By Ray McGovern and Matthew Hoh, August 4, 2021
As promised in our most recent posting ( https://raymcgovern.com/2021/08/04/afghanistan-what-kind-of-future-is-possible/ ), here is the discrete link to my (Ray’s) indiscreet presentation at last Saturday’s conference on the future for Afghanistan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSfNy1bRqmw (24 minutes)
I chose to focus on the racism that underpins much of U.S. superiority-complex behavior abroad. And to illustrate, I put some indiscreet quotes on discrete slides — as Exhibits, so to speak. Here they are:
The thrust of my talk turned out to be a bit jarring, amid the wider (and commendable) attempt to look toward the possibilities for a positive future for Afghanistan, with economic development and lasting peace — and what achieving that kind of result might require. For balance, it seemed appropriate to note the obstacles to change in U.S. policy and to be candid about the deep-seated racism underpinning it.
I cautioned against unrealistic hopes that a change in attitude, a metanoia, would come any time soon to U.S. policy makers deeply tinged with white supremacy and the benighted notion of U.S. “indispensability”. Reflecting my (admittedly jaundiced) view, I suggested that Afghanistan’s neighbors would be well advised to expect U.S. resistance rather than cooperation, if/when they undertake a serious effort to seize this liminal opportunity for peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s neighbors with immediate concerns (like fear of infiltration by highly trained/experienced/armed terrorists from Afghanistan) should anticipate that it may be necessary to proceed without U.S. involvement. The countries should, of course, welcome U.S. participation, but not count on it — and not wait for it. Still more: Afghanistan’s neighbors need to meet the challenge of doing what they can to keep not only U.S. troops, but also U.S. warplanes “over the horizon”; that is, out of Afghan airspace.
For my talk on July 31, I reached back a couple of years to borrow something from a short presentation, The White Man’s Burden: White Supremacy and Military Bases, which I gave, dealing with NATO at a Conference on U.S. Foreign Bases (Jan. 2018). ( See: https://raymcgovern.com/2018/01/18/white-supremacy-and-military-bases-a-short-talk-by-ray-on-the-white-mans-burden-the-bloody-burden-on-people-of-color-and-other-others-like-the-young-palestin/ )
While preparing that earlier talk, it dawned on me (duh!) that NATO happens to be all white — in attitude as well as geography. Dr. King’s warning — “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide” — began to ring loudly in my ears. A new consciousness. Then, something James Baldwin wrote a half-century ago helped.
In a Nov. 19, 1970 letter to Angela Davis, who had just appeared on the cover of Newsweek — in chains — James Baldwin wrote:
As long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness… they will allow millions of other people to be slaughtered… So long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between their own experience and the experience of others, they will never feel … responsible for themselves. As we once put it in our black church, they will perish in their sins—that is, in their delusions. ( For full text of Baldwin’s letter, see: https://raymcgovern.com/2019/01/18/james-baldwins-letter-to-angela-davis/ )
Racism: From Strategic to Operational Level
I asked my good friend Matthew Hoh, a Marine officer in Iraq (2004-07) and later a senior Pentagon and State Department advisor on Afghanistan, to share from his own on-the-battleground-and-within-the-Pentagon-and-State-Department involvement in these issues. Hoh’s non-Ivory-Tower response comes from his experience — both macro and micro — a highly unusual combination. (It reminds me, actually, of that of Daniel Ellsberg on Vietnam.) The following five paragraphs are from Matthew Hoh:
Racism affects America’s overall desire for dominance today just as much as did with Manifest Destiny and the doctrine of Discovery. “Civilizing The Other” remains a major component in American exceptionalism. This, simply, is what the US is supposedly ordained to do! Bring the rest of the world up to US standards. The white man’s burden, so to speak.
Former foolishly revered “savants” like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama had a tremendous impact. Even though today many will scoff at their works in the 90s, those works reflected — and still reflect — predominant thinking within the American foreign policy community and the overall “Washington Blob”.
The Establishment sees an American empire that must be maintained and expanded. Many within the military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities view the world in not only a Manichaean way but in a way that resembles a game of Risk. The Middle East is one large region of borderlands that if not subjugated must be controlled so as not to imperil the rest of the empire, including, of course, Israel.
That thinking and world view at the strategic level makes its way down to the operational level, i.e. the three and four-star generals and admirals. While it would never be stated out loud and certainly not written down, the attitude is a racist one — embracing the belief that Iraqis and Afghans, Africans or Central Americans, or Vietnamese or Koreans, et al. not only have little right to their own land and self determination, but are inferior and so cannot be worthy adversaries. (Are today’s general officers too young — or too star-hungry — to remember Vietnam?)
With respect to Afghanistan, I often experienced this kind of white supremacy in 2009 and 2010 when I told very senior officials that escalating the war in Afghanistan would not work. The responses I would get would often be along the lines of “Why do you think these kind of people can beat us?”
QED.