How Feminists Lost The Afghan War
Is this how you win a war?
The Washington Post recently ran a series of stories centered around previously classified government interviews and briefings concerning the Afghanistan war. The so-called "Afghanistan Papers" revealed, to no one's surprise, that the government was deceiving the American public about the dismal progress of the war from its very inception. The “Afghanistan Papers” revealed something else, however, much less remarked upon but equally damning, and that has made victory in Afghanistan all but impossible. They showed the extent to which our military and foreign policy establishment has subordinated its war-fighting ethos to the dictates of feminism.
To fully understand what has happened to the greatest military the world had ever known, it's helpful to step back to more than a decade ago when Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson became a nonfiction bestseller. The memoir depicted the aftermath of Mortenson's failed attempt to scale K2 in the Himalayas, and his rescue by local Pakistani villagers. The villagers' kindness and poverty convinced him to start a nonprofit, the Central Asia Institute, intended to build schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Published against the backdrop of the struggling missions in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006, Mortenson's book was portrayed as the antidote to the floundering regime change strategy of the Bush administration. The original subtitle was literally "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time".
Three Cups of Tea exemplified a particular genre of feminist humanitarianism that assumed good intentions equaled sound policy. It posited that Afghanistan could rid itself of terrorism and become a functioning democracy, if only young girls in Afghanistan were taught to read. If only women in India were given small business loans. If only black girls in the Congo were taught to code. If only the U.S. would buy into this or that fashionable cause, complex problems would solve themselves.
These kids have never even heard of Harry Potter.
More schools and books, less bombs and guns. Naturally, the idea appealed to the sensibilities of Northeast liberals, and must have sounded convincing to the NPR demographic. The New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, forever fascinated by the plight of young girls from the third world, repeatedly lauded Mortenson's mission, even hosting him at his own home for lunch and reading Three Cups of Tea to his daughter.
Three Cups of Tea perfectly captured the self-flattering prejudices of feminists. Instead of more armored vehicles and drones, the U.S. could just invest in girls education and everything would be okay. But the U.S. government won't make these investments because of the patriarchy, Republicans, colonialism, Haliburton, the Religious Right, etc. (Or will it? More on that later).
Essentially, Three Cups of Tea was an affluent white woman's idea of how you win the war on terror.
In fact, it was women who first started pouring Three Cups of Tea-ism into the ears of prominent men at the top echelons of the military. These daughters of Eve were the driving force behind Mortenson's ideas garnering influence in the U.S. foreign policy establishment and Mortenson becoming an unofficial advisor to the Pentagon. Back in 2007, the wife of Colonel Christopher D. Kolenda sent him a copy of Three Cups of Tea while he was commanding troops in Afghanistan. Kolenda then reached out to Mortenson directly, and by 2009, Mortenson was attending high level meetings in Kabul with Kolenda, Afghan locals, General Stanley McChrystal and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Mortenson personally advised on counterinsurgency and winning hearts and minds.
General David Petraeus likewise had the book foisted on him by his wife, whom he valued enough as an advisor, if not as a spouse. Like McChrystal, Petraeus took it to heart, and incorporated it into his counterinsurgency strategy. In 2009, Mortenson would visit about two dozen military outposts in Afghanistan to provide a lecture to troops about his deep insights into nation building.
Nor were the rank and file immune. "Many deploying soldiers had the book pressed on them by wives or girlfriends" the LA Times reported. Mortenson's book became required reading for senior military brass as he became a type of guru to the military's counterinsurgency strategy.
What I have thus far failed to mention was that Mortenson was a confidence man. He concocted much of his rescue tale, failed to build many of the schools he promised, and ran into legal trouble after he bilked his foundation to promote his book and fund his travel. He was a perfect fit for the Pentagon.
Three Cups of Tea-ism did make an impact on Afghanistan, however. Last month, as mentioned above, the Washington Post published the trove of so-called "Afghanistan Papers." These were previously classified reports and interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The Inspector General interviewed subjects from all aspects of the combat and reconstruction effort, such as State Department personnel, military members and even Afghan officials.
It's difficult to summarize the breadth of what the Afghanistan Papers reveal, from systematic manipulation of information about the war's progress by the Pentagon ("'Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,' according to an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser") to the failed effort to prop up Afghan security forces, whom U.S. soldiers described as incompetent, drug addicts, or members of the Taliban, at least those that didn't desert. Efforts ostensibly directed toward building democratic institutions produced only corruption and the entrenchment of a kleptocracy as the U.S. poured billions into Afghanistan indiscriminately. It’s immediately apparent why these documents were kept classified.
The situation was perhaps best described by President Trump's former National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn:
So they [Generals and Commanders] all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission. Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan, or Iraq or any place, and say, ‘You know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission.’ So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up, after a great right seat ride. They do their mission analysis once they are on the ground and then they come back and go, ‘Man this is really bad,' but the last battalion, regiment or BCT, accomplished their mission. They have all of these wonderful stats about what they did. I am telling you that this is true from 2002 until today.
From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job. Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?
. . .
So when you look at Afghanistan, every single measurable activity is failing. If [General John Campbell were to sit here today and say [that is not true because,] we have built more schools, we have more cars on the road . . . really?
No one in the military leadership had the courage to say that the emperor had no clothes, especially in the field, when it mattered. As a result, after nearly a trillion dollars, thousands of U.S. casualties, and tens of thousands of Afghan casualties, the Taliban is as strong as it was when the war began. We may be losing the war, but the real question is, are girls learning to read?
Notably, Flynn pinpointed "schools" as a typically heard propaganda item, as well as a stand-in for actual progress. If one reads the “Afghanistan Papers” closely, Mortenson's fingerprints abound. According to one military adviser interviewed in 2017:
“We were building schools next to empty schools, and it just didn’t make sense. When I did interviews with local Afghans, they told me that they didn't really want schools. They said they wanted their kids out herding goats and they thought the school didn't serve any purpose.”
Given the option, kids love farm animals, and despise teachers and books. This would be a hard sell even in the U.S. Another Afghan official reported a similar issue:
"I and others argued that we needed to figure out what Afghanistan needed. And given the state of Afghanistan, it basically was dependent on subsistence agriculture. Agriculture needs water and land if you want to build it up. But no one wanted to invest in water management - they told me so. So we ended up with a huge amount of investment in education . . . but we didn't know how the economy would be able to absorb the graduates from that system.
So the issue was that the balance of investments was not thought through. Investment was much more focused on the training of girls and minority rights and things. . . . The issue was one of grafting. (Rather than starting from zero.) Because a culture and an economy takes time to evolve."
Of course, Afghans couldn't be left to be Afghans. They needed to be Americans. With girls who code, gay pride parades, and shopping malls.
According to John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist embedded with the Marines in 2011, these pet projects became ends in themselves, with no clear correlation to a winning strategy:
There were a number of discussions and there was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you towards your goal? What is the meaning of the number of students who are in some way, shape or form taking an English language class? What is the meaning of the laudable number of girls in schools? How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?
Our foreign policy establishment and military leadership turned the Afghan war into a deluded humanitarian experiment. In the softy and fuzzy egalitarian fantasies of men like Mortenson and the military leadership he influenced, Afghanistan was a backward, tribalistic, and violent country not because of the nature of the Afghan people, but simply because of unlucky circumstances. The Afghans could be just like us if only the Taliban would let these young girls learn to read! All they need, therefore, is freedom and opportunity and the Afghans would embrace Americanism.
Only a leadership blinded by ideology would gamble the success of the reconstruction on a strategy that required imposing female empowerment on a patriarchal, Muslim society.
Admittedly, as this article has demonstrated, girls can do amazing things. Shrewish women in the West have effectively henpecked their husbands and turned our military into social workers. If that is the plan for victory in Afghanistan, i.e., we must wait for these girls to slowly sow the seeds of feminism in Afghanistan and undermine their war-fighting capacity from within, I’m afraid that it will take centuries for their decadence to catch up to ours.
The root of this is much more mundane. There is a prevailing political belief on the left and right that insists America is a "nation of immigrants", and thus assumes that the world is full of "Americans-in-waiting." Once we give everyone in the world a right to be an American, it follows that America's brand of liberal democracy becomes the birthright of every forlorn child in every poor village in the third world. These benign sounding platitudes resulted in decades of death, waste, and failure in the Middle East. In one sense, there is an aspect of Western chauvinism in the mere act of imposing the West's style of democratic self rule on an Islamic, tribal society. But exporting democracy starts from the egalitarian premise that all cultures are equal. It springs from a deluded conceit that American democracy works not because of the culture, history, and habits of its people, but simply because the West was lucky enough to happen upon the idea of self-government and individual rights. Under this view, liberal democracy is for everyone and the people interchangeable.
All people have equal dignity, but all people are not equal. We have an American Dream, and the Afghans should have been left to their Afghan Dream: of goats, child marriage, Islam, and beautiful rugs.
When you plan immigration law along these lines, you get some terror attacks here, and some honor killings there, until entire areas become no-go zones, as in Europe. When you plan foreign policy along these lines, you get what has happened in Afghanistan. Good intentions do not win wars.
Am I saying that the U.S. failed in Afghanistan because its military leadership read a crappy book? No. But only a military leadership that was already thoroughly compromised by false ideologies - feminism, political correctness, egalitarianism - would place any value whatsoever on Mortenson's "books over bombs" surmises.
Ultimately, Mortenson's con game caught up with him, and he was forced to pay restitution to his foundation after an investigation by the Montana Attorney General. The question remains: when will the Pentagon's confidence men pay restitution for Afghanistan?
