Speaker calls for volunteers in Afghanistan
Toolbox
By Gordon Dritschilo STAFF WRITER - Published: March 7, 2009
MIDDLEBURY – Afghanistan needs more soldiers and more civilian volunteers, one of those volunteers told an audience at Middlebury College on Friday.
Sarah Chayes covered the fall of the Taliban as a reporter for NPR and then stayed in Afghanistan to help rebuild.
She told a packed crowd at the Dana Auditorium that several popular myths about the country have dominated discussion of it.
One, she said, is that Afghans would resist any outside influence. Chayes said this was true to the extent that most of the outside influence Afghanistan has experienced has been attempted conquest. When the Taliban fell, she said, most Afghans showed great enthusiasm for "outside influence."
"It was like, at last, we could aspire to a properly functioning government and a place in the international community," she said.
Another is that Afghanistan is such a tribal society that its people do not want a central government. In her experience, she said, tribal identities are like regional identities in the U.S.
"If someone asked me if I was a Bostonian or an American, I'd look at them cross-eyed," she said. Chayes also said that the popular cliché that Afghans only unite when attacked from the outside is the opposite of the truth.
The country has repeatedly reacted to invasions aimed at its central government by dissolving that government and falling back on the tribal structures. In the 1980s, she said, massive injections of money made some of the tribal leaders resisting the Soviet invasion too strong for their tribes to rein them in. They became warlords, and the Taliban was initially welcomed as an alternative to those warlords. Afghans then saw the U.S. invasion as a chance at a government untainted by religious extremism. Instead, the U.S. brought back the same warlords driven out by the Taliban. An Afghan villager today, Chayes said, faces a government corrupt at every level and the Taliban threatening to kill him if he colludes with the government.
"You are that villager," she said. "Why on earth would you collude with that government? How can we fix it? Number one of how we can fix it is, 'Yes we can.' We need some of that magic in Afghanistan."
And, she said, we need more troops. Chayes said that the troop density in Afghanistan is one-twentieth of what it was in Kosovo in 1999. She also argued that more troops can mean fewer civilian casualties. She described how a lack of troops kept allied forces from adequately defending a region where they expected an attack, forcing them to go in and take it back once the Taliban captured it. With just a few more checkpoints away from the more heavily populated areas, Chayes said the military could have kept the fighting away from the population centers, meaning fewer civilian deaths and less property damage.
She also talked about seeing U.S. forces use 5,000-pound bombs to destroy tiny machine gun nests.
"When you don't have enough troops, you have to use disproportionate means," she said. Chayes also said the U.S. military has learned valuable lessons in Iraq about interacting with the population around them. She said a deployment aimed more at protecting the population than hunting the "bad guys" would go a long way.
"Next, I need some of you," she said. "In particular, I need some of you sitting here with gray hair. I need some retired public servants. I want some mayors. I want some public health officials. You name it. … I need a hundred of you throughout America. … I heard a call to service at President Obama's inauguration."
Chayes said she saw 9/11 as her generation's equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an event which would have a cascading impact as the century unfolds. It was that notion, she said, and not any love for Afghanistan, that prompted her to get involved there.
"I became convinced that how we do in Afghanistan is going to have an overpowering impact on the 21st century," she said. "That's why we do it in Afghanistan."
gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com
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