Peace Later!

Here in Tunis, the war in Libya is ever-present, in the rumored 100,000 Libyans temporarily relocated to the city. You can’t drive for ten minutes without spotting Libyan license plates. The five-star beach hotels, like the Barcelo Carthage that I stayed at, and the El Mouradi, are filled with wealthy Libyan families. This has been a boon at a time when tourism to Tunis has crashed due to lingering fears of unrest—and with hotel rooms running just $100 or so, its a boon to the Libyans as well. Some are rich indeed; I heard of a young man living for two months at the Sheraton, which is not discounting much. “Half my friends from Tripoli are living in Tunis now,” 19-year-old Shadda told me from Benghazi. Of course, there are those too poor to leave, those engaged in underground activities against Qaddafi, and also substantial numbers of Qaddafi loyalists.

When I met the late Kandahar Mayor Ghulam Hamidi in December 2010, he struck me as the sort of quietly decent, competent civil servant that are so woefully scarce in Afghanistan. A white-haired, bespectacled man who looked like the accountant he was, he spoke fluent, rapidfire English like the American citizen he also was. His daughter, Rangina—a fiery, charismatic University of Virginia graduate who runs a women’s embroidery cooperative in Kandahar—was terribly worried about the danger he faced, telling me that the Taliban already controlled the city. She explained that he would answer his own phone, because the two deputy mayors had been killed and he couldn’t find anyone who wanted the job.

I’m frankly tired of writing about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. One of the reasons, in fact, that I’m tired of writing about Afghanistan is that it so often involves writing about horrible people and how the US has empowered them. So AWK’s slaying on July 12th is interesting to me more for the chance it offers to discuss a fatal error in American strategy, one that goes far beyond the Afghan war.

What’s important for the US and Afghanistan going forward is the trope of destabilization that has occurred in a lot of discussion, both professional and popular, of the slaying of Kandahar’s Al Capone. We hear that with the elimination of one powerbroker, Kandahar will be less stable. This theme also occurs in analysis of the revolutions of the Arab Spring. If Saleh or Assad falls, the pundits wonder, will Yemen or Syria be less stable?

“Back in civilization!” my companion in Libya exclaimed as we drove from Libya into Egypt in late April. “I’ll be able to get my e-mail and my newspapers!”

I thought we had just left civilization.

Two weeks in Benghazi and three days in other towns in eastern Libya had shown me civilization as I wished it were: public civility, private effort, generosity, responsibility, egalitarianism. And part of the magic of Libya al Hurra (“Libya the Free,” as the eastern part of the country is known) was the absence of the Internet.

You could still check your e-mail—very slowly on laptop at my hotel, the Uzu, where the link was too weak for my BlackBerry to get e-mail, or quickly on BlackBerry at the Al Jazeera Net Café, which, on the other hand, had a terribly slow connection for laptops.

In the two weeks since I returned from Free Libya, I’ve been amazed at how many people I talk with repeat the same misapprehensions about the country, the revolution, and what the US is doing there. I hear that Libya is “tribal,” that what is going on is a “civil war,” that we “don’t know anything” about the people currently governing Eastern Libya. The average person I have talked with thinks that the free Libyan forces are either a bunch of al-Qaeda, or Islamists at best, or savage tribesmen. And everyone believes we are involved in training and supplying the free Libyan forces, with a fair number of people somehow having got the notion that we have special forces working on the ground.

So, a quick clarification is in order.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE SMART, Afghanistan — There are improvements here in Qalat, capital of Zabul, one of Afghanistan’s poorest and most Taliban-friendly provinces. There are 37 schools open now as opposed to 28 a year ago, 10 college-educated judges, new public works projects to improve sanitation and the quality of life. The provincial government has even paved one road in Qalat. But despite the competence and commitment of the 111-strong American provincial reconstruction team (PRT), the deeper you look, the more fragile the successes appear.

This province of 300,000 has judges, yes, but no criminal defense attorneys. “I don’t know that any law school graduates want to come to Zabul,” explained PRT commander Andy Veres. Nearing the end of his second nine-month stint, Veres, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, quickly admits that almost all Zabulis are illiterate, and it’s difficult to persuade educated outsiders to move here.

A nation’s treatment of its past reveals its psyche

The famous Bost Arch of the Bost Citadel, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Photos by the author.

How a country treats its cultural heritage is a proxy for how it feels about itself—much as how a person treats his parents is a proxy for how he feels about himself. Or so is my conclusion after decades of seeking out and writing about archeological sites in the developing world. National wealth plays a part, of course, but it isn’t the whole story. Tenderness to the past is related to pride in one’s current day country, and also to self-respect.

These reflections come from my recent travels, to some of Afghanistan’s most famous but least-visited ruins, around Lashkar Gah, the capital of embattled Helmand Province, and to Greek and Roman ruins in Libya, with a few days in Cairo in between.

Photo of Benghazi demonstrators by 15-year-old Tawfiq ben Saud, part of the youthful Media Center crowd.

BENGHAZI, Libya — A around 8:45 this morning Senator John McCain, accompanied by his adviser Christian Brose and Ambassador Chris Stevens, the US envoy here, made an unannounced visit to the makama, or courthouse, where the Revolution of February 17th got its start. The senator was en route to a meeting with the 31-member Transitional Council that’s governing Free Libya. The Arabic-speaking Ambassador Stevens has been in Benghazi now for several weeks, getting to know the people who made this improbable revolution, and McCain is on a 24-hour visit.

A wall of the courthouse in Benghazi has become a shrine to martyrs and missing
in the “Revolution of the 17th of February,” as the uprising is known in Libya.
Photos by Ann Marlowe

BENGHAZI, Libya — The Libyans watching Al Jazeera at the Tibesty Hotel at 4 p.m. on Wednesday started to cheer as the Qatari representative to the Doha group on Libya announced approval of weaponry for the forces here. Later in the evening, at a press conference, National Transitional Council spokesman Abdul Hafez Ghoga reiterated that the council had asked for weapons because Qaddafi had violated his cease-fire and continued to violate UN resolutions 1970 and 1973 by attacking civilians in Misurata and the Western Mountains. Asked how close the free Libyan forces were to obtaining arms, he said, “We have made a request to the friendly nations and are in the final stages of negotiations and their responses to that are positive.”

The voice of the bien-pensant class can’t believe Arabs want freedom

Whose side is the New York Times on?

“Syria’s Chaos A Test for U.S.,” reads a front-page headline from yesterday’s Times (online, the headline became, “Unrest in Syria and Jordan Poses New Test for U.S. Policy”). The headline’s implication is that Syria used to be a well run state and that now it is afflicted by “chaos.” It’s the equivalent of a headline the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall stating, “East Germany’s Chaos a Test for U.S.”

At a Washington think tank panel discussion, I expect at least mild intellectual stimulation, but not time travel. At the March 16th lunchtime discussion on “Afghanistan: Regional Stability and Global Security” at the Institute for the Study of War, I was transported back to 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan seemed to be a manageable problem, and President Karzai a tolerable leader. Or perhaps the panelists had awakened from a deep sleep induced that year. The sense of fantasy that hung over the proceedings was frightening, given that two of the three panelists had recently advised General Petraeus on the Afghan war.

Looking for the Arab or Afghan George Washington is a Category Mistake

Bret Stephens recently asked, in the Wall Street Journal, “Is there an Arab George Washington?” Looking at what might happen in Egypt in the future, if today’s democrats become tomorrow’s autocrats, he argued, “America’s revolutionary history was exceptional because we had a Washington while the French had a Robespierre and the Egyptians had a Nasser.”

Watch this video and then say you support negotiating with the Taliban

If Steve Coll’s recent piece in the New Yorker is correct, bilateral talks between the Obama administration and Taliban leaders began late last year. Last week, members of an Afghan “High Council for Peace” announced they would like to send a delegation to Guantánamo Bay seeking the release of some big fish detained there.

The idea of talking to the Taliban has been floated for years — ever since we began losing the war, in fact — and it’s an even worse idea now than it was when things looked better.

In memory of Captain Dan Whitten and First Lieutenant Chris Goeke, KIA in Afghanistan

What the military calls IEDs (improvised explosive devices), but which could also be termed mines, are notoriously the leading killer of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our tactics have evolved to combat this threat, with American troops traveling in heavy, and increasingly well-protected, armored vehicles that have limited mobility in Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. This past fall, I spoke with a group of young officers of the 82nd Airborne who suggested a different approach, more mobile and more risky. Since insurgents often use remote-control mines to target convoy vehicles carrying commanders, it is worth listening to these officers’ views.

“Chris Goeke was an American warrior and he died as we all want to die, fighting for his country and his soldiers.”