Foreign Policy and Domestic Emotions

Just yesterday there was another bomb blast in Afghanistan, and I heard some general come on NPR to talk about what the implications were for troop withdrawals from the Afghanistan theater.  The President had withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq as a basic promise for after he won the White House, but of course he has found that disengagement with the Taliban is not as easy as he thought it would be.

Every time there is a new piece of guerrilla violence in any country we’ve invaded, it becomes that much harder for the Pentagon to make withdrawal palatable to the public.  We have to withdraw after the enemy has been ‘quiet for a while,’ which could be presented to the public as having won a peace of some sort.

But remember whom we are facing over there: the Taliban.  The Taliban is not a bunch of very bright people; they’re very motivated, cunning people, as military folk tend to be, but not bright.  But they’re also from a society in which machismo plays a big role; a man must show that he’s a man, or he’s nothing.  So the last thing they want is for the Americans to withdraw after they can claim a victory.  So they have to keep hounding our troops with bomb blasts, so that we leave after what is clearly an American defeat.

Well, we don’t want that.  So we have to stay.  We can’t nuke the country; that ship has sailed, hasn’t it?  We bombed Japan, and in the last analysis, that did not work out very well for us.  We did win the war, but our European friends, god love them, looked sorrowfully at us, as if they could not believe we would take such a crude and extreme step.  And we took it for them!  And don’t tell us the Germans wouldn’t have nuked us if they had the capability, right?  And so on, and so on.

Hey, but we have machismo, too.  It’s more subtle machismo, but it’s still the same ... thing.  We just can’t withdraw right after there’s been a bomb blast; that’s too much damn bile to have to swallow.  The last place we got hounded out of was Vietnam, and we swore we’d never do that again.

So the machismo of the American electorate and the machismo of the Taliban will conspire to keep the US in Afghanistan indefinitely, unless we get really clever with our machismo.

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