US President Joe Biden emerged from three days of hiding this week to clear up a misunderstanding that had arisen in the preceding 20 years. He announced to a bemused world, and to millions of terrified Afghans, that from now on, Afghanistan was on its own. The US hadn’t spent 20 years rearranging the geology of the countryside, he offered by way of explanation, because it was trying to do nation-building à la Iraq in a country known as the “graveyard of empires”. Read my lips: no nation-building here, build your own bloody nation!
Bristling with indignation, Biden berated the Afghanis for not being prepared to fight for the survival of the until-then US-backed government, which one imagines saw itself as the shiny citadel of the nation-building effort that was, alas, all in the imagination. He wasn’t going to be the fourth American president to fight a pointless war in Afghanistan, even though as wars go it took up relatively little by way of manpower or hardware. Presumably the Afghanis are more dispensable than the South Koreans, for example, for whom great amounts of US tax dollars are dispensed without anyone calling it war, or mistaking it for nation-building.
But if the US wasn’t in Afghanistan to “nation-build”, what was it doing then? After all, it busied itself propping up a multiparty system of government, which crumbled as quickly as one of the EFF’s bridges in Limpopo when confronted by the Taliban.
Now I know the Americans have sent guys to the moon and all that, and maybe they’re better in outer-space, but who will deny that an American abroad is a thing of unending fun, and not in a nice way? It should come as a great shock, but it doesn’t, that the entire alphabet of US intelligence-gathering acronyms failed to detect the Taliban would overrun the country in a month. And it goes without saying that the local mascot they anointed to front the US imperial project looked so obviously dodgy and out of his depth. Personally, I’ve always wondered why in Afghanistan the US favoured little bald chaps with restrained facial hair, and you have to ask whether the fuller-bearded look might not have been a better investment in the circumstances.
Anyway, as it turns out, the hapless incumbent, Ashraf Ghani, fled the action before the ZZ Top crowd roared into town. He left his fellows in the government to face the music, such as it is under the Taliban, and thousands of barbers wondering how they’re going to occupy themselves for the next 20 years. At least the world’s last remaining superpower, and here I’m referring to Facebook, not the US, put the Taliban in its place, saying no Facebook for the organisation because it’s a terrorist movement. Obviously the company would be prepared to consider its customary exemption for live-cam massacres on a case-by-base basis.
Self-doubt is not an attribute you’d naturally associate with the Taliban, but it has benefited from 20 years of nation-building ordnance raining down on it from on high. In the resulting illumination it has decided to do a bit of nation-building itself. Non-Taliban elements will be considered for inclusion in a broader government, and apparently a lot of top posts are up for grabs, although it has already chosen a chief whip. And unlike other politicians whom the ignorant like to accuse of “flogging a dead horse”, the Taliban will continue to flog real, live people, well, mostly women, but this will be within the law. And shouldn’t overly disturb the general upward progression of the nation-building project.
Who but the most mean-spirited libertarians will not wish the Taliban, and especially its hapless subjects, well on its new journey? God alone knows how difficult it is to build a nation, especially amid the sting of ingratitude and second-guessing from the very people shortlisted to benefit from your omniscience.
Yes, it’s no easy task, and who better to attest to the scale of the challenge than we South Africans? As we well know, if building one nation is hard, it’s exponentially more onerous to build two, as we’re doing here, according to former president Thabo Mbeki. Remember how he shocked both our nations with his “two nations” speech as deputy president in 1998?
Who but the most mean-spirited libertarians will not wish the Taliban, and especially its hapless subjects, well on its new journey?
There we were, hard at work building archbishop Desmond Tutu’s “Rainbow Nation” — and remember, we’d won the football and the rugger, so we were upbeat about our progress — when along comes Mbeki to double down (or is that up?) on the nation-building project. Later, during the Zuma era of procrastination, the job of building one or even two nations was set aside, and we just built Nkandla for a few years instead. Under President Cyril Ramaphosa, who styles himself as the reincarnation of Nelson Mandela, we’re more a one-nation effort again, perhaps with outlying areas that suggest a tendency to factional insubordination.
No matter how many nations we’re building here, perhaps we should just be grateful and get on with it. Remember under the Nats, some palooka with far too much time on his hands, and with a Darwinian inclination, came up with the “consternation of states” idea. They’d be just as likely to jail you for contravening the Riotous Assemblies Act as they would recognise you as a new nation with full sovereign rights to a territory somewhere between the third and fourth junction of the M2 East. You had to keep moving to stay ahead of the nation-building project, lest you became a nation unto yourself.
As we watch Afghanis clinging in desperation to US Air Force jet wheelhubs, take heart, because there is still much to cheer for the global democrat. And this time it’s Africa to the rescue, with incumbent Zambian president Edgar Lungu more or less gracefully giving way to his victorious electoral rival Hakainde Hichilema in the world’s latest showcase election. Lungu once had Hichilema jailed for blocking the way of his presidential convoy, so it’s encouraging to see there is a role still for revolutionary obstructionism in modern politics.
On the flimsy foundation of a makeshift road barricade, a nation is being rebuilt. No fuss, no great bother, just plain, old-fashioned nation-building, and where cynics might expect it least.
One Zambia, one nation! And that’s how you do it, America!
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