You read the news and find out some odd things. In Pakistan the Swat Valley has been in the news a lot lately with reports of the Taliban blowing up girls’ schools and trying to run people’s lives, banning music, dancing, movies and anything else that makes life joyful in this one-time tourist resort area. Who knew Pakistan even had a tourist resort area? That’s the news, not the Taliban Inquisition. Who used to go there for a carefree holiday? What were the attractions? Did the Taliban arrive there for a vacation from killing people and blowing up stuff in Afghanistan and decide to make it busman’s holiday? Maybe they figured what the hell, we’ve got the guns and explosives with us, why not? The news reports don’t address any of these questions.
You can look up Swat on the internet and see it described as Paradise on Earth, complete with some breathtakingly beautiful scenery that looks like the set of the movie “Heidi,” all forests and glens and crystal clear rivers and snowy mountain peaks. Even some of the buildings have that Bavarian chalet look to them. There’s pictures of people hang gliding, skiing, hiking in flower-covered meadows and sipping cocktails in luxury hotels with magnificent 360 degree views. There are winding roads, horse trails, trout streams, wooden bridges suspended high above raging rapids and so many waterfalls that only the most beautiful catch your eye. The perfect place for a weary jihadist to kick back and forget about destroying the Great Satan for a week or two. Swat may have been the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri-La in his novel “Lost Horizon,” about a peaceful Utopia where men get along.
But you know those whacky Taliban, they just can’t sit still. After a few days of skiing, fishing and knocking back shots of Jaegermeister at the ski lodge, they probably noticed that everyone around them seemed pretty happy. A little too happy for their liking. And over what? It’s not like the people of Swat had just killed anybody or blew anything up, so what was with all that joy and laughter? So, in a tradition that started with Alexander The Great 2,336 years ago, they decided to conquer the place. Maybe wipe those smiles off their faces, and so far, so good. They’ve got the whole valley living in fear and their bread and butter, the tourist trade, is gone completely. Which sort of makes them the infidels, because an outfit like the Taliban is nothing without an enemy to hate and a helpless population to terrorize.
It’s a good deal for the Taliban, outside of the occasional Predator Drone that drops a rocket on a few of them. Pakistan sent some army units to fight them, the few that they can spare from their eternal border clashes with India, and they haven’t exactly distinguished themselves in routing these foreign interlopers. Maybe Pakistan figures this Delaware-sized chunk of their real estate is not worth saving. Hard to say with that nation, a puzzling mix of a modern, educated and nuclear-armed nation and a poor, backward and almost primitive country dominated by ancient tribal loyalties. Will the real Pakistan please stand up? Even their government doesn’t seem to be sure what sort of nation they are running.
All of which would be a remote curiosity to most Americans were it not for the fact that we have a war going on in Afghanistan for like 6 years now, what started out as a simple manhunt for Osama bin Laden but has now, like most wars, turned into something else entirely. Instead of just going in, grabbing bin Laden and killing anyone who prevented that and then leaving immediately, what we seem to have done is to try our hand at nation-building once again, even though the only nation America was ever successful at building was our own. (There’s a lesson there somewhere, no?) Now we’re sort of stuck there re-defeating the Taliban we overthrew when we got there and bin Laden is enjoying an exciting new career in video and the rest of the Taliban simply crossed the border into Pakistan, which is our ally, at least on paper, so we can’t pursue them there.
Of course, none of this makes any more sense than doing calculus with Roman Numerals, either the Taliban with their banning of shaving, singing, dancing and education or America getting stuck in yet another incomprehensible mess with no possible good outcome. Unless maybe we can kill or capture bin Laden, at which point we should bid the whole region a so-long, it’s been weird to know you. Hand them a few billion for their trouble and tell them to get back to us when they have something other than tribal warlords, jihadist fanatics and imprisoned illiterate women to offer the world.
Right now there’s about as much chance of Afghanistan or Pakistan or any of the surrounding ikstans turning into peaceful democracies as there is of another Bush getting elected President of America anytime soon. Let’s bring our troops home from places like these and wish their people the best of luck. As much as we’d like to, we can’t fix the world, and the army isn’t exactly the people you send in to win hearts and minds. They have another function entirely and they’re very good at it. Let’s fix America first before this sort of crap becomes a way of life and then we become Pakistan, a house divided and not really certain what sort of nation we want to be. Enough. The repairing of our own nation has barely begun. Let the real America stand up by having our armies stand down.
