Our ignorance in Afghanistan
Tom Streithorst
The beginning of wisdom: the illusion of control?
So there I was, in the graveyard at dusk, the little girl screaming. I couldn’t deny it, it was all my fault. Umm? Maybe I should start again.
December’s issue of Prospect features a perceptive article by Alex de Waal on the west’s failures in Afghanistan. De Waal suggests that western officials, comfortable with academic concepts like “nation building,” “civil society” and “rule of law” have a hard time understanding the nitty gritty of politics in places like Afghanistan. I think he is right. We in the west are so much richer—often so much better educated than the Afghans we meet—that it sometimes blinds us to our ignorance about their lives and country.
Back in the very early days of the “war on terror,” back when the Taliban still ruled Kabul, back when it was still all good fun, I was based in a compound deep in rural Afghanistan, near the Northern Alliance foreign ministry in Takhar province. We westerners, well trained as to the proper disposal of garbage, would always neatly put our trash in the little pails we had brought with us from Tajikistan.
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