Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Washington Post Report about the 1950s “Little America/Lashkar Gah” Project in Afghanistan Captures the Futility of Attempting to Change a Culture that Doesn’t Want to Change

© 2011 Peter Free

 

06 August 2011

 

 

Most every day, an American or Afghan family gets a reminder that tolerating arrogantly bone-headed American leadership bears a terrible personal price

 

The perennial bleeding that continues in Afghanistan was dramatically punctuated yesterday, when thirty United States troops were killed, when their NATO helicopter was shot down.

 

Those troops would not have been there, if American civilian and military leaders combined spiritually appropriate humility with a willingness to learn from history.

 

As if to grind this lesson home, Rajiv Chadrasekaran’s Washington Post report on sixty years of failed nation-building in Afghanistan was published the same day as the crash.

 

 

Short memories and lack of strategic insight bite us at every turn

 

An introductory premise:

 

I suspect that the majority of wisely reflective old people would agree that the overwhelming majority of people don’t change over time.

 

Throw in the inertia that tags along with cultural momentum, and we have a slowly rolling mess of often-alleged “dysfunction” that successfully resists most external efforts to redirect it.

 

In short, our repeatedly displayed stupidity should encourage us toward humility and restraint.

 

Which brings us to:

 

(a) reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s review of a failed 1950s nation-building experiment in Helmand Province

 

and

 

(b) today’s War in Afghanistan

 

as examples of

 

(c) the United States’ history-defying penchant for indulging in deadly strategic follies.

 

 

It isn’t that we always fight the last war — it’s that we’re just plain dim-witted when it comes to actually learning anything from past endeavors

 

Take the “Little America” experiment:

 

It was 1951.

 

Over the following decade, a legion of Americans hungry for adventure and hardship bonuses descended upon southern Afghanistan to join the vast, U.S.-funded nation-building project.

 

Within a few years, they had built a model town from scratch. The streets were lined with trees. The white-stucco homes with green front lawns resembled subdivisions in the American Southwest. There was a co-ed high school and a community pool where boys and girls frolicked together.

 

The Americans called the town Lashkar Gah. The Afghans called it Little America.

 

Sixty years later, the canals that Jones helped construct still irrigate small farms in communities whose names . . . are known mainly because of the U.S. Marines and British soldiers who have been killed and maimed there.

 

But much of the rest of that grand development venture in the ’50s and ’60s failed. The valley never became Afghanistan’s breadbasket (although it did become the world’s largest grower of opium-producing poppies).

 

There are no factories, co-ed schools or community centers.

 

And just last Sunday, a suicide bomber killed 10 police officers and a child outside the city’s police headquarters.

 

As the United States begins to reduce troop levels and transition responsibility for security to the Afghan government — Lashkar Gah was handed over last month — the legacy of Little America helps to explain why, despite the more than $20 billion spent on reconstruction, development and humanitarian aid over the past 10 years, the hopes of many in the Obama and Bush administrations of transforming Afghanistan from a terrorist haven to a reasonably stable society have not materialized.

 

© 2011 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, In Afghanistan, the rise and fall of ‘Little America’, Washington Post (05 August 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

The article continues with specific examples of avoidable screw-ups, unrestrained greed, overreaching aims, cultural arrogance, and a generalized lack of project supervision that are identical to those we see today.

 

1951 was sixty years ago.  Apparently, the American political and military leadership hasn’t learned much of anything.

 

 

“So, let me see — we knew that this quasi-nation building experiment was a failure at least forty years ago, but we still began an unwinnable war in Afghanistan?”

 

It’s clear from the Lashkar Gah example — and its obviously immediate relevance to the War in Afghanistan — that our:

 

(a) military academies,

 

(b) Yale (President George W. Bush),

 

and

 

(c) Harvard (President Barack Obama)

 

are either distorting lessons on history and leadership, or our wannabe leaders simply aren’t paying attention in class.

 

Add two more premises:

 

The first rule of honorable leadership lies in making a determined effort to scope out the history and culture of the mess one is considering leading others into.

 

The premiere sin of leadership is killing those we lead due to our own stupidity.

 

Had Commanders-in-Chief Bush or Obama, and a plethora of their generals, acted appropriately in regard to these two self-evident principles — thousands of American military people would not be dead today.

 

Nor would the United States be in the geopolitically and financially precarious position it is.

 

 

Chandrasekaran’s short article encourages us to consider what our political and military leaders apparently haven’t

 

With History’s facts and implications in mind, maybe we will be successful in avoiding (i) another American misadventure, (ii) the completely unnecessary deaths and maimings of our military sons and daughters, and (iii) adding to the world’s burden of hatred.