The Afghanistan Plan: My Version

By
Dr. Mahmoud S. Audi

The President will soon announce his plan for Afghanistan. He will talk about his objectives, in the landlocked country, and his strategies to achieve these objectives. The pronouncement will be limited by his desire to please his supporters, and to minimize the impact of the objections of his political adversaries. Unfortunately, most of the discussion will be heated. The demagogues of the media will have a free field day, the pundits will spew their wisdom for the world to ponder, and the disinterested will also contribute to the noise.

So I write about Afghanistan: about what should be our objectives, and how we could achieve them. My knowledge of the culture and the political history of that part of the world have influenced what I have written.

The following should be our objectives.

• The primary goals of our focused and renewed attention to Afghanistan must be the security of our land and the security and safety of our people, wherever they might be.
• The creation, with contributions from friends and allies, of conditions in Afghanistan that will not permit the reestablishment of training camps for individuals and groups who think that violence is the only means of solving their problems with us.
• The establishment of conditions, in the urban and rural communities of Afghanistan, to help them develop their economic infrastructure, such as water supplies and sewage systems, roads and electricity, agriculture and industry, as investment in their future.

Our security depends on our vigilance and our strength; it also depends of the weakness and understanding of our enemies. In my opinion, our security depends on the ability of each of us to stand guard of his or her community against those who want to keep us busy worrying about the next attack on us and on our land. It also depends of our confidence to offer our friendship to those who may think that we are their enemy; let them know that we mean no harm to their peaceful living.
The creation of the humongous Department of Home Land Security has not been the answer. The security needs of the different communities are more likely to be different than the same. But there is a basic need to all of them: each knows best itself and how to protect itself or what it needs to protect itself from human and natural disasters.
The structure of the different departments and agencies of the government before they became components of the Home Land Security Department was more efficient than the current huge multilayered bureaucracy. Each local community needs to protect itself against manmade and natural menaces. They all need, always current, communication systems for simultaneous and instantaneous exchange of intelligence and other information. They need unified codes of communications and unified training in aspect that are relevant to their communities. Moreover, those communities which are at risk more than others, but they do not have the means to protect themselves should be helped. The independent revitalization of all the security departments and agencies along with the installment of qualified leaders and other qualified personnel would produce a more efficient and less expensive structure than the recently established Homeland Security Department.
Our security also depends on those who think that the only way to treat their problems with us is violence. That attitude, rightly or wrongly, is reinforced by what some of us do and what that some say. For examples, there are crowds among us who incessantly say that we decide and the rest of the world must listen. It may be true that the world listens when we speak, but we should also know that the world might react, to what we do or say, in ways that might be harmful to us.
We can reduce the threat of our declared enemies by behaving in a more responsible and mature ways, and not necessarily by killing them. Giving them hope and respecting who they are religiously and culturally might help. But saying to the peoples of the world that they are either with us or against us, and they are with our God or against our God does not help. We should have the inclination to assume and act on the assumption that the world is our friend, although we know that parts of the world are closer to us religiously and culturally than the other parts. That fact should not matter. Humanity is the more encompassing scope than the other yard-sticks.

Yet in every religion, every culture, every ethnicity, every country, every city and every tribe, there is a small group who do not follow the rules of the law. Instead, they use the tools of democracy, such as the freedom of speech, to agitate the people to highjack their governments and convert it to a tool to achieve their selfish and unpatriotic political goals. In none democratic countries, such small groups use arms and other suppressive measures to highjack their governments and change them into tools for achieving power. Let us not judge peoples by what the small groups do.

There are many things that we could do to woo people to our side. But the most potent among them is the empowerment of the United Nations. There are many conflicts in the world, and as its acknowledged leader we must understand them, and understand the opposing points of views. We must not take sides. We must allow the community of nations to work to resolve these conflicts and we must support this community by endorsing and supporting its resolutions. We must regularly remind ourselves that we alone were the main driver to create the United Nations, with the main purpose to resolve peacefully international conflicts. In my opinion, our neutral stand between conflicting parties will reduce the number of our enemies considerably. No other foreign policy will pacify our enemies than the stance of neutralism in our foreign policy.

The second objective is the security of Afghanistan. Simply, the Afghanis must be responsible for the security of the Afghanis and their country. To do this they need help. Help would come if the Afghanis show inclinations to accept modern understanding of their ethnicities, their culture, and their religion. They must learn how to take what improves their lives from the West, and use it as their own. They should also be willing to teach, from what is in their own culture, the West and the rest of the world about what enhances the life and the dignity of the individual. They must also understand that their destiny is peace among themselves, and among their neighbors, and they should learn from us and from others, by example, how to be tolerant.
The creation and adaptation of that paradigm will not and must not be our job in that remote and rocky country. From the security point of view, our job is to train the Afghanis to secure their communities and their borders, and to prevent the use of their land to house and train those who want to harm us. For that object we do not need more American troops in Afghanistan, on the contrary, we need less American troops. We will need 50,000 of American military personnel who in Afghanistan will be focusing on defending themselves, and training the Afghani military and police forces.

For that job, we should give the government of Afghanistan one year to recruit enough police and military personnel. Then we will train them, arm them, and discover and promote leaders among them. Then our military forces will withdraw for good from that troubled land.

Also, the government of Afghanistan will be encouraged to develop its own flavored democracy. We will educate them about democracy and freedom and how freedom strengthens the creativity and the productivity of the people, and how democracy makes people believe that they own their country which makes them more willing to bear arms to defend it. We will not indoctrinate them into our form of democracy and our brand of freedom.

We will tell the government of Afghanistan about the dire consequences of allowing the military training and indoctrination of would be our attackers.

The third objective of the Afghan plan rises from our humanity and our desire to help them rise from the ashes of war and destruction, and live in a peaceful land. That requires the creation of developmental programs to help the people in securing their lives and lively-hood. If the process is successful we could eliminate the killing of people by our bullets, and reduce the exposure of our personnel to being killed by angry bullets. Reaching this end, however, requires, for example, helping the Afghani farmers develop their farms by introducing improved agricultural technologies and knowhow, and introducing new agricultural products. Beyond that, we need to help them develop markets for their agricultural products.

The same approach would be applied toward creating businesses, we should support locally created businesses, and encourage the development of needed projects. We could educate them in such fields by teaching them the ways of the industrial West.
Schools and training programs of all kinds including technical and arts schools should be developed. Students should learn the ways of agriculture, industry, and technology along with culture and religion. They should also learn how to respect the religions and cultures of other peoples.

Mahmoud S. Audi, Ph.D.
Retired professor
22 South Springfield Rd / C-2
Clifton Heights, PA 19018
Email address: draudiphd@yahoo.com
Home phone: 610 626 7494
Cell phone: 484 574 1937