Motus Mentis

There’s a good deal of disagreement out there about whether we should be getting out of Afghanistan. The prospects are bad either way.

A while back, after I’d finally emerged from the herd-minded and thoughtless liberalism of my youth, I became sympathetic to neoconservative optimism about remaking the world in America’s image. I imagined right along with the neocons that the blessings of our modern Western civilization were desired by all people everywhere, and that the scaffolding upon which America was erected was universally adaptable.

Well, having devoted much of the last ten years to reading history, attending carefully to the national debate, and studying Islam, my views have, as they say, ‘evolved’, and I’d no longer describe myself as anything resembling a neocon. In particular, I’m thoroughly convinced that our nation-building projects in tribal Muslim snake-pits are a fool’s errand, however worthy our motive — and that to waste ourselves in such noble folly is a luxury we no longer can afford, if indeed we ever could. As Mark Steyn reminds us, we no longer prosecute wars with the aim of “winning” — and our foreign policy, like our immigration policy, has twisted itself into a bizarre syndrome combining guilty self-abnegation with limitless global commitment. (Indeed, Anglo-European civilization as a whole — the extraordinary creative force that brought into existence the modern world, and that is still essential for its maintenance — seems nowadays like a new member of AA, sheepishly “making amends”, far less concerned about advancing its native people’s interests than about atoning for them.)

We simply can’t carry on like this any more.

John Derbyshire summed up well enough in his weekly podcast on Friday:

In the beginning, Afghanistan was a punitive expedition ”” fully justified, since the government of the country had offered friendly hospitality to a group that planned the 9/11 attacks on us. With 10,000 troops we took down the government, chased them into the back country, killed a lot of them and broke their stuff. Mission accomplished. If we had left at that point the Taliban would soon have come back, but with a new attitude to harboring American enemies. Or if not, another six month campaign, another ten thousand guys, lather, rinse, repeat until they got the message.

Instead we got those ten years, those half trillion dollars, those sixteen hundred lives. What a stupid waste.

Admittedly, some knowledgeable parties say that we’ve been making “real progress”, and I don’t doubt that in many ways we have. But our progress in Afghanistan is the sort of progress you might make bailing seawater out of a hole you’ve dug at the beach. Unless we want to work that God-forsaken hole forever, at ruinous expense, we need to go.

But what about our “sunk costs”? Given that we’ve invested so deeply in this mission, and that so many have sacrificed so much — how can we not “stay the course”?

Rather than answer that question myself, I’ll leave you with a little story from Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson:

A Transcaucasian Kurd (a nomadic Moslem living in Kurdistan) once set foot out of his village to do some business in a neighboring town. On the way, he noticed in the marketplace a fruiterer’s shop displaying handsomely arranged fruit, among which was one “fruit”, the color and form of which particularly took the Kurd’s fancy. Although he had almost no money with him, upon inquiring about the price of the beautiful “fruit”, he found it was not at all expensive, and so he was able, with his last two cents, to buy a whole pound.

Later in the day, having concluded his business in the nearby town, and on his way home by foot at sunset, he sat down by the side of the road and took from his provision bag some bread and the attractive “fruit” and began to eat. But — horror of horrors — very soon everything inside of him began to burn. But in spite of this he kept eating.

In time, there came along the same road a fellow villager who, seeing that the face of the Kurd was aflame, that his eyes were streaming with tears, and that in spite of this he continued to eat what were in reality red pepper pods, the villager said to him: “What are you doing, you Jericho jackass? You’ll be burnt alive! Stop eating that extraordinary product, so unaccustomed for your nature.”

But the Kurd replied: “No, for nothing on Earth will I stop. Did I not pay my last two cents for them? Even if my soul departs from my body I shall still go on eating!”

Whereupon the resolute Kurd ”” it must of course be assumed that he was such ”” did not stop but continued eating his red pepper pods.