Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Diversity is...

...military failure:
The Taliban's ability to infiltrate throughout the Afghan National Police (ANP) and Army (ANA) may have been facilitated by efforts to "homogenize" those forces in 2007 and 2008. Initially, many units in both forces were organized along regional or ethnic lines. Existing regional and ethnic divides were thus institutionalized - hardly a way to create national unity and lessen tensions among groups that have been at war for three decades .  
The new plan was to create units that were roughly proportional to the ethnic makeup of the country: Pashtun at 42 percent, Tajik at 27 percent, Hazara and Uzbek at 9 percent each, Turkmen at 3 percent, and several smaller groups, including nomads, making up the remaining 10 percent.

It is believed that it was at this time that the Taliban were able to insert sleeper agents into every major ANA and ANP unit throughout the country. These agents are now being awakened and given missions designed to demoralize ISAF forces and drive a wedge of mistrust between trainer and trainee.
Sounds like the Pentagon replaced the traditional accommodation of diversity, divvying up institutions by ethnicity, which no doubt hinders the creation or fiction of a national identity, with our own naively radical notions of proportional representation and desegregation.

2 comments:

josh said...

My opponent, Mr. Dale, wants us to move backward, to the days of Homer; I want us to move forward.

Andrea Ostrov Letania said...

Americans are so stupid. They should have gone for the Yugoslavian option. After 9/11, we had the moral right and political will to do whatever we wanted to Afghanistan. We should have realized it never was and never will be a viable modern nation. Too much diversity and divisions. Then, US should have done whatever it could to divvy up Afghanistan into 4 or 5 nations along ethnic lines.

Afghanistan is less a nation than an empire in its own right. It's been an empire dominated by one ethnic group over others, and as such, has been unstable like the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire. Americans could and should have divided Afghanistan into several nations, moving populations back and forth--as it did after WWII.

But we had this crazy idea that we could turn all those people into democrats. It would have been difficult enough even if Afghans were culturally homogeneous because they are so backward, but it was hopeless given the diversity.

Would America have become a democracy if each of the 13 colonies had been colonized by different races and nationalities? Suppose Georgia had been settled by Italians, Pennsylvania by the Irish, Mass by Japanese, NY by Arabs, and etc. It would never have come together as a nation. Same problem in Afghanistan. Islam in the only thing that is holding that place together and only barely.

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