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The Iraq Paradox: Why has it been so much harder than Afghanistan?
by Robert Pollock, Wall Street JournalBAGHDAD--"How was Afghanistan?" asks an aide to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "Dusty," I reply, pointing at my shoes, which show every evidence of having been in Kandahar hours earlier. "And remarkably stable," I add: The press corps following Donald Rumsfeld drove from Kabul airport to the U.S. Embassy compound with no significant security, a sharp contrast to the helicopter ride that prudence dictated we take into Baghdad's Green Zone. "We'd sure like to have that kind of situation," my interlocutor says. So why does he think the U.S. mission here has been so much harder? Maybe, he says, because the Taliban didn't have 35 years to create the infrastructure of a totalitarian state, with millions of party apparatchiks and a KGB-trained intelligence service--"the same people who are still killing us today." It's the best answer I heard to a question that nagged me on a recent visit to two of the hottest battlefronts in the war on terror. Iraq, a cosmopolitan civilization, actually knew something of representative democracy before the Baath rose to power in the 1960s. It has an educated middle class, and at least 80% of its population hated the regime when we liberated it. It seemed as fertile ground as any to test the idea that the force of U.S. arms could help improve political evolution in the Muslim world. Iraqis have vindicated that idea by bravely turning out for two elections and a constitutional referendum; but the security situation in Baghdad continues to deteriorate. And the middle class--upon whom so much depends--is fleeing Iraq in numbers. By contrast, Afghanistan seemed to pose more daunting challenges. It is larger, more populous and largely illiterate, with a history of being the "graveyard of empires." It was the actual home of an Islamist regime. And across the border in Pakistan, madrassas turn out a seemingly endless supply of holy warriors. Yet Afghanistan was liberated with only a token U.S. ground force and stabilized with barely more than 20,000. It still has decades to go before basic education levels will allow it to be anything approaching modern democracy. But don't believe the reports of a significant Taliban resurgence; they're greatly exaggerated. Go read the rest of it; it's quite insightful. Posted by: Mike 2006-07-30 |
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