Sherry Chandler

According to Barnett Rubin, writing at Informed Comment Global Affairs, the Durand Line was “demarcated by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in 1893 as the limit of the dominion of the Amir of Afghanistan,” Abdul Rahman Khan. That line, which was intended to create a buffer state (Afghanistan) between British India and Russia, is what we now call the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a border that has not been accepted by the people who live there. And the nature of those people may not be what we, in our own isolated ignorance, have been led to believe:

It is no coincidence that al-Qaida, though led and conceived by Arabs, was founded in these borderlands. To Westerners it may appear that Bin Laden is now trapped in an isolated region. But this region, never fully integrated into the modern system of states, provides an appropriate seat for this transnational insurgency against that very system.

…that region is no longer the isolated backwater it remains in the National Geographic mind. While in the days of Abdul Rahman Khan only British India was permitted a legation in Kabul, today the capital of the Mughal Emperor Babur is a major outpost of the UN, NATO, the US Central Command, and the European Union, with enormous embassies of every major country under construction. The people whom Amir Abdul Rahman Khan informed about his rule with an illustrated map are now more likely to have traveled abroad than Americans, if not usually as tourists, and listen to far more international news in several languages.

Their country, which used to rely on subsistence farming, has become a commercial single-crop economy. Opium poppy — like sugar cane in Cuba, rubber in Liberia, or tea in Sri Lanka — encroaches further every year on land used for subsistence farming and traditional horticulture. Traffickers and traders from all major markets reserve their share of the Afghan product through futures markets. Every family includes migrants in Karachi, Iran, or the states of the Persian Gulf. The remittances sent by these workers finance many new houses and shops, while the workers, separated for years at a time from family, tribe, and village, seek refuge and meaning in mosques frequented by global preachers. Cash, once rare, reaches the remotest villages through this global trade and the omnipresent hawala system, which links Afghans to global electronic banking networks through mobile phones and itinerant traders.

It is common enough to observe that globalization has transformed sovereignty, transferring functions of states to larger organizations like the European Union and shattering the weak institutions of others. It is less commonly realized that Bin Laden’s vision of the caliphate constitutes a revolutionary response to globalization.

I recommend that you read the whole article. I found the following passage particularly telling:

Amir Abdul Rahman Khan used the British subsidy to build his army; he used his army to build his revenues; he used his revenues to build a justice system; and the justice system enabled his people — those he had not massacred or exiled — to till their lands in peace. He died in his bed in 1901 bequeathing to his son both rulership and a surplus of 40 million rupees in the national treasury.

This Circle of Justice, first described in an Islamic text of the eighth century, has for centuries constituted the model of governance for the people of South and West Asia; today the Afghan Government uses it to describe the goals of its Afghanistan National Devleopment Strategy.

But in response to the challenge of Bin Laden, rather than building its army, the US has mobilized thousands of private contractors and exhausted its army in the fatal venture of Iraq. Rather than calling our people to fight and sacrifice, our government cut the taxes of those most able to afford to pay and financed its military ventures with subsidies, not from an imperial hegemon, but from financial markets that are far more arbitrary than Lord Curzon. To retain its monopoly on power in the face of failure, the ruling party has undermined the system of justice. We could have responded more wisely to Bin Laden’s challenge, but we have drawn this circle of injustice around ourselves

Corollary. From the Santiago Times via Worldpress.org: Chile’s Iraq Mercenaries Under Investigation by U.N. Group

Hired Mercenaries Are Second Largest ‘Coalition Force’ in Iraq

A United Nations work group arrived in Chile today to begin investigating the recruitment of Chilean mercenaries in the American war in Iraq. The U.N. Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries (UNWG) also hopes to get Chile to sign on to the 1989 U.N. Mercenary Convention aimed at restricting mercenary activity.

The group, created in July 2005, has also investigated the recruitment of Honduran, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Fijian citizens to fight or provide military-related services in foreign conflict zones. Socialist Party Sen. Alejandro Navarro estimates that as many as 1,000 former Chilean soldiers are now working in Iraq.

…

“Presently, we know that there are ex-military and ex-police recruited by a Chilean company with headquarters in Uruguay, a company that has the support of a U.S. company,” said Gomez del Prado. “These [private security] companies come to Latin American countries and recruit people for $31 a day, which is what we just saw in Peru. And once they are on a plane or bus, recruits are made to sign an English contract with a sister company from the United States, a contract that leaves them completely unprotected.”

…

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that 180,000 mercenaries are working in Iraqi territory, outnumbering the 160,000 American troops on the ground. The mercenaries include 21,000 American citizens, 43,000 foreigners, and 118,000 Iraqis. One thousand of these privately contracted security personnel have died, reported the L.A. Times, and at least 10,000 have been injured.

Link via Meteor Blades.

Kenneth Rexroth from his essay on the Tao Te Ching (from the Bureau of Public Secrets):

The lesson is simple, and once learned, easy to paraphrase. The Tao is like water. Striving is like smoke. The forces of Nature are infinitely more powerful than the strength of men. Toil to the top of the highest peak and you will be swept away in the first storm. Seek the lowest possible point and eventually the whole mountain will descend to you. There are two ways of knowing, under standing and over bearing. The first is called wisdom. The second is called winning arguments. Being, as power, comes from the still void behind being and not being. The enduring and effective power of the individual, whether hermit or king or householder, comes from the still void at the heart of the contemplative. The wise statesman conquers by the quiet use of his opponents’ violence, like the judo and jujitsu experts.