Craig Mason: Afghanistan and the need for strong states

By Craig Mason

Afghanistan is behind us, for now, until we must return to Afghanistan, or to Somalia, or to some other stateless part of the world in which terrorists thrive amidst warlords.

Americans have become incompetent on the world stage because our anti-government fantasies have displaced the pro-government wisdom of our Founding Fathers. We must relearn the need for a strong state, for functioning, regulatory and legalistic governance. Let me start with Iraq.

In late 2002, I was the 4th Congressional District Democratic nominee, having run to drag Democrats to the center on cultural issues so politics could focus on the economics of the working class. Toward the end of 2002, George Bush was stampeding America to war with Iraq, and I pointed out that every former advisor for the Elder Bush, and every academic close to the CIA, was asking Bush not to go to start the Second Iraq War. At the Yakima Herald editorial board meeting, I pointed out that every CIA-linked source was stating that Saddam (a) had no weapons of mass destruction, (b) had nothing to do with al-Qaida, and © had nothing to do with 9/11. Congressman Doc Hastings alleged he had “secret intelligence” to the contrary – a piece of the massive lie that led us to destroy order in Iraq, ultimately strengthening Iran and setting ISIS in motion.

Compare, instead, the Allied wisdom after WWII. The Allied leaders and generals had a great concern for maintaining order. The “de-Nazification” of Germany was wafer-thin. Why? Because the Allies knew that disorder is the greatest evil you can inflict on people, and disorder would create new security threats. Likewise, in Japan the Allies rehabilitated the pro-war emperor into a well-meaning stooge of the Japanese military, and the Allies maintained the administrators of the Japanese state. Recovery proceeded apace with our massive aid well-spent within good governance.

In Iraq, Saddam had built a functioning state, and we could have frightened him into incremental democratization. Even after we killed Saddam, we could have maintained his state and gradually democratized it. Instead, ham-handed “de-Baathification” destroyed the Iraqi state, and the resultant chaos remains to this day.

It is much easier to destroy order than to re-create it once a society is smashed back to warlordism (feudalism/mafia-ism/tribalism). Feudal societies distribute rewards by personal connections, not by impersonal regulations as occurs in a society under the rule of law.

In short order, after Bush ruined Iraq in 2003, Obama joined with Tony Blair and others to ruin Syria and Libya.

As a reminder, Elder Bush kept Saddam in power in Iraq after the first Iraq War as a counter-weight to Iran. Elder Bush and Clinton forced Saddam to behave better and better. (And Elder Bush and Clinton got a refresher course in unmanageable chaos in Somalia in 1992-93.)

“Democracy” is not an end in itself. “Democracy” is a means of adjusting existing legal systems with popular participation. A legal system requires laws rooted in a constitution, and regulation rooted in the institutions of an independent judiciary and professional administrators.

It goes against human nature to accept a legal system in which people submit their personal relationships to universal norms that do not allow for favoritism to family and friends. It takes training from birth in a commitment to equal treatment before the law to create a population able to exercise democracy by also respecting legal norms.

Turning to Afghanistan, we poured billions through existing “tribal” (mafia-like) social arrangements, leading to no love, to no loyalty and to no Afghan state. America was surprised when loyalties immediately shifted from Americans to the Taliban as we departed. No one can use feudal (personal) social arrangements to build a modern, legal (impersonal) state. Trump and Biden were correct to leave Afghanistan. We should have left once al-Qaida was neutralized, or we should have built a genuine legal-state.

Of course, the wells we dug, roads and schools we built, and all those projects will have lasting benefits. And I value the courage and commitment of soldiers doing their best in a bad situation.

Also recall that American covert operations destroyed the Afghan state throughout the 1980s to frustrate the Soviet Union. The Afghan chaos we used as a Cold War tactic became a boomerang on a long arc.

To return to the point of our Founding Fathers, everyone wants to talk about “natural rights” as if they spring from the ground or from the heavens, but the Declaration of Independence says about those rights: “… to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men …”

In short, you may “morally” have “rights,” but those rights are non-existent in any practical sense without government. Government must “secure these rights.”

Precisely because of the strength of our state, childish Americans have been able to lose themselves in anti-government fantasies for many decades now. Americans stomped around the world sowing disorder, creating the very statelessness that shelters and breeds the terrorists who eventually come to attack us. Our failure to build a Russian state with a new Marshall Plan in the 1990s will come to be seen as a world-historical tragedy. Americans must recover their understanding of the value of, and need for, government to maintain order and “secure rights.”

If we attack a terror threat, we must rid ourselves of the threat and come home. To cure a terror threat in the long run, we must destroy warlordism and build a genuine state based upon impersonally administered rules and regulations. Haiti is now falling into warlordism as I write.

After January 6, 2021, it looks like state-building needs to begin at home “to secure these rights” that we could not provide to the Afghans, and to protect the liberties that only competent government can preserve.

Craig Mason is a local attorney and Spokane native who has also taught at Columbia Basin Community College, WSU-Tri-Cities, EWU and Gonzaga.