But this crucial episode of U.S.-Afghan history has been erased from national consciousness, pricked only by the odd remember-when news story. Of course, these historic U.S. efforts in Helmand Province -- the Taliban-spawning, opium region into which 4,000 U.S. Marines "surged" this summer -- have themselves been erased from Afghanistan, which may explain the amnesia.
Still, for nation-building utopians such as Gen. McChrystal, those from Left to Right who see different peoples and cultures as interchangeable markers on a game board, reality never tempers the fanaticism. A blind faith empowers believers both to see their utopian visions and to block out the reasons they can never materialize -- in this case, the specifically Islamic reasons (Sharia) Afghanistan can neither serve nor fulfill Western ends.
A similar blindness afflicted the Soviets in the USSR's war on Afghan "insurgents." Christopher Andrew, citing KGB archives smuggled out of the USSR by Vasili Mitrokhin in "The World Was Going Our Way," writes: "Islam became the unifying bond of opposition to the (Afghan Communist Party) and its Soviet backers. Afghan resistance to the regime was thus transformed into a jihad in defense of Islam whose significance was grossly underestimated by the KGB. None of the reports noted by Mitrokhin even mention the threat of jihad..." -- a point I have made about the McChrystal assessment, among all too many other U.S. policy documents.
Once again, here lies the fatal flaw in our strategy. Like the doomed Soviets, the United States and its Western allies ignore the threat of jihad, a threat now on a global level unimagined in 1979 when Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul. "We miniaturize the challenge," writes Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review Online. "Thus, the war is said only to be in Afghanistan. The 'challenge' is framed as isolating a relative handful (of extremists) rather than confronting the fact that tens of millions of Muslims despise the West." And even worse, the fact that tens of millions of Muslims work to assuage their feelings by following and imposing Islamic law across the West.
In other word, nation-building in the Islamic world is a distraction from nation-saving in the Western one.