The CANZUK Future

 

The current chaos in Afghanistan offers one more good argument for CANZUK—a formal coalition of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Britain, Australia, and other nations were trapped by America’s sudden withdrawal. America no longer looks like a reliable ally. Had CANZUK existed, it might have been able to take charge.

CANZUK should also appeal to Britain as a way to stand strong in trade competition with the EU. For Canadians, it elevates them beyond just being America’s eternal kid brother. For New Zealand, the added partners prevent being overmatched by Australia. For Australia, it is protection against China.

It is suddenly looking possible that Erin O’Toole may become Canadian prime minister. If so, CANZUK is an official part of his party’s policy.

Is the Fall of Kabul the Fall of the Left?

 

Does the chaos in Kabul mark an inflection point?

It seems to me an inflection point is due, and overdue. And current events in Afghanistan are surely shocking enough to burn for some time in collective memory. Someone needs to be blamed for thiis, and someone needs to be punished. “Never again.”

It looked as though we were already hitting an inflection point in 2016; first we had Brexit, and then we had Trump elected. Both seemed miraculous, a turning of the tide. The cognoscenti, the clerisy, the managing elite, did not want either. Moreover, the elite predicted with confidence that neither would happen. It was as though the common man was rising up and refusing to do as he was told.

We should have expected a response, even a hysterical response, and for the past four years we have seen it. 

Realizing that a wave had swept over the gunwale, it was all hands on deck for the brass-polishers of the regular navy. So we got cancel culture, deplatforming, critical race theory, an openly partisan press, lots of fake news, multiple impeachment attempts, and branding at least half the country, or respective countries, racist and fascist. They didn’t manage to reverse Brexit; the voters remained adamant, dramatically endorsing Nigel Farage, and dramatically rejecting Jeremy Corbin. But they did manage in America, with or without the help of electoral tricks, to frighten enough ordinary folks back into their habitual cap-doffing to their betters. For the moment.

But now they have demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic terms. People are dying. Biden was their guy; now they own him. Covering his own away-from-the-mirror parts, Biden insists constantly he was following the advice of the experts. He ran promising to do so, and has claimed all along to be doing so. 

So it is natural and proper to hold the elites responsible for the unfolding Afghanistan disaster. They can’t tag it on Biden personally, because Kamala Harris is on record as saying she signed off on the decision. Nancy Pelosi insisted it was wise at the time. Blaming Biden and pressuring him to resign would only pass the presidency on to one of them.

it now looks possible, in the shadow of Kabul, that Gavin Newsome will be recalled, and replaced by Larry Elder—not just a Republican as governor of the ultimate “blue” state, but a libertarian Republican. If California falls to the “fascists,” who on the left is going to feel safe? Who on the right who has been cowed until now into silence won’t feel emboldened?

It now also looks possible that, in defiance of expectation, and also in the shadow of Kabul, the Liberals might fall to the Conservatives in Canada.

And this might look to all like a swelling wave, encouraging others to resist and to speak out. 

We seem already to be seeing it at school board meetings across the US.

In a few years, the fashionable leftist positions of today may look as bad as Joe McCarthy did by the 1960s, or Chamberlain and isolationism did by 1945. 

Biden Their Time

 

One thing about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan strikes me as insane. But I see no one else commenting on it.

Before and since the pullout. Biden and his people were saying they expected the Afghan army to hold out for another nine months. 

But if it was clear enough to them that the country was likely to fall in nine months, wouldn’t it have been clear to the Afghans? And if you are going to lose in nine months, why would anyone continue fighting? You would be risking death for nothing, and ensuring the Taliban would see you as an enemy once they came to power.

Accordingly, the idea that the Afghan army could or would keep fighting for nine months was always delusional, and obviously delusional. Yet Biden and his team made policy based on it. Only on such an assumption did it make sense to leave so many American civilians in country.

This is the sort of self-serving delusion that is typical of a narcissist. Biden is not rational.

A Day that Shall Live in Infamy

 

The actual situation in Afghanistan is rapidly looking worse. Geraldo Rivera, who is Fox’s representative for the Democratic Party viewpoint, is condemning Biden’s handling of the matter in unambiguous terms. Kamala Harris is nowhere to be seen. It is all looking bad enough that other Dems do not want to be associated with it. They are starting to turn in order to hang it all on Biden.

This is, I think, a historic debacle. The fall of Kabul is something everyone will remember for generations, as a watchword for incompetence. People will remember it the way they remember 9/11, or Kennedy’s assassination, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are now hearing that on top of perhaps 40,000 Afghans and their families who have legitimate claims to US protection after having aided the US and allied forces, perhaps 10,000 or more American citizens are stranded in Afghanistan. Are they all now abandoned to their fate? People are angry.

The Taliban may turn out to be a bunch of softies. But that is not the lesson of history. When an army conquers, the first troops in are usually well-disciplined and well-behaved, but after a few days, realizing victory is won, discipline breaks down and the troops are inclined to celebrate, rewarding themselves as they see fit. Even if the Taliban leadership wants to act nice to the Americans—which is unlikely—I doubt they will be able to control their ragtag forces. A series of atrocities is more likely.

Biden is now trying to blame the Afghan army and the intelligence agencies. Bad idea. People are going to feel pretty sorry for the Afghans who supported the US and were abandoned. Blaming them looks monstrous. Someone has pointed out that the Afghan army lost 60,000 soldiers in the fight with the Taliban—more than the US in Vietnam. And everyone in the military and intelligence now has an urgent need to leak to the press how it was all Biden’s fault, to cover their own stern parts. If Biden were a little more intelligent, he would have chosen one fall guy. Now it has to be him.

I think this has to end with Biden’s resignation or removal under the 25th Amendment; failing that, impeachment. Incompetence can’t be the charge, but between Hunter’s laptops and Biden’s extraconstitutional eviction moratorium, there are obvious grounds on which he could be impeached if necessary.

The Fall of Kabul and the Fall of Saigon

 

Folks are referring to the situation in Afghanistan as “Biden’s Saigon.” But in almost every aspect, this is worse than the fall of Saigon in 1975. This is an incalculable blow to American prestige.

1. The collapse was much faster: a week as opposed to two years.

2. The enemy was much less substantial. In Vietnam, the other side had major backing from the Soviet Union and China. North Vietnam itself had a large population and a stable government infrastructure. This time, the US was beaten by just a band of guerillas.

3. In the fall of Saigon, the most disturbing image was people trying to get onto a helicopter leaving from the embassy roof. In Kabul, we have already seen people trying to grab onto a cargo plane as it tried to take off. This is worse in both numbers and in apparent desperation.

4. In the fall of Saigon, the Ford administration could rightly claim their hands had been tied by Congress. In Congress, blame was spread out; and Congress was not equipped to make any snap policy shifts. This time, it is entirely the Biden administration’s decision to pull out, and they planned it without any restraints. Nor were they particularly constrained by public opposition to the war, as Congress and the Presidency were in 1975.  They are holding the bag.

5. The US invested nine years in Vietnam, to no purpose. They invested twenty in Afghanistan.

Shockingly, Biden has now sent more troops into Afghanistan to try to secure the evacuation than he pulled out. Surely that is a mark of signal incompetence.

And it looks callous, cowardly, and chaotic that neither Biden nor his press secretary have yet been available for comment. It looks like chaos.

Were the US a Westminster parliamentary system, I think Biden would now have to resign.  The American system is less flexible. Incompetence is presumably not an impeachable offense.

The Last Helicopter out of Kabul

 

Mohammed Zahir Shah, last king of Afghanistan, 1914-2007

The American war in Afghanistan is ending badly for the US; it looks like a debacle, evoking memories not just of the rise of ISS in Iraq, but of the fall of Saigon. A massive blow to American prestige.

Could it have ended differently? Was the US mad to go in at all? After all, Afghanistan had already proven too much for the soviets, and for the British Empire. Could they have improved matters by staying longer; or would this only have delayed the inevitable?

I thought in 2001 it made sense to go in; but only for a fast, surgical operation. My thinking was to they go in, overthrow the Taliban government, punish the ringleaders, and pull out. Then let the chips fall where they may. Rather on the model of how the British reacted to the Boxer Rebellion in China. I thought the same about Iraq. And I still think this could have worked.

If the Taliban then regrouped and retook government, as they now look about to do anyway, it would not have looked like a debacle for the Americans. A punishment would have been delivered, at relatively little cost to the US. Its power would have been asserted.

And there was a second easy and obvious step, that the US could have taken, which would have made this outcome much less likely. 

The Americans cannot seem to understand that Afghanistan is not now, and has never been, a nation. It is geographically like the Balkans, each valley developing an independent culture, with purely local allegiances. There is no ethnic unity around which to build a national consciousness.

In Afghanistan, therefore, there are only two ways to unify the country: either around a shared religion or ideology, or around allegiance to a royal family. The latter exploits the instinctive attachment to family—the king becomes everyone’s father. That means, either the Taliban, or a king. 

Convert the entire country to liberal democracy instead? Not a realistic goal; if possible, it would take generations, and in the meantime you, an alien, are attacking the one thing that holds everyone together, that everyone agrees on.

The US had available to them a candidate with legitimate historical claims to the throne. The former king was still alive. It could have quickly and easily been done, and they might have made an early exit.

They should have done the same thing, for roughly the same reasons, in Iraq. 

Americans hear “king“ and think it means an oppressive, authoritarian government. This is obviously, objectively, wrong. Some of the least authoritarian governments on earth are monarchies: the UK, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain. The most stable, benevolent, and least authoritarian governments in the Middle East are monarchies: Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Jordan, Morocco. 

Indeed, under Zahir Shah, by the 1950s, Afghanistan was peaceful, developing economically, and becoming a modern constitutional monarchy.

It should have been a no-brainer.

Vietnam and Afghanistan

The way we were...

Saw a documentary on the Vietnam War last night. It is remarkable how memories of Vietnam, once such a pressing issue, at least to those of us who were young, have faded. For a time, the trauma of Vietnam seemed overwhelming, and the end of American domination in the world. It was, the Americans thought, the first war they ever lost. God had deserted them; or they had deserted God. When Reagan a decade later send a few thousand marines into Grenada, the world gasped at his recklessness. After Vietnam? Unthinkable!

And now Afghanistan has dragged on as long, and nobody notices.

My opinion of Vietnam has not changed; not since I read the Pentagon Papers in 1971. I don't think the Americans were wrong in any moral sense to go in. It would have been better for the South Vietnamese had they won. But it was foolish. Just look on a map. First off, they could never invade North Vietnam, or, the Korean War informed them, they would be engaged in a land war in Asia with China. That would be the world's worst-case scenario for American arms, it being a distant sea power. As a result, they were committed to a purely defensive war; they could not win, only hold the line. Unless the North Vietnamese decided to give up, they had to lose.

Worse, South Vietnam is little more than one extended border. Insurgents could slip over that border at any time, at any point. No part of the country could ever be secured. The only way the US could fix that problem was to invade and conquer Laos and Cambodia, which would be a clear act of aggression against neutral countries, a flagrant violation of international law, and would damage US prestige as badly as or worse than losing the war.

All of this was obvious before the US went in.

I do not blame LBJ for going in; he was already committed, and to pull out would have meant a huge loss of American prestige. I do not think you can blame Kennedy either. His hands were similarly tied by prior commitments. You can blame Eisenhower. First, at Suez, he kicked the slats out from under the French and British empires. He forced them out of the game, and so out of Indochina. Then he committed the US to preserving the status quo under which the French left. He put America's head in the guillotine, and pulled the cord. It just took a few years for the blade to fall, and by then he was out of office. Anything after that would have been a grievous loss of American prestige, with perhaps disastrous consequences: the domino effect everyone worried about. The US would have shown itself an unreliable ally.

So why doesn't Afghanistan provoke the same public angst as Vietnam did?

It was almost as obviously dumb from the start. Afghan conditions defeated the Soviet Union, when it was the second-greatest military power on Earth. And a heck of a lot closer for resupply than the US. They defeated the British, when they were the greatest military power on Earth. And a heck of a lot closer to their base in India. Why, other than insane hubris, would the US (and NATO) attempt the same folly? Afghanistan is mountainous—perfect for guerilla warfare, so good for it that local governments have never been able to maintain control. Back in the Sixties, Afghanistan was still famous, as it had been throughout history, for bandits. The roads were never secure. Its natural state is constant total war. It has no seacoast—a huge logistical problem for a sea power like the US. And this also means that it is all border, through which insurgents can always pass in and out. The long border with Pakistan works just as did the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And NATO cannot invade Pakistan to do anything about it. 

The American war aim, back in 2001, was to punish the Taliban for refusing to hand over Osama Bin Laden and for hosting Al Qaeda bases. That mission was accomplished within two months. The US should then have handed the reins of power, such as they were, to their local allies, the Northern Alliance, and pulled out. This is how the British or French used to do it back in the days of empire; this is good old “gunboat diplomacy.” Send in a mobile force, burn down the Summer Palace, and withdraw in good order. Lesson taught. If they go back and do it again, go in and do it again.

US White House after Royal Navy raid, War of 1812.

Anything else is, if you will pardon the term, colonialism. You really do not have to stay and take over the country, do you?

But Vietnam was a much bigger conflict: it required the draft, a lot of unhappy involuntary soldiers, and a lot more casualties. Afghanistan is far less fierce.

In fact, it is so relatively placid that there may be real, material reasons for NATO to want to stay, even if the conflict is unwinnable. It might still be useful as a live-fire training and testing ground for NATO arms and tactics. In case of and more serious conflict, having forces recently battle tested is a huge advantage.

Unfortunately, real people are dying. I'd still pull out. With a strike force waiting on Diego Garcia.

Afghanistan's "Rape Law"

There is a lot of outrage everywhere in the West these days about the proposed new Shiite marriage law in Afghanistan. Canada, Germany, and New Zealand have all protested. The Toronto Star calls it “Afghanistan's 'rape' law”in headlines--the point being that it allegedly allows men to rape their wives. It also supposedly requires the husband's permission for a wife to work outside the home; though the details of this second provision are unclear from what is available in the news reports. The Huffington Post huffs and puffs: “to imagine that this injustice goes on in today's world is confounding.”

But all the outrage must seem rather odd to Muslims--given that it was a universal principle of common law in all English-speaking countries right up to 1991 that spousal rape was a logical impossibility. As recently as 1997, it was a recognized crime in only 17 countries. Okay, possibly we are right, and were wrong for the past five hundred or ten thousand years—but it does seem a bit hypocritical to so soundly condemn Shiites in Afghanistan for believing the same thing we all did up to twenty-five years ago. And it seems a bit anachronistic to refer to the law, as the Toronto Star does, as “Medieval.”

Though of course the Bible too, just like the Muslim sharia, recognizes a marital obligation to provide sex: see Corinthians 7:3-5. That would, of course, make Christians as guilty of “marital rape” as Muslims in this postmodern age.

More guilty, really. Neither the Bible nor the British common law allow the spouse to refuse sex for three nights running—the Afghan law would.

It is also, of course, wholly impossible to prove rape inside marriage, making it a bit awkward to enforce laws against it. Unenforceable laws do tend to bring the administration of the law into disrepute. Chillingly, though, a web source claims that, in Virginia at least, 88% of spousal rape cases result in conviction. This has to mean that a lot of men are being sent to prison solely on the testimony of their wives—suggesting a certain distinct lack of equal treatment before the law.

There seems to be much less concern over the part of the law that requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. I can't even find a clear statement on the Internet of what this actually entails, in the proposed legislation. The clearest reference I find says "The law also contains stipulations that women can pursue employment, education, or avail of doctor's services only with their husband's permission."

But this actually makes good sense: it is not a matter of discrimination against women, but of balancing rights and duties between the sexes. For it is also true that, in Muslim law, a man has an absolute obligation to support his wife financially. It does seem only fair, accordingly, that he has a say in what she does with her time, when it affects him directly. Indeed, sexual equality argues that we ought to have similar provisions in our own laws: why are women free to chose whether to work inside or outside the home, regardless of their husband's preferences, but men do not have the same freedom to choose? How many men might prefer to stay home every day, and let their wives worry about paying the bills? How many men would prefer, on divorce, to keep the kids and have their wives send them fat cheques every month?

Of course, there is something else about all this that must be puzzling the Afghans. The Westerners came in saying they were spreading democracy. Now they see a law duly passed by Aghanistan's elected parliament and signed into law by its elected president, but which they do not like—and they are demanding it be changed. It seems it is not really democracy that they want at all. You can't blame the Muslims if they throw up their hands and assume it is all just a plot against their traditional culture.

After all, it is.

To the typical Western leftist, they are simply “lesser breeds without the law.”

The Tragic Plight of Afghan Women

A regular correspondent forwards the following topical gag:

WOMEN WHO KNOW THEIR PLACE
.........A point of view.

Barbara Walters, of Television's 20/20, did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan, several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

She recently returned to Kabul and observed that women still walk behind their husbands. From Ms. Walters' vantage point, despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women now seem to walk even further back behind their husbands, and are happy to maintain the old custom.

Ms.Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked, "Why do you now seem happy with an old custom that you once tried so desperately to change? The woman looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes, and without hesitation said, "LAND MINES."

Unfortunately, the story fails as humour on a fundamental level. Humour works by a reversal of expectations: the punch line must be unexpected, or it is not funny.

But this is exactly why women have walked behind men in all violent countries, from the beginning of time. This is exactly where the custom came from: the man walked in front to protect the woman from attack. This is no doubt also why the man traditionally walks on the outside in North America and Northern Europe: so that, if a carriage veers from the road, or disturbs a mud puddle, or, in older days, an open sewer, or if someone dumps offal from an upper balcony, his body protects hers from harm.

It is, of course, the same reason that, when you have an official procession, the VIP, king, or president, appears at the rear, not at the front. It takes a certain perverse procrusteanism to interpret this as anything but the place of honour.

Nor is there the slightest evidence that Afghan women ever wanted to end the traditional customs of their country. That was always a demand of Western feminists, maternalistically thinking they knew better than native 'savages' what was best for the latter—albeit they might have been joined in this at times by the tiny minority of Western- or Soviet-educated Afghanis.

The same ethnocentrism is shown in the present gag in the reference to the time “before the Afghan conflict.” The author seems to think there was no fighting in Afghanistan until NATO showed up. For an Afghanistan without land mines, you would probably have to go back to 1973—almost before feminism became well known in the West, let alone Afghanistan.

No doubt, if and when Afghanistan becomes a much safer country, women will indeed walk closer to their husbands.

But I hardly think this is the most important breakthrough Afghanis could look forward to.