“Amoeba are essentially everywhere and have probably existed . . . long before the appearance of macroscopic animals,” says the science department at the University of Edinburgh. “Throughout our entire existence therefore, we have lived in intimate association with amoebae. It is consequently no surprise that some amoeba have adapted to take advantage of us.”

Twenty-four years ago, a pregnant lady encountered one of these pathogenic amoebae in the Philippines. This pesky single-celled creature, in the process of its attempt to take advantage of her, gave her an infection that put her into a coma. In an attempt to revive her, the Filipino doctors gave her medication that caused her placenta to separate from her uterus. So severe was this placental abruption that the awakened lady was given disturbing news: Your baby will likely be stillborn. Your best option is to have an abortion.

Now, if ever there was a case of a protect-the-life-and-health-of-the-mother abortion, this was it. She was married, yes, but she already had four children. Can’t we all just agree that in this, the rarest of circumstances, it is best to take some sort of decisive action?

Then again, she and her husband were no mere tourists: They were missionaries. As Christians, abortion was not an option. So they resigned themselves to fate or, as they would say, the “will of God.”

Who would win: mom or amoeba?

It turned out, the baby—a boy—was born healthy. He was so perfectly normal that, at age six, he took an interest in football. The family split time between their missions work and orphanage in the Philippines and their home in Jacksonville, Florida. As parents, they were the hands-on sort. Dad made the boy join his brothers and sisters in tending a half-acre garden. Mom homeschooled them.

The boy really, really liked football, and so it occurred to the parents: Why not see if the local public school would let him play on the team? As luck would have it, in 1996 the state of Florida had passed legislation allowing homeschoolers to play for a local high school of their choice in district. And it turned out the boy wasn’t half bad. As a high-school jun­ior and senior, he was named Player of the Year—of Florida. It helped that, as quarterback, he led his team to a state title in his senior year.

Despite being a maladjusted, evangelical, six-day-creationist homeschooler—did I mention that he pledged to maintain his virginity until marriage?—this 6'3" muscle-bound loser was coveted by several SEC football programs. As a freshman backup quarterback for the Florida Gators, he rushed for only 469 yards and eight touchdowns. At the end of that season (2006), in the BCS National Championship game, the Gators faced the no. 1 ranked Ohio State Buckeyes, led by Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith. The Gators routed the Buckeyes 41-14, and the boy threw and ran for a touchdown.

Next season, he became the starter and won the Heisman himself—the first underclassman ever to be so honored.

In 2008, his coach decided to split the load at QB since this wrecking ball of an abortion candidate didn’t know when to quit. Coach should have known that from the start: In high school, he’d finished a game on a broken leg. Still, the boy led the Gators to another BCS Championship that year.

And then, just as you’d expect from a home­schooling nerdstrom, he announced that he was staying in school to complete his senior year, instead of entering the NFL draft, wherein he would likely have signed a contract worth something in the neighborhood of $40 million.

During his senior year, despite a season marred by injury, he managed to break the SEC’s record for career touchdowns, formerly held by Herschel Walker, perhaps the greatest college running back ever to play. The Gators won the Sugar Bowl, and the boy produced a mere 533 yards of total offense—enough for a BCS record.

“A lot of times people have this ster­eotype of homeschoolers as not very athletic,” the statistically stillborn boy remarked, after it was noted in an interview that he was the first homeschooler ever to win the Heisman. “It’s like, go win a spelling bee or something . . . ”

And yet, there are plenty of sports and cultural commentators who wish Tim Tebow would just go away, spelling bee or no. He’s a painful reminder of all their blown stereotypes. Rest assured, if he ever slips up, they’ll be there with their cameras and knowing grins. Somehow, it will have to have been wrong for him to win, in football and in life, on his first birthday.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be at once odious and craven. In his latest effort, The White Ribbon, we discover they’re natural Nazis too. And for this enlightenment, Hane­ke has been honored by bourgeois saps around the world, including the saps at that most bourgeois of redoubts, the Golden Globes, who have hailed Ribbon as 2009’s best foreign film.

Haneke’s thesis is that fascism took hold in 20th-century Germany because the nation’s seemingly respectable citizenry tolerated child abuse, female subjugation, and sexual repression—especially sexual repression. To make his case, he takes us back to 1913 and dramatizes a series of lurid fictional events besetting Eichwald, a farming village in northern Germany. We are to understand the hamlet was feverish with perversity and malcontent on the eve of World War I.

The narrative is told through the eyes of a village schoolteacher. “I’m not sure if the story I’m about to tell you corresponds to what actually took place,” he begins. “I can only remember it dimly. I know a lot of the events only through hearsay.” This is a strange way to begin his account, especially since he also insists that, whatever the events were, they unquestionably contributed to Germany’s self-destructive course in the years following—a flight of deductive reasoning worthy of the schoolmaster’s supremely speculative countryman, Georg Hegel.

Once the teacher has put forth his foggy claim, we’re shown Eichwald artfully rendered by Haneke’s luminous black-and-white cinematography—clearly the best aspect of his film. He has revealed in interviews that he shot in color and then drained the film stock of its hues to give his story an air of remoteness in time. This certainly works, but it seems an odd choice given that he unmistakably wants his narrative to affect our thinking about the present. Then again, perhaps not. There are indications that he doesn’t want us to think too closely about actual history. His story is not a recreation of an historical moment but the ideological deployment of a useful example.

Eichwald is presented as a once-quiet feudal community presided over by an emotionally disengaged baron content to let the villagers fulfill their duties under the guidance of his steward. Then suddenly, the village is plunged into confusion and recrimination by a series of odd accidents and crimes, beginning with the local doctor being thrown from his saddle when his horse stumbles on a nearly invisible wire that someone has strung across the path to his home. Shortly afterward, a woman falls to her death through the rotten floor planks in the baron’s sawmill. Then someone abducts the baron’s four-year-old son. The boy is rescued, but only after he’s been beaten and hung upside down from a barn rafter. Someone leaves a nursery window open, perilously exposing an infant to the frigid night air. A suspicious fire burns down the baron’s barn. These and other untoward incidents set the community into an orgy of suspicion. Who is responsible? Haneke never answers this question definitively. Instead, he arranges matters so that we’re led to believe the village children are clandestinely striking back at the adults for routinely oppressing them. As we slowly discover, these adults—nearly every one a hypocritical monster—deserve what they get.

Take the doctor. He seems to be a respectable widower, but it turns out that he is given to satisfying his sexual needs with his devoted housekeeper. Disgusted with himself for succumbing to his desires, he makes the poor woman pay for her efforts to please him. After their joyless trysts, he treats her with undisguised contempt. Meanwhile, he’s perfectly at his manly ease regularly molesting his 14-year-old daughter.

A different kind of abuse is taking place in another part of town. The village’s Lutheran pastor rules his home with severe propriety. When his children fail to live up to his standards, he insists they wear white ribbons on their arms to remind them of the innocence they have lost. Having become suspicious of his 12-year-old son, he interrogates the boy regarding masturbation. After playing dumb for several agonizing and thoroughly humiliating minutes, the boy tearfully admits that, yes, he’s a wanker. His father takes the obvious measure, tying the boy’s hands to the bed rails at night to defend him against the tempter. Then there’s the baron’s steward, who keeps his kids in bounds by beating them to the floor and kicking them vigorously—despite the shrill pleas of his wife.

We are made to feel it’s pointless to worry about which child did what, since they all suffer from such ghastly parenting. It’s enough to know the repressed, deeply unhappy parents have so deformed their offspring that the kids will return the favor by secretly attacking them. They’re all sadistic Nazis in waiting.

For people of Haneke’s persuasion, repression is always the primary explanation for human iniquity. They take it as axiomatic that all societal ills spring from frost-bound loins. But this logic can hardly explain the horrors that happened in Russia, where, shortly after the events depicted in Haneke’s film, the Bolsheviks strove to inaugurate a regime in which sexual repression would be swept into history’s famous dustbin. Marriage was to be revamped, if not eliminated, and men and women would be free to disport themselves as they saw fit. Should children follow in the train of such activities, they would be provided for by the understanding state. The argument among not a few red visionaries ran thus: If folks were freed from the bourgeois trammels of romantic courtship, they would satisfy their sexual needs intelligently. Best of all, relieved of their sexual tensions, people would become better workers. No more would they waste time and emotional energy mooning over unattainable loved ones. They would couple unsentimentally with whomever was at hand and be fresh for the factory or office the next day. What a glorious future lay ahead for a populace liberated from sexual repression!

Unfortunately things didn’t work out quite like that. I wonder if Haneke will ever come to dramatize this moment in history. It certainly seems more relevant to our time than the distant mirror he has held up in this film.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

With these words, Amir Dost Mahammad bade farewell to the governor general of India at the end of the First Afghan War. Mahammad had spent much of his life fighting to preserve his kingdom. His elder brother, Fatteh Khan, had been assassinated by Mahmud Shah Durrani, the very ruler of Afghanistan he had restored to his throne. As the leaders of the Barakzai tribe, Fatteh Khan’s brothers had to seek vengeance. They drove Mahmud from his throne and parceled out his territories among themselves. Mahammad received Ghazni, to which he later added Kabul, but his troubles had only begun.

These Pashtun rulers had powerful enemies and rivals. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of Punjab, seized Peshawar, an important fortress town that Mahammad had to recover, but in asserting his right and defending his territory, he involved himself in a struggle among far greater powers. These were the years of the Great Game between Russia and Britain over control of the region. Mahammad, though he was courted by Russia, preferred Britain. The British governor general, however, instructed Mahammad that to receive British assistance, he had to surrender control over his foreign policy to Britain, but, in return, the only help the British offered was the dubious protection of Ranjit Singh himself. In the inevitable war they had provoked, the British defeated the Afghans, and Mahammad himself surrendered in 1840.

Defeat and political decapitation were not enough to secure control over the country. When the First Afghan War ended in 1842 with the treacherous destruction of a British force that numbered (including civilians) 16,000, Amir Dost Mahammad was permitted to return to the people he ruled. It was on that occasion that he expressed his bewilderment to the governor general.

Colonel Malleson began his History of Afghanistan (1879) with this anecdote, because he wished to explain to his British readers why “this country of rocks and stones” had “an importance beyond its territorial value.” Malleson had some explaining to do, since Britain was already fighting the second of three wars over Afghanistan. In the Second Afghan War (1878-80), which ended with the defeat of Ayub Khan, Mahammad’s grandson, the British were, indeed, victorious. They had also learned (or rather remembered) at least one lesson. Ayub Khan had besieged Kandahar, until he was routed by General Roberts. Ayub was not the actual ruler of Afghanistan, and when his uncle the amir died at the end of the war, the British installed another nephew, Abdur Rahman Khan, as their puppet. Ayub Khan again attacked and seized Kandahar, but the amir, at the head of an army from Kabul, retook the city. These divisions—always encouraged by the British—made it easier to defeat the Afghans in the short run, though foreign occupation or domination would ultimately unify the country against the invaders. Once in power, even Abdur Rahman proved to be a wily diplomatist who effectively kept his country independent of Britain. If quiet was what the British wanted, they got it, but if they thought they had gained the friendship of the Afghan nation, they were sadly mistaken, as the Third Afghan War was to prove.

After the Second Afghan War, Britain once again took over Afghan foreign policy, but this time wisely paid the amir a subsidy and left him in peace. In the Third Afghan War (1919), the British were able to repel an Afghan attack, and the RAF inflicted great damage on Afghan cities, but British forces suffered greater losses than the Afghans, and the net result was a decline in British influence. I wonder what Colonel Malleson would have said about these conflicts, as Britain was abandoning her empire in India after World War II?

Are there any lessons to be learned from the British experience or, more broadly, from Afghan history, that can be applied to the current debacle? Some are obvious, and the Russians had to learn them the hard way. One lesson of experience is that it is easier to conquer Afghanistan than it is to hold her. It is usually possible to bribe one set of natives (“friendlies”) to fight their enemies, on Julius Caesar’s principle of divide et impera, “divide and rule.” Unfortunately, the English mistranslation of Caesar’s dictum, as “divide and conquer,” has proved to be more accurate for modern empires that find places like Somalia or Afghanistan easy to conquer but impossible to rule. The peoples (note the plural) of Afghanistan are violent and quarrelsome, but today they are in basic agreement in hating their American conquerors. E pluribus unum.

The word Afghanistan, which refers to a region and not to a nation, is a great stumbling block to any would-be overlord. Indeed, the whole mistake of the current American operation may be said to derive from the delusion that there is any such nation as Afghanistan. Anyone who has even the slightest familiarity with the political geography of Afghanistan—and that is all I claim for myself—will realize that the region is the product of a series of ethnic and religious eruptions from all points of the compass. In the earliest days, it seems, it was a cultural extension of the Indus River Valley that winds through what is now Pakistan. When the invading tribes that spoke dialects of Indo-Iranian came bursting in, some entered the Indian subcontinent, while others went to Iran. Afghanistan, so far as I can tell, became a continuum of Indo-Iranian dialects and cultures, though the Iranian element would have become more dominant under the empire of the Medes and Persians. When Alexander the Great conquered Bactria, that name was applied to a region encompassing northern Afghanistan and the neighboring “stans” to the north. When Afghans speak of their glorious ancient past and claim Zoroaster as a native son, they are really boasting of the fact that they were subjects of the Persian Empire.

When Alexander’s successors wisely withdrew, the region was taken over by the Mauryan dynasty, which ruled a Hindu empire that came to include most of the subcontinent. As the Mauryan Empire dissolved, the territory that is today Afghanistan fell under the control of Parthians and then the mysterious Kushan Empire, followed by the Sassanid Persians. As the Sassanian Empire crumbled, the region broke down into local fiefdoms until the Arab conquest of Persia exposed the land to Islamic conquest, a process completed by the Ghaznavid dynasty in the 11th century. The Ghaznavids themselves were of Turkic origin, though they became thoroughly Persianized in language and culture. At the height of their power, they ruled much of India, on which they imposed Islam. It is usual to say that the Ghaznavids, alien though they were, more or less created Afghanistan, but the reality is rather more complex. Afghan cities were the center of an empire ruled by a Turkic dynasty and dominated by Persian culture. A better claim might be made for their successors, the Ghorids, an Iranian people who ruled over Afghanistan and parts of Iran and the subcontinent.

The Iran-India axis has been dominant in much of the region’s history, but there is another, which might be called the Turkic-Mongol axis. Ghaznavid rulers were preoccupied with fighting off the Seljuq Turks, and both they and the Ghorids’ successors, another Turkic clan, were overwhelmed in the 13th century by the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his Turkic allies. Some of this history is embedded in the form of the Turkic Uzbeks and Turkmeni who inhabit Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and parts of Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is not a nation, much less a nation-state. It is an endless civil war, alternately lapsing into a cold, or blowing up into a hot, war. It is one Pashtun tribe against another, Pashtun against Uzbeks and Iranians, and Uzbeks against Iranians, old guard corrupt mujahideen against idealistic Taliban, and, overall, Shia against Sunni. I know too little about the place to speak with any more authority than the CIA experts who permitted a Jordanian triple agent to blow them up, but even that little is more than I wish to know. Returning veterans have said they find our Afghan “allies” as revolting as our enemies, and, from what I can gather, pedophilia and homosexual rape are routine pastimes, like bowling or having a beer with your buddies in the good old U.S.A. One friend told me he went to bed each night and woke up each morning with but one thought: “I don’t want to have my legs blown off for these people.”

Military men have told me that General McChrystal is an excellent officer, but his job—subduing Afghanistan—is not only impossible: It is not worth the doing. Two misinformed and ignorant American presidents have sent their countrymen to die in the rocks and stones of Kabul, protecting the right of child-molesting warlords to grow the opium that is poisoning the soul of Europe and America. Yes, we shall lose face in withdrawing. This is something that Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld might have thought about before going in, something that President Obama’s advisors might have considered before beefing up the mission. So far the government admits that our own First Afghan War has cost about $300 billion and 1,000 lives. The whole of Afghanistan is not worth a red cent to the American people, much less the life of one American helicopter pilot. It is time to cut and run.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its name) in the basement of Holy Family Parish was almost full. The crowd reflected not only the number of pro-lifers in Rockford but their composition. Nineteen priests and many prominent physicians, lawyers, and businessmen joined almost two hundred others to raise money for Rockford’s upcoming 40 Days for Life campaign. There were even a dozen or more politicians, though it was hard to get an accurate count because the Republicans all left early to attend the Lincoln Day Dinner, held nearly a month in advance of Lincoln’s birthday. (Is nothing sacred anymore?)

Sheila’s roots are in Rockford, but she has spent much of her life elsewhere. I explained that the local pro-life politicians themselves are part of the problem—once elected, not a single one of them has tried to shut down the euphemistically named Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic, housed in a former public school.

To be fair, their failure to act isn’t necessarily hypocrisy. Even those who are in a position to make life uncomfortable for the abortionist and his landlord, Wayne Webster (whose own child attended the school that Webster has turned into a chamber of horrors), lack the imagination to do so. During the 2001 mayoral election, I asked Denny Johnson, the pro-life Republican candidate, why he didn’t use his position on the board of directors of Rockford’s largest hospital to get the abortionist’s privileges revoked. Richard Ragsdale, now several years dead but then one of the most notorious abortionists in the country, didn’t perform abortions at SwedishAmerican, Johnson replied, so why revoke his privileges? (He didn’t suggest that Ragsdale’s privileges couldn’t be revoked; he simply couldn’t see what good it would do.)

Similarly, when I asked Johnson to pledge to use zoning restrictions to try to close down the abortuary, he admitted that the idea might work, but that he had never thought of it. Yet he refused to make such a pledge.

Politicians seem always at the ready to use the law to protect abortion, however. Just ten days after the Pro-Life Banquet, and within a few days of the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Rockford Register Star reported that city attorney Jennifer Cacciapaglia had drafted a “bubble zone” ordinance that would make it illegal for the pro-lifers who pray at the abortuary every Wednesday and Friday (the two days that it is open) to come closer than 8 feet to any person who is within 100 feet of the entrance to Turner School. The ordinance was requested by Karen Elyea, the alderman in whose district the abortuary lies, ostensibly (the Register Star reported) as a response to “128 calls for service from police and 64 complaints filed at the clinic’s address in the past two years.”

The Rockford Pro-Life Initiative notes that the majority of those calls have not been made by mothers entering Turner School, or even by those who accompany them, but by pro-lifers filing complaints against a counterdemonstrator who spends his time harassing those gathered in prayer. (Most of the rest of the calls have been made by the counterdemonstrator.) Elyea told the Register Star that she is concerned about the “‘heated interaction’ between protesters and clinic staff and patients,” but the ordinance is likely to lead to greater tensions, as different people standing at different vantage points will disagree about whether the eight-foot “bubble zone” has been breached. And that will mean more calls to the police, not fewer.

Our current mayor, an independent, is a practicing Catholic, and I have heard him speak eloquently and movingly about his pro-life convictions. To his credit, Mayor Morrissey opposes the “bubble zone,” which will come before the Rockford City Council in a few weeks.

The real purpose of the ordinance is to prevent pro-lifers from handing out brochures on fetal development and alternatives to abortion, including material from the local pregnancy-care center, which has assisted many mothers who have decided to bring their children to term. During last Lent’s 40 Days for Life campaign, the weekly number of abortions fell by over 20 percent, and it continued to fall throughout the year.

If this year’s campaign were to result in a similar decrease, the abortuary might well have to close its doors forever. Undoubtedly, Alderman Elyea is concerned about the loss of a local business. But adding a few more folks to the ranks of Rockford’s unemployed would, in this case, be a very good thing.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Now Carmen is a work that nobody—director, conductor, or singer—has a right to get wrong, which means, in part, to meddle with, save for a damn good reason. Putting Micaela (whose music is some of the opera’s most glorious) in the smugglers’ pass with a woolen coat and brown satchel common to women of the lower-middle class in the dreary interwar period is an example of meddlesomeness of the inexcusable sort. Eyre has explained that Carmen is too familiar to audiences, whom he hoped to shock and awe into a fresh appreciation of the opera by evoking the brutal and repressive spirit of the Spanish Civil War. My own immediate reaction to this bit of political correctness was to reflect that, had the Communists won in Spain, an updated Carmen might plausibly be set outside a gulag fence instead of a bullring. The serious objection, however, is that neither Mérimée’s book nor Bizet’s opera touches in the least on the politics, liberal or monarchist, of early 19th-century Spain, which is wholly extraneous to both works.

One might suppose that the fact of Carmen’s familiarity indicates the opera’s huge popularity, which suggests in turn that there never was a need to make it less familiar to operagoers. But even if there had been, moving the historical setting forward by a full century fails to accomplish this feat. Surely the Seville of Mérimée’s time is no more difficult to grasp imaginatively than the Seville of Orwell’s, which would be equally unrecognizable to modern tourists. If familiarity were the criterion, Eyre could have put Carmen in the socialist Spain of the early 21st century, with, in the background of the action, gay couples leaving the town hall in wedding parties and immigrant girls from Morocco washing their aprons outside the cigarette factory alongside the gypsy lasses. Or, if shock were the director’s principal aim, he could have set the opera a hundred years in the future, when Spain has become a Muslim country, cigarettes have been outlawed, and Christians instead of bulls are being killed in the arena. In that case, Eyre’s problem would have been that the composer’s score, which combines elements of Berlioz with intimations of Debussy, can no more convey the sensibility of an imagined futuristic Spain than it can the Europe of Edith Piaf. Bizet’s music, like the opera considered as a whole, is at once historical and timeless. At any rate, degrees of familiarity have exactly nothing to do with artistic appreciation. If they did, Mr. Eyre would have had a case to make for adding syncopation and electric guitars to the score and orchestration, and curators at the Vatican could defend a decision to dress the figures in the Pietà in T-shirts, jeans, and Nike shoes.

Directors and conductors are secondary creators who realize their talents by reacting upon the work of the primary artist. Quite naturally, they wish to create in their own right by presenting an established work according to their interpretation of it. And often they really do improve on earlier treatments of a familiar masterpiece. Wieland Wagner’s impressionist productions of his grandfather’s Ring of the Nibelungen music dramas were inspired, resetting these operas from what could have been scenes from Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s country estate into panoramas of light, shadow, color, and geometric form that represent in visual terms the sweeping music of which Owen Wister imagined the vast landscapes of the American West to be the embodiment. Unfortunately, when the secondary creation relies upon the principle of aggiornamento for its effect, interpretation is always at risk of becoming deconstruction.

The temptation in the operatic world to update the classic repertoire is closely associated with the embarrassment many modern patrons feel at their involvement with anything so archaic, so elitist, so passé as opera. I suspect, for instance, that the Metropolitan’s current general manager wishes that Grand Opera could somehow be transformed into Grand Broadway, a hybrid perhaps of Franz Lehár and Busby Berkeley. Even so, artistic aggiornamento is not essentially an expression of cultural insecurity and the tyranny of artistic fashion. Aggiornamento is really an uncontrollable tick acquired from the world of progressive politics, with its vision of endless change carrying all of us forward into an imaginary utopian future.

Consistent viewers of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre over the past 30 years have probably noticed how, in the past decade or so, British producers, directors, and actors appear to have lost the ability to portray in a convincing way the old, aristocratic British society that even now is not yet dead. They fail, I think, because they do not really try; and they do not really try, because their hearts are not in their work. For a new generation, the Old Britain is the Bad Old Britain, even if they never really knew it. The old Masterpiece Theatre—Jeeves and Wooster, the two Lord Peter Wimsey series, Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes—are works of nostalgic affection for a certain literature and a certain social period that are now lost irretrievably. The new people have no such affection for these things. And so they cannot match the wonderful documents their predecessors, not so long ago, created. For them, the world of P.G. Wode­house, faithfully reproduced, is too painful—or perhaps simply too dull or irrelevant—to contemplate.

I say the matter is of a political nature because the modern political agendum has to do with redeeming cultural sensibility from the past and transferring it ahead in time—not to the present but to the future. Politics in the Western world has become a futuristic activity, so that it has got ahead of itself, chronologically speaking. Progressive politics has succeeded in progressing beyond history. This is why modern governments are so far out of step with their publics. Governments are aware of the discrepancy and are encouraged and flattered by it, rather than dismayed. In their minds, they are the enlightened vanguard whose mission and duty is to lead, persuade, and, if necessary, coerce the plebeian mass at their backs. The Obama administration is determined to establish an overwhelmingly unpopular system of government healthcare because it believes that, faced with a fait accompli, the mass of citizens will, in time, acquiesce in it. If the politicians are out of step with their constituencies, then at least they are ahead of them by that much. They are, they assure themselves, legislating for the future. But they are not legislating for the future; they are legislating in the future. The world they inhabit is not the real world of the present, but an imagined future world that is wholly the creation of the politicians themselves, beavering away in the present time.

Healthcare “reform” is actually healthcare preform, designed to address not the present-day United States but the United States of the future, when the government will have granted citizenship to 20 or 30 million illegal immigrants, repatriated tens of millions more of their nearest relatives, and established a policy of virtually open borders between the United States and much of the rest of the world. “You just have to decide if you want us to be a tomorrow country or a yesterday country,” Bill Clinton declared at a rally in Boston for Martha Coakley, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate to succeed Edward Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. The “today country,” ignored by Clinton, has an unemployment rate of ten percent; a popular majority hostile to amnesty and more immigrants; a balkanized population that is determinedly self-segregated; a bankrupt government; 20 million impoverished resident invaders; and the wreck of the world’s best medical system, destroyed by four decades of government intrusion and mismanagement. But Washington lives in a postdated United States that has already taken its place in an achieved multicultural socialist world in which welfare states can coexist practically with open borders, budgets can be creatively jiggered forever, currency promiscuously printed out of thin air, and doctors created by federal fiat; the Ethiope can lie down with the Somali, the terrorist break bread with the security agent, and the Christian convert his church into a mosque, or else subside into a tolerant secularism whose only doctrines are those of the proposition nation and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Enoch Powell spoke with the mature and tutored wisdom of a statesman when he described that historical relic as one who anticipates future evils and acts to prevent them from coming to pass. The progressive politician, by contrast, foreseeing such evils, takes steps to accommodate them, while preparing to welcome their arrival as inevitable—so inevitable, indeed, as to have in some sense already occurred. The difference between the two is the difference between the historicist and the ideologue, the visionary and the fantasist, the sane man who dwells in time and the insane one who lives, to every intent and purpose, outside of it.

The progressive politician’s illusion is both reflection and cause of the congenital dissatisfaction and discontent of mass democratic man, addicted to living on emotional, as well as financial, credit. “We live from hope to hope,” Samuel Johnson said. A mental time machine is not what the good doctor had in mind. Nor Pascal: “We are not, we hope to be.”

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

What might a Don Quixote himself have thought, said, and done—in light of his chivalrous naiveté and generous (though often cynically mocked) illusions and his own tradition-mindedness—had he been present there and encountered this “Tremendous Trifle” and “Prodigy” in his path? For, as we shall see, it was a sudden and surprising challenge, indeed: a somewhat staining adventure with a Very Model of a Modern M.P. Soldier. And soon there came his Defenders, his moral supporters and protective sympathizers.

How would Cervantes himself—or G.K. Chesterton in his Return of Don Quixote (1927)—have presented this scene and some of its implications? For, despite our reputed modern freedoms, it is still the case that we have as many Masters as we have Moral Vices. However, moral vices may certainly produce illusions of autonomy and freedom.

On a Wednesday morning in late October 2009, my wife and I made a brief visit to the West Point Post Exchange with our little daughter. It is a place where cadets and military families with their young children often visit. Shortly after our arrival, I turned to find my wife and suddenly faced a scene I had never before witnessed in a military store, especially not at West Point. A hobo was there, some 30 yards away, and walking sluggishly into the store more or less in my direction. He was plodding along vaguely and maundering still when he passed me nearby. I watched him all that time, stunned in thought.

This seeming vagrant and clochard had as part of his attire a gray Army shirt of official issue, in incongruous combination with big baggy pants, either cut-off trousers or elongated Bermuda shorts. What a picture!

But that was only the beginning. He had a hat on with a beak, but it was not turned completely to the rear as one often sees with fashionably shabby adolescents. Rather, the hat was turned sideways toward his left ear, bending the ear down and curving it outwardly. This touch imparted to his visage an especially goofy look. That goofiness was further amplified by a large drink he was vacantly slurping, as he further shambled on.

As he passed, he saw me gazing at him in silence, and he proceeded to stare at me. Still stunned, I remained standing where I was, but I turned to watch him. From what I then saw in his eyes, it even looked as if he were on drugs.

Since the man looked too old to be a military dependent of one of the Army families residing at or visiting West Point, I decided, after some minutes, to approach him and ask if he was himself in the military. He answered in the affirmative. I then asked, “May I know what unit you are in?” He responded, “The Military Police.”

I did not then ascertain, nor afterward reliably discover, his rank. I only knew that he was one of the guardians.

Things deteriorated rapidly. I formally identified myself and then asked his name. He became petulant and surly: “Why do you want to know my name?”

I replied, “I wish to speak with your superiors in the provost marshal’s office about your mixed and shabby dress and also about your deportment and demeanor.”

At once he became more brazen and defiant and suddenly expressed himself with a sneer and a smirk of contempt: “Hey man, you’re harassin’ me.”

“I beg your pardon,” I answered. “I ask you for your name, and you call it harassment? You must be a real stalwart. Have you no self-respect?”

Constable Clochard reached into his baggy pants and pulled out his cell phone. “Hey,” he informed his friends in the Military Police, “some guy is harassin’ me over here. I’m at the PX. Come on over.”

Assured that his comrades were en route, he became even more insolent. He gathered together in a little cluster with a few younger female employees of the store, muttering and grumbling among them. But he kept his distance until two junior sergeants of the Military Police arrived. One immediately took the approaching and welcoming constable by the arm and went with him to a more distant part of the store. The other young sergeant stayed with me. He was very polite, but his own words and, soon, his effective acts of omission were even more shocking to me than those of the querulous constable himself.

“Sir, what’s your problem?” the young sergeant asked.

As I started to tell him about the behavior and appearance of the constable, he interrupted me. “Sir, I don’t see your problem. I dress like this, too, when I’m off duty.” Although I attempted to discuss further his colleague’s disturbing fragility and acute rudeness, the young sergeant, though still polite, had had enough. There was no danger, he concluded, of any violence, and thus he and his partner wished to depart. The case was finished—on their terms.

Aside from a few ongoing glowering looks and sneers, Constable Clochard kept his distance after his comrades’ departure. Yet we had one final act of his baseness to face.

It was raining, so I came with my car to the entrance of the Post Exchange to fetch my wife and daughter. Unexpectedly, the constable reemerged and proceeded to copy down our car’s license-plate number, after which he sauntered off again.

My usually calm and poised wife was quite troubled by the constable’s implicitly threatening act. She feared some indirect form of revenge.

We decided to visit the office of the West Point provost marshal himself, to report these acts of dishonor and disrespect. We thought that the traditional ethos of honor of the West Point Military Police would informally correct the constable’s abuses. We were wrong.

We met with the executive officer and the senior sergeant in the provost marshall’s office. The sergeant did most of the talking. Both were polite, and the sergeant asked me to write and give him my e-mail address as soon as possible, so that he could tell me how he handled the incident. The senior sergeant then said to me straightaway that current Army regulations regrettably permit mixed dress “off duty,” so there was nothing he could do there. But as to the shabby constable’s conduct—his open defiance and disrespect—the sergeant would attend to that at once. He was also polite with my wife, and even appeared to understand her anxiety about the soldier’s final rudeness and implicit threat.

That evening, I wrote to the senior sergeant and gave him my current e-mail address. I did not hear from him for two weeks, though I wrote to him twice. When he finally wrote back, he was so vague about what he had discovered and had purportedly done by way of correction, that I wrote him two more messages of inquiry, one of which (on November 11, Veterans Day) was a somewhat long and detailed description of what had occurred, a sort of Incident Report and Memorandum for the Record.

In response to my first message, the senior sergeant, copying his replies to his superior officers, wrote only a brief but indignant note—addressing me as “Mr. Hickson.” He instructed me that I should trust him to have done what was proper and altogether fitting, stressing, moreover, that the constable is “an Iraq combat-veteran” who has “proudly served his country,” and that he would tell me no more than that. The case was over.

When I contacted some of my trusted classmates from West Point and told them the entire story, I was told that the problem extends beyond the West Point Military Police. When cadets themselves are “off duty,” it is often difficult to say who is a cadet and who is a vagrant or suspect gangster. Moreover, a dignified woman in the West Point Post Exchange had told me that the dress and conduct of the constable was representative. Cadets and other members of the military increasingly dress and act in such a manner. “This is not, by far, the way it used to be,” she said. “But people don’t seem to care anymore.” There is a pervading indifference, as if to say: “I don’t care, and you don’t matter.”

My classmates informed me that the ethos at the academy is now so changed that a recent superintendent invited a very young, potential financial donor to stay overnight at his prestigious military quarters, while a decorated veteran general from World War II was put up at a nearby hotel. One of my other good classmates—not at all a curmudgeon, much less a pessimist or a fatalist—said, “Robert, the Corps has, and the Army has”—cadet slang for “the standards of the Corps and the Corps of Cadets itself have gone to hell, and the Army has, too.” I had not expected to hear these words from such a senior and distinguished man.

In any case, we shall not recover the flower of chivalry, much less its fuller fruits, unless we rediscover and are nourished by its roots, including its deeper religious roots. But as James Burn­ham writes, “To be defeated after losing well does not always lose so much as not to have fought.” Don Qui­xote would agree. (And, along with his courage amid the surrounding mockery and cynicism, he further displayed “the wisdom of his naivete,” especially by his prompt and sustaining desire for “chivalrous magnanimity” and for “a new order of voluntary nobility.”) As Ches­terton once said, only a live thing can swim against the stream. Let us not be a drifter, nor a slothful tramp. As my Catholic Special Forces team sergeant once said to me: “Sir, let us flame out, not rust out!”

To see the place where I became a man show signs of dissolution does deeply affect the heart. To feel that one is an absurd and injurious anachronism is not a thing easily borne in a manly way, with integrity and true fortitude. I miss being part of a living, active tradition, especially in these late years of disrupted traditions.

As Burnham once said, man is nourished “by social experience acting through time—that is, by tradition.” That is especially true of the virtuous and deeply tested tradition of the Long Gray Line, where once there was a sincere faith in this tradition as a living and continuous force.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

What the glass reveals is a very disappointing publication, if one judges by former standards. Though there had been modifications in the early years, as the magazine ceased to deal chiefly in humor and published more serious journalism and fiction, and though changes in editorship (from Harold Ross to William Shawn to Robert Gottlieb) inevitably introduced slightly different tones, there was no new departure until it was redesigned by Tina Brown, its editor from 1992 until 1998. The aim was apparently to be modish, and that meant campy, vulgar, even outrageous. Brown fired respected contributors (some left on their own), hired new people, including fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and adopted a policy of épater le bourgeois. In the process, according to Gawker.com, she incurred losses of $70 million. Generally, the same editorial positions have been maintained by her successor, David Remnick, whose staff includes several of her appointees.

For decades, my late friend Evelyn Payne read everything in The New Yorker, every week, except the football articles; she would not read it now at all, given the assaults on good taste, or what the radical cultural critics call (approvingly) “transgression of boundaries.” Taste and fashion, it might be argued, are culturally insignificant—clothing fads, slang, dark nail polish, casual furniture. In fact, many such matters are important: Choices in manners, speech, dress, music, literature, and film reveal us and form us—and affect others, including children, edifying them or perhaps leading them astray. That is, taste is an aspect of propriety and, ultimately, morality. It’s not, as Fat Albert would have said, that The New Yorker has no taste; what it has is bad taste. True, bad taste can be just slovenliness; but when is that desirable? Frequently, violation of taste is intended to offend (and thus attract attention as daring), as in the mouths or on the bodies of rebellious children and youth and in the work of many writers and painters. The nude photographs in The New Yorker under the new dispensation were surely meant to create chic scandal—a pseudo­sophisticated nose-thumbing—and raise subscription numbers. As for the foul language in every issue, the wacky behavior, the intimate details, they are inspired, one might charitably suppose, by a realist impulse—to portray people as they really act and speak. Some people, that is. I am not unaware of the arguments for Zola­esque realism in fiction and reporting; but is near-photographic imitation necessary in a magazine of broad interest, widely circulated, with 47 issues per year?

In addition, the general design of the magazine is no longer attractive. There are numerous sidebars, gaudy cartoons in large panels, and messy pages with eye-distracting fonts and illustrations, as though it were directed to readers with attention deficit. Infantilism is not absent elsewhere, especially in short items in The Talk of the Town. While, unlike explicitly experimental magazines, The New Yorker does not excoriate previous models of literary worth, the latter seem to be of little concern. The fiction strikes me as generally mediocre, often dealing with jaundiced urbanites whose tales are tedious; sometimes it approaches soft porn. (A story by Tim Gautreaux in the June 22, 2009, issue was a pleasing exception.) Similarly, the poetry is usually mediocre, sometimes incredibly bad; witness Michael Dickman’s poem in the December 14, 2009, issue, a juvenile product echoing bad Surrealism. (The poems of Richard Wilbur, C.K. Williams, and a few others deserve praise, however.) Since 2004, a pop-music column by Sasha Frere-Jones, who previously wrote for the Village Voice, has brought another type of vulgarity into the magazine. What drives pop music anyhow is mostly seriality, not personal taste; girls scream and swoon at performances because others do, and CDs sell on the basis that other consumers like them. Generally, the worse, the better.

Facts are still checked in The New Yorker, presumably, but I found a significant error (December 8, 2008), by which Sartre’s escape from a German prison camp is cited to support the ease of such evasions. In fact, he did not escape; by displaying his bad eye and falsifying his military papers to show unfitness for service, he got out with the Germans’ knowledge. Another departure from the earlier New Yorker is degraded grammar. Surely, previous staff members, famous for their emphasis on high standards of language, especially Eleanor Gould, who occupied the position of grammarian at the magazine from 1945 until 1999, would recoil in horror from what one finds today. A frequent error, doubtless house style now, is the use of the objective case after forms of to be. “It was him,” “It’s me” are the rule, no matter who has written the piece (including, doubtless, some who know better). Then there are errors in syntax. From the pen of David Denby, the movie critic, comes this misuse of whom: “a woman twenty years older—a stern, secretive, yet hungry partner whom the boy doesn’t realize is a former concentration camp guard.” Elsewhere, a who is omitted, as though the writer or copyeditor could not follow the sentence.

Plural subjects (often linked by and) sometimes have singular verbs, as in “the combined salaries . . . was . . . ” and “Operation Iron Triangles rules of engagement—which, they had said, was . . . ” One finds snuck instead of sneaked, and, from the pen of John Lahr, the following solecism, perhaps immigrant-influenced: “only a month in New York” (for “who had been in New York for only a month . . . ”). There are errors in French. The offices probably have a dictionary already; someone should learn how to use it. Then there are illogical or badly worded sentences. The sort of error that traffic reporters make during early morning newscasts appears: “If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay . . . the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career.” Ah, but if I don’t go to that museum, what, then, about those masterpieces? Now, these errors do not bother all New Yorker readers, presumably; many won’t recognize them, while others would say, “So what?” I may be taken for a pretentious pedant. Does it make a difference how one writes? Yes. Language is both queen and servant of true culture. The adulterated language of today reflects depravity—the deliberate rejection of discrimination and erosion of standards.

In matters of behavior The New Yorker shows tolerance and permissiveness. Its interviewers seem to attach no blame to petty crime, sale and use of illegal drugs, pornography and its peddlers, sadism, “drag” and transgendering, or other deviancy—these are just phenomena. Leslie Mann, a filmmaker interviewed breezily, talks casually about “smoking pot” in school and the use of marijuana among friends and in her husband’s films. In fiction and profiles from the worlds of fashion and film, the magazine celebrates what I shall call “the homosexual life.” It goes without saying that abortion is never questioned; in a Talk of the Town column Jeffrey Toobin complained (in connection with the Stupak amendment) that “abortion services are being treated like a second-class form of medicine.” The choice of plays and movies reviewed (for instance, Madonna’s Filth and Wisdom) suggests a bias toward what is tawdry, shocking, vile, criminal. If this is almost all that stage and screen have to offer, at least the morally objectionable material could be noted as such. (Literature is full of rascals and criminals, but usually they are not treated with benign indifference; Macbeth comes to a bad end, and Madame Bovary poisons herself.)

The magazine is thus without prejudices, except, of course, against conservatives and traditionalists of all stripes and other wrongheaded people. No mockery of “disadvantaged groups” would be allowed, but Texans may be ridiculed, along with unreconstructed Southerners, even the South in general. California figures and phenomena, some on the loony side, fare better. Although Saul Steinberg’s View of the World From 9th Avenue (1976) suggested that the rest of the globe was almost insignificant, the magazine is now entirely enfeoffed to the great powers of globalism and internationalism. In leafing through issues of the past year or so, I find few expressions of American patriotism or regionalist loyalty (except, of course, to New York City). To judge by the contributors’ names, the magazine pretends to cosmopolitan openness; such multiculturalism is displayed also in fiction, reportage, and reviews.

In 2004, for the first time ever, The New Yorker endorsed a presidential candidate (Kerry). Four years later it endorsed Obama. At least six covers had connections to the Obamas. Before the election, a satiric drawing showed the couple in the Oval Office, with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall and an American flag burning in the fireplace; the candidate wears a turban and salwar kameez, and Michelle, with an Afro, sports camouflage trousers and an assault rifle slung over her back. The cartoon was intended as a reductio ad absurdum of charges that there was a connection between Obama and Islam. The drawing caused considerable comment; the editorship, evidently blind, had not imagined that Americans might take it at face value. A post-election cover celebrated the victory by highlighting in moonglow the O in the magazine title above a shot of the Lincoln Memorial bathed in light; the cover can be bought in poster form. Another showed Obama interviewing dogs for the position of First Pet. A later cover depicted Mrs. Obama as a fashionista. In December 2009, Obama was shown receiving Santa Claus in what looked like an oval room. The tone of Talk of the Town pieces concerning him is that of slavish adulation. Objections to his administration’s policies become, in New Yorker terms, “demonization” or a result of “disinformation.” It is significant that, in contrast, the cover of February 1, 2010, depicting him in three panels walking on water, then sinking in the fourth, suggests that he is not quite omnipotent.

Now, The New Yorker ownership (Condé Nast Publications) and editors may, obviously, do what they want, as long as revenues hold up; and, unless they fear repercussions, advertisers generally support “inclusiveness” (surely, they will sell to anyone). Harold Ross, the first editor, declared that the magazine was “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” No, but its readers were discriminating, and it was not disgusting and could be left, for instance, in a dentist’s waiting room. Alas, now, the joke is on us. What was an eminent weekly, featuring notable writers (for example, E.B. White, James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, William Trevor, Roger Angell), has become awful (though of course it is not all bad, and well-done articles still appear). Ezra Pound’s assertion that a nation atrophies and declines if its literature declines is apposite. Human beings spent untold millennia developing what can be called civilization and, then, high culture. Are we to discard it all, perverted creatures who destroy what is best?

The worst aspect of the whole matter is that The New Yorker’s claim to being the acme of culture is founded, in a way. Gutter and infantile tastes prevail among American consumers of print, electronic media, and entertainment; and the prevailing “inclusiveness” rules out few behaviors and celebrates iconoclasm. Dropping names of New York and Hollywood “celebrities” and winking at coarse, illegal, and perverted behavior, today’s New Yorker snobs are right in fashion. Eustace Tilley (as the figure with the monocle was named) should drop his eyeglass, take off his dress clothes, mouth a few obscenities, and get cool.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Afghanistan began as the “good war,” receiving near-unanimous backing in the United States and similar support in Europe. The objectives were clear: weaken or destroy Al Qaeda, which had attacked America; oust the Taliban, which had given Al Qaeda refuge; warn other regimes that cooperating with terrorists would leave them out of power.

The United States quickly achieved all these objectives. Al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. It is not certain that Osama bin Laden is still alive; much of the organization’s leadership has been killed. Al Qaeda now appears to be mostly effective as an inspiration to other jihadist groups. Moreover, Afghanistan is largely irrelevant to Al Qaeda’s operations. National Security Advisor Jim Jones recently claimed that there are only 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and that they have “no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” The underwear bomber, linked to Nigeria and Yemen, illustrates the limited relevance of Afghanistan to terrorism these days.

The United States also succeeded in driving the Taliban from power. Whatever happens in the future, Washington punished the regime that hosted Al Qaeda. Even if the Taliban returns to power in some provinces or in Kabul, many Taliban leaders appear less than well disposed to an organization that misused their hospitality and caused their ouster. Even a victorious Taliban is likely to be a chastened Taliban, hesitant to host terrorists seeking to strike America.

Finally, the United States has sent a very clear message to any other regime tempted to aid anti-American terrorists: Do so at your peril. Washington might not have the knowledge, wisdom, or commitment to spread democracy, impose liberal values, and otherwise transform society, but we still can and will punish any government foolish enough to assist those who attack us.

Having met these objectives, Washington could have withdrawn, demonstrating how (limited) military action can effectively combat terrorism. Such an outcome would have yielded a more secure America, although not necessarily a more democratic Afghanistan.

The intervening eight years have not been cheap. The conflict has consumed roughly 900 U.S. and 600 allied lives and cost about $220 billion, with nearly another $100 billion budgeted for this year alone, inflated by President Obama’s ongoing escalation. The Afghan people, too, have suffered greatly, with tens of thousands of dead and injured civilians.

The return on this investment has been poor. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the situation in Afghanistan is “deteriorating.” Taliban attacks on allied forces are up; secure areas are down. The Afghan government exercises little control over most of the country. The most vibrant industry may be drugs, which fund friends, including high government officials, and foes alike. Vote-rigging by President Hamid Karzai wrecked any pretension that we are promoting democracy.

So what now?

A narrow focus on counterterrorism would be no cakewalk, but it might be achievable at a reasonable cost. This approach would accept that Afghanistan is a tragically fractured land, poor and at war. The embarrassing Karzai government could be accepted with equanimity. After all, if Mr. Ten Percent can be president of the far more important nation of Pakistan, Mr. Dubious Democracy can reign in Kabul.

The United States could look for a political accommodation, with some mixture of Taliban and local warlords willing to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary. The bulk of American forces could be withdrawn over time. Should terrorists attempt to return to Afghanistan, use of Special Forces and drones in combination with friendly local forces could minimize their effectiveness.

Terrorism will never disappear, but focusing on counterterrorism might at least thwart future terrorist attacks. Said President Obama when he announced his Afghan policy, “Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda . . . ”

Still, nation-building seems to beckon U.S. policymakers. In March 2009, the President agreed to send another 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, explaining, “For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people—especially women and girls.”

A Taliban victory would be bad for the Afghan people, but so far America’s attempt to establish nirvana in Kabul, let alone the rest of the country, has fallen far short. Malalai Joya, a woman oft-threatened by traditionalists for running for parliament, has complained, “Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords.” But should defeating the Taliban be Washington’s business?

While there are many reasons to sympathize with the Afghan people, humanitarian sentiments do not constitute our national interest. David Ignatius of the Washington Post criticized those who would adopt “a more selfish counterterrorism strategy that drops the rebuilding part,” but it is easy to be generous with other people’s lives when you are fighting from your office chair in your ivory tower. The lives and wealth of Americans should not be sacrificed for costly grand crusades irrelevant to American security.

Some believe that Washington needs to finish the job it began in Afghanistan. Masuda Sultan of Women for Afghan Women argued, “We have a moral obligation to continue to follow through for Afghan women who have put themselves at risk over the last eight years.”

Foreign intervention no doubt encourages other peoples to count on the U.S. government, often with costly consequences. However, that does not turn foreign social engineering into a U.S. priority. There is a good argument for welcoming to America those who have risked their lives on her behalf; Iraqi translators come to mind. But this is not the first time, unfortunately, that foreign peoples have shared the unrealistic hopes of U.S. policymakers to transform impoverished, traditional, and war-ravaged societies into free and prosperous countries.

Finally, what of the means about which the President spoke? If fixing Afghanistan is America’s goal, is it possible to achieve? And at what cost?

Here the President’s policy most obviously breaks down. Killing terrorists is easy compared to remaking societies.

Unfortunately, it appears that the administration has taken the worst path possible. Instead of folding or going all in, it is attempting to stay in the game with a slight escalation. General McChrystal wanted at least 40,000 additional troops; President Obama agreed to 30,000. Depending on how many the Europeans actually contribute—undoubtedly fewer than they have promised—the United States and her allies will have around 125,000 personnel in Afghanistan, a country of 33 million people scattered among thousands of villages, many located in forbidding mountainous or otherwise desolate terrain. That is not nearly enough.

Traditional counterinsurgency doctrine indicates that about 660,000 troops are needed. The Soviets ultimately deployed 118,000 troops, too few to impose Moscow’s will. The NATO nations initially used 60,000 soldiers to garrison Bosnia—after all fighting had ceased in that much smaller and less populous land.

Despite all of that, could the Obama administration’s policy somehow work? Most analysts who advocate an increased effort in Afghanistan believe that we must start with an effective regime in Kabul.

Rahm Emanuel spoke of creating “a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need.” Former Defense Department official Marin Strmecki argued for establishing “an effective and representative government.” The Center for American Progress issued a report advocating “a national representative government that is able to govern, defend, and sustain itself.”

One cannot say, given the range of human experience, that such an objective is unachievable. However, the likelihood of success seems slim at best.

Afghanistan has often been called the “graveyard of empires”—a cliché, perhaps, but foreign powers have never successfully ruled the Afghan people. While internal conflict is not inevitable, any central government must, like the mid-20th-century Afghan monarchy, understand and respect both the decentralized, traditional nature of Afghan society and the sharp limits on its own power.

Intervention from outside, even by a power with greater understanding of and respect for local cultures than the United States, is inevitably more difficult. Afghanistan is made up of 20 often antagonistic ethnic groups. The dominant Pashtuns are divided into 50 tribes. While many urban people seek modernity, many other Afghans remain hostile to outsiders, especially foreigners carrying guns. Three decades of war have profoundly afflicted Afghan society.

Some advocates of war appear to believe that what is desirable must, by definition, be practical. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations argued,

Poor governance is an argument for, not against, a troop surge. Only by sending more personnel, military and civilian, can President Obama improve the Afghan government’s performance, reverse the Taliban’s gains and prevent Al Qaeda’s allies from regaining the ground they lost after 9/11.

Boot’s claim is curious, to put it politely. Having failed to create an effective government and suppress insurgents after eight years of war, Washington must do more of the same, Boot says, in the hope of achieving a different result. Maybe escalation is the only way, in theory, in which the Obama administration can improve the performance of the Karzai regime. But theories do not always work in practice.

This is no knock on America’s forces. Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who resigned from the State Department after spending time in Afghanistan, contended that no “military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan.”

Liberty, prosperity, democracy, and stability may eventually come to Afghanistan, but only through the efforts of the Afghan people. Any system imposed from outside is bound to have limited credibility, stability, and longevity.

Washington should adjust its policy ends and military means. Its principal objective should be protecting Americans. That means cooperating with friendly local forces, utilizing Special Forces, employing limited drone and air strikes, drying up terrorist funding, sharing intelligence, and otherwise cooperating with friendly states. It does not mean building states and nations where none exist.

In 2002 Illinois state senator Barack Obama warned against fighting a war “without a clear rationale and without strong international support,” and argued that an invasion of Iraq would yield “a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, and with unintended consequences.” Unfortunately, that appears to be the current scenario in Afghanistan.

President Obama still has time to reconsider his course. If he does not, Afghanistan is likely to define his presidency as Iraq does that of George W. Bush and Vietnam that of Lyndon B. Johnson.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Divide and Conquer
by Thomas Fleming

views

The Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan
by Srdja Trifkovic

From Good War to Bad Social Engineering
by Doug Bandow

news

The Graveyard of Empires
by Janek C. Kazmierski

reviews

On the Quai at Smyrna
by Srdja Trifkovic

[Giles Milton, Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922—The Destruction of a Christian City in the Islamic World]

One For the Road
by Derek Turner

[Joe Moran, On Roads: A Hidden History]

Dead Sea Drama
by Jovan Culibrk

[Raphael Israeli, Piracy in Qumran: The Battle Over the Scrolls of the Pre-Christ Era]

A Sum of Contradictions
by Fr. Michael P. Orsi

[Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic]

correspondence

The Labour Minders
by Thomas McMahon

Ave Maria
by Sean Scallon

vital signs

Don Quixote at West Point
by Robert D. Hickson

The New Yorker Under the Glass
by Catharine Savage Brosman

columns

Between the Lines
by Justin Raimondo

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

Sins of Omission
by Roger D. McGrath

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

In the Dark
The White Ribbon
by George McCartney

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

“Missing Mass”
“Soul of the North”

by Timothy Murphy

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium

Cultural Revolutions