. Even the old Taliban regime never did that; it gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his gang, but it almost certainly had no knowledge of his plans for 9/11, and on other issues it was often open to Western pressure. In early 2001, for example, the former Taliban regime
shut down the whole heroin industry in Afghanistan, simply by shooting enough poppy farmers to frighten the rest into obedience.

Afghanistan will not be left to its own devices until after the people who ordered the invasion leave office: presumably next year for Tony Blair, and January 2009 for George W. Bush. There is time for lots of killing yet, but Afghanistan stands a reasonable chance of sorting itself out once the Western armies leave.

I would stand by everything in that article, except that it’s clearly going to take more time for the Western armies to pull out of Afghanistan
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This week is the sixth anniversary of the start of U.S. air strikes against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. It was a very clever politico-military operation, and by December 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of twelve American dead.