Post-War Afghan Government

On the radio this morning, I heard, for the millionth time this month, some blowhards talking about the difficulty of setting up a post-war Afghan government. The main message this time was to point out that there are groups in Afghanistan who hate the much-vaunted Northern Alliance even more than they hate the Taliban, and who would support the Taliban in a close fight between them and the Alliance.

In any case, one would like to think that the U.S. government would have learned, by now, that while the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that guy often (usually?) turns out to be my enemy, too, before too long. Witness Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

The obvious solution is to invade and occupy Afghanistan until such a time as its economy, society, and infrastructure has been rebuilt and a stable and peaceful culture can exist there. It worked for Germany and Japan after World War II, and it can work for Afghanistan.

Of course, if we did this, the United States would be criticized from all sides. We'd be imperialists. We'd be subjugating the poor people of Afghanistan to American will. We'd be exporting our poisonous culture all over the place. Et cetera.

However, the United States is already criticized from all sides for being imperialist. We're currently bombing the people of Afghanistan -- and if bombing isn't a tool for subjugating people to your will, I don't know what is -- and our culture has already spread to nearly everywhere in the world except Afghanistan. Better McDonald's than despotic religious lunatics, I say. And if we do not rebuild Afghanistan -- destroyed not by U.S. bombing but by the Soviets and its own civil conflicts -- the Left will say that we're neglecting those poor, starving people. Since we're going to get nailed in the pages of the Guardian no matter what we do -- a perfect solution from the USA, impossible in this imperfect world, would still draw fire from people like Arundhati Roy -- I say that we ignore utterly the Roys of the world and follow a course that instead leads to the best and most secure future for the people of Afghanistan and the USA.

Afghanistan has a culture that has allowed insane fundamentalists to take control. Such a culture cannot, it became clear on 11 September, be allowed to exist any longer. The multiculturalists will have a problem with that statement, but let them. It's impossible to stand by and say that the culture of Osama Bin Laden has a right to continue to exist. By stamping out Bad Ideas, human culture undergoes an evolution of sorts.