Twisted by Time

Pay no attention to any journalist–right, left, or center–who claims to know what went wrong.

All those expressing shock and/or surprise at the American evacuation of Afghanistan must be wondering how it could have possibly happened and are eager to know.  But today’s news outlets have already missed the point.

They missed it long before Bush/Cheney invaded, before Reagan sold arms to Saddam Hussein, before Carter welcomed the Shah of Iran to New York for medical treatment, before Kennedy, before Eisenhower.

Blame will be cast in opposing directions, photographs will appear next to those of Saigon in 1975, and books describing this month will be on shelves by the holiday season.

Don’t waste your time with any of them.  Don’t bother with explanations certain to be twisted by time and ideology.  Instead, go to a bookstore, a library, or a website and find this:

Caravans: A Novel of Afghanistan by James Michener.

Yes, that James Michener, but this is an early novel, long before his epic doorstops such as Texas and Space, a slim volume I read in two boozy afternoons with plenty of time to savor the drink.

Written in 1963 but set in the months immediately following World War Two, Caravans’ plot is the mystery of a young American woman from a rich family who apparently disappears after marrying a young Afghan engineer.

A fascinating story well-told, but Caravans’ real value is in its prophetic backdrop, particularly in one scene:

That engineer was one of thousands of young men sent by Middle Eastern countries to American colleges and universities to study engineering, agriculture, public policy, business.  They were here before WWII and have been here ever since.  They are still here.

Another of them in Michener’s book is a policy advisor in the fledgling Afghan government.  The scene, as I recall, is a dinner party in Kabul.  When it ends, an American attaché has a disagreement with the secretary over some policy.  It escalates until the secretary screams at the American:

We know exactly what is going to happen! The Soviets will invade us, and we will beat them. And then you will invade us, and we will beat you.

That may be paraphrase, but it is true to the message which is now proven true on both counts.

What Michener did not predict was the consequence for either the USSR or the USA.  Many historians have said that military defeat in Afghanistan hastened the end of the Soviet Union, draining an already weak economy and destroying national pride.  It invaded Afghanistan in 1979, left in 1989. It began to dissolve in 1988 and was no more in 1991.

With that in mind, we might ask what it might do to a nation already divided by region if not by race and–to account for our “culture war”–religion.  Now that, as one wag put it, “a virus has mutated into an IQ test,” we are even divided by science.

The answers will not be found in anything written this week or next, this month or next year.  The answers are already present in novels and reports written at the time the Middle East was “redrawn” by colonial powers in the Sykes-Picot Agreement following World War One.

While it is too late to avoid defeat, we may yet heed those and other cautions to avoid consequences that are already looming.

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Postscript:  I got to know several young Iranians, men and women, at South Dakota State University in the mid-70s.  Like many around the USA at the time–including a few I met during visits to the University of Minnesota and Mankato (Minn.) State–they held evening seminars to which they invited all students and faculty to hear them tell of the Shah’s rule (with American support) in their country, and how it was provoking a dangerous and militant opposition.

Days ahead of the event, they advertised it every way they could.  I attended one in which I was one of just three non-Arab, non-Muslim, or non-Jewish people present.  A year later, the American embassy in Tehran was stormed, American hostages were taken, and the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the country.

In America, we scratched our heads in amazement and disbelief.  Much like we are doing now.

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