After several days of withholding his
identity, the Pentagon has announced that the alleged perpetrator of last week’s
massacre in Afghanistan is a soldier named Robert Bales. We’re told that Bales, an Army staff sergeant
with eleven years’ service, left his base camp without authorization on the
night of March 11th, went into the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, Panjwai, Kandahar
Province, and murdered sixteen civilians in their homes. Another five were reported wounded in the
attack.
Most of the news accounts I’ve read and watched
this week have been concerned with the attack’s potential consequences for U.S.-Afghan
relations and future NATO operations in Afghanistan. Never mind the human rights of the victims; already
they have become abstractions in our foreign policy calculus. To be sure there are diplomatic causes for
concern not least of which was the surreptitious spiriting of Bales first to
Kuwait, then to the United States. The Panjwai massacre may very well be the breaking
point in our relations with Afghanistan.
The Taliban have already broken off negotiations with the Karzai
administration over the incident, further setting back prospects for peace and
the Obama Administration’s objective of withdrawing U.S. combat forces by 2014.
But, back to Robert Bales. News reports state that he had served three
previous deployments, all of them in Iraq.
Assuming that the deployments were at least a year in length, Bales’
time in war zones nearly equals that of America’s involvement in the Second World
War. When you consider that the majority
of our World War II service members never saw anything approaching that much time
in combat, this fact takes on a certain significance. Add to this the knowledge Bales had suffered
a traumatic brain injury in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD, and he becomes an
object example of the human toll of our post-9/11 wars.
None of this excuses his crimes. But I can already see how this is going to play
out in the arena of public opinion. Our political
and military leaders will do their best to minimize the incident as an
aberration. The mainstream media is
already framing Bales’ acts as the tragic-but-inevitable consequence of a
punishing operational tempo and inadequate military medical and mental health services. There will inevitably be more than a few self-proclaimed
“patriots” who will portray Bales as a wronged hero. But I think the incident will quickly fade
from our collective consciousness. In
the coming days and weeks, other news stories will claim our attention. I doubt that the people of Afghanistan will
forget quite as soon.
We cannot simply write off the Panjwai
killings as the deeds of a man pushed past his limits or as something out of
character for us as a people. Even though Bales’ acquaintances say he wasn’t
prejudiced against Muslims, our culture reflected a strong anti-Muslim bias long
before the September 11th attacks.
When you consider our mindless propensity for conflating the words “Muslim”
and “terrorist,” the spate of civilian murders by American troops in
Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few years was probably inevitable. As it is, our faith in our national superiority
causes us to take a dim view of other cultures.
When we are armed and among people we have been conditioned to hold in
contempt, it takes little provocation to produce a tragedy.
Considering the larger implications of
Panjwai, it’s little use at this juncture to speak of our image in the Muslim
world. The United States, along with
Britain and France, squandered its credibility there generations ago. I suspect the most galling thing for people
in the Middle East and in Central Asia is the glaring disconnect between
Western democratic ideals and Western actions.
Americans like to claim they are bringing democracy
to the oppressed. Yes, Afghans were oppressed by the
Taliban. It’s true that the Taliban’s
harboring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda posed a threat both to the region and
the rest of the world. But a decade into
our occupation of Afghanistan, can we really say its people are any better
off? Has anything fundamentally changed to make our conception of democracy a reality in Afghan society? Outside of Kabul, traditional ways
continue as they have for centuries. Pashtun culture is
rooted in local custom and familial ties, rendering the kind of state-building
pushed by the U.S. and its allies ineffective.
(The fate of the 1980s communist regime after the Soviet
withdrawal is a grim example of what might befall Karzai’s after ISAF departs.) Regardless
of whether or not the Taliban ultimately return to power, there are timeless
qualities in Afghan society which militate against exogenous change. Perhaps it’s best that we finally learn the lesson
the Afghans have been trying to teach the West since the “Great Game” of the
nineteenth century and leave them at last to their own affairs.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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