Get Used to It

By our thinking in a democracy majority rules well (in Iraq, Shiites with their mystical interpretation of the Qur’an) in a country formally run by a minority (Sunnis with an opposite, literal interpretation of the Qur’an), as we let that angry majority vent and rule in Iraq, we not only lost that military “incursion” but we set the stage for ISIS. Kurds rapidly withdrew to their northern enclaves, leaving Sunnis and Shiite to battle it out in the south. As the angry Shiite majority set about stripping their former rulers (those Sunnis) of power, they managed to turn the now-disenfranchised Sunni minority into suicide bombers and snipers. As the farmlands occupied by Sunni farmers turned into global-warming-induced dust, Sunni anger rose further. In Iraq. In Syria where a tiny Shiite minority rules a huge Sunni constituency.

The ultra-violent, intolerant, genocidal Islamic State (Sunni extremists) slipped into the mix, inhaled that anger, and began one of the most brutally violent assaults in history. Seven public beheadings, journalists from Westerners to Japanese, plus untold mass executions of local citizens (especially Shiites and anyone taking arms to oppose them) beyond any measure, are a constant and brutal message to the rest of the world. IS controls roughly 20,000 square miles of Iraqi and Syrian territory (twice the size of Massachusetts). Western-led airstrikes have had limited success in countering this despicable military force, and the ability to put sufficient boots on the ground from regional nations has failed rather dramatically. Only fierce local fighters, often Kurds, have provided consistent positive results.

In Afghanistan, a rugged and unforgiving land forged in tribal divisiveness that managed to bring down every foreign conqueror – the leaded straw that broke the back of the Soviet Union – we imposed a democracy on an illiterate constituency with no experience in any form of self-rule. Those who fomented a “constitution” and a subsequent series of elections did what recently empowered elitist leaders ruling an ignorant electorate often do; they empowered and enriched themselves (and their cronies) at the expense of their charges. Afghanistan became one of the two or three most corrupt nations on earth, a position it still enjoys to this very day. The leaders never really controlled much more than the capital city of Kabul and its environs.

Local respect for the Kabul regime is minimal. From War Lords to the Taliban, the rest of the nation pretty much ignores their elected leadership except on those rare occasions when Kabul brings its military into distant regions and forces momentary allegiance until the forces depart.

We dream of local involvement in wars against extremism. Iraqi forces under fire have so underperformed, lacking leadership and supplies, suffering from corruption and lack of true commitment from their military, that they appear to be useless in the fight against ISIS. Stepping up to Shiite Iran for help against the ISIS Sunni extremists is an exceptionally uncomfortable alternative. Both Sunni-led Jordan and Saudi Arabia are so fearful of provoking internal dissent or external attack that they have only been willing to contribute minimal support to the anti-IS effort.

Turkey, noting that IS is attacking Turkey’s own internal dissidents, the Kurds, has so far been completely unwilling to place its well-trained troops into this mix. Topple the Shiite Assad regime in Syria and use those empowered rebels to repel IS? This assumes that this can be done quickly (it’s been years, and nothing has changed), that the rebels can be trained fast enough and are actually opposed to IS.

So what does this mean? Did we lose? Are we going to have to commit massive US forces to battle the Islamic State? Local communities find little value in trusting in political structures imposed on them by US-selected leaders who follow American-designated policies. They wonder what arrogance leads Western leaders to believe that their political ideologies are the best solutions for their well-established traditions.

And it’s not as if the Islamic State can triumph and sustain control over its desired constituency with powerful regional or grassroots support. Remember, despite the much-publicized beheadings, the mass of victims of their murderous brutality are mostly other Muslims. ISIS’ tactics are catching up with them. “Their threat to kill a captive Jordanian air force pilot (and their failure to produce evidence that he was alive) did not achieve the intended effect of undermining support for Jordan’s role in the international coalition bombing the Islamic State. Now even skeptical Jordanians have begun rallying around their government’s position and denouncing the extremists.” New York Times, February 1^st.

The February 3^rd video of IS burning that pilot alive has infuriated Jordan, which claims it would retaliate by hanging its militant captives immediately. The first such hanging? The woman almost-bomber that IS tried to trade for in the first place. Another terrorist was hanged immediately thereafter. Both had been tried and sentenced to death but benefited from a moratorium on executions… that just ended. An eye for an eye? It’s getting uglier, and could this retaliatory hanging backfire against the Jordanian monarchy? But it’s not the lure of Western culture and political systems that will motivate the change. The support will erode because of the inherent cruelty of these extremists. The general perception in the Middle East is that the American-led efforts in the region have been an abysmal failure. The Islamic State is eroding its own cause, perhaps faster than we might have hoped.

It does seem that aside from eating some humble pie in the litany of our military and diplomatic failures in these two theaters of war, we are going to have to learn to live with systems we neither trust nor understand… but systems that locals find appropriate and compelling for their own needs. Take, for example, the judicial system in mega-corrupt Afghanistan… and even in neighboring Pakistan, a nation also infected with long-standing corruption.

“Frustrated by Western-inspired legal codes and a government court system widely seen as corrupt, many Afghans think that the militants’ quick and tradition-rooted rulings are their best hope for justice. In the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Chaman, havens for exiled Taliban figures, local residents describe long lines of Afghans waiting to see judges.

“‘You won’t find the same number of people in the Afghan courts as you do in the Taliban courts,’ said Hajji Khudai Noor, a Kandahar resident who recently settled a land dispute through the Taliban in Quetta. ‘There are hundreds of people waiting for justice there.’

“Western officials have long considered a fair and respected justice system to be central to quelling the insurgency, in an acknowledgment that the Taliban’s appeal had long been rooted in its use of traditional rural justice codes. But after the official end of the international military mission and more than a billion dollars in development aid to build up Afghanistan’s court system, it stands largely discredited and ridiculed by everyday Afghans. A common refrain, even in Kabul, is that to settle a dispute over your farm in court, you must first sell your chickens, your cows and your wife.

“Countless training programs funded by Western allies for lawyers and judges have become bywords for waste. Laws suited to Western-style democracies have populated the books… ‘The problem is we spent money on what we wanted to see, as opposed to thinking about what Afghans wanted to see,’ said Noah Coburn, a political anthropologist at Bennington College.

“Recognizing that informal tribal law would remain the choice for most Afghans, the United States in recent years began spending money to support local councils and connect them more publicly with the government. But a review by an independent monitoring organization found that instead of bolstering the government’s image, the effort mostly reinforced the primacy of the informal courts — of which Taliban justice could be considered a radical extension, wielding a mix of Pashtun tradition and extreme interpretations of Islamic law.

“President Ashraf Ghani made cleaning up the judiciary one of his first pledges in office, but it will be a daunting task. According to a poll released by Gallup in October, just 25 percent of Afghans expressed confidence in the nation’s judicial system.” New York Times, January 31^st.

In the view of the Islamic State, their extreme Sunni philosophy is, in their view, the only true faith, Sharia is the only acceptable legal system, and they are mandated by God to impose these views and systems on as many people as they can conquer. Nigeria’s Boko Haram, indeed its very name, constitutes a complete rejection of Western teachings at every level. Those are the extreme views, but even among those just living their lives, there is no particular love lost on Western systems of government.

From the days of Christian missionaries converting primitive peoples to wars in which we impose constitutional democracies where there is no such tradition in these distant lands, we too are infected with our own brand of hubris. Extreme regimes are unsustainable, and they probably won’t fall because some Western notion of democracy would succeed. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Not an extreme and brutal repressive government from genocidal intolerants. Not a Western-style democracy. And we are simply going to have to learn to live with folks who just don’t see their world the same way we see ours.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we have a very bad habit of swatting at wasps’ nests and wonder why the wasps are so angry at us for trying to teach them to be (or beat them into being) better wasps.