The American defeat in Afghanistan didn't begin last week. It became unavoidable when the Americans set themselves a goal that was beyond punishing and deterring terrorists. This was an idiotic attempt to initiate a process that would conspicuously improve the conditions in the backward country, develop its defective society, and establish there a regime that would meet the needs of its people.
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It is difficult for Americans to accept the fact that there are societies without standards, which are not ready to disconnect from their tribal and violent political culture. If it is not necessary to prevent the fallout, it's better to let them wallow in their failures.
If a society like this needs help in efforts that it mainly undertakes itself, one should support it on the margins. If there is no choice but to act against it, it's advisable to do so through strengthening its regional enemies, targeted economic or military pressure, activating sub-state actors and a variety of secret tools. Just do not try to fix the distortion. Not with ineffective force and not with naïve ways of pleasantness.
Afghanistan and its ilk are lost. It is a failed society with barbaric leadership. It is not "different," in the sense that would justify its inclusion in a multicultural system. It is inferior, since its brutal and evil attitude towards its children, especially its daughters, marks it out from civilized societies. When it gives cover to terror and spreads violence and drugs in many different parts of the world, it may be necessary to bomb its territories, to eliminate its leaders and their replacements, to place a blockade upon it, to support local groups fighting against it and to punish those who support it. But none of these steps will solve the problem, since the problem has no solution.
The correct approach is damage limitation. These methods extract a price in the form of the collateral damage of innocent civilians, but their cost, also in the humanitarian sphere, is dramatically lower than the number of civilians who were harmed during the two decades of the stupid attempt to change the violent and failing society in Kabul, and of course lower than the scenario in which we allow terror to operate undisturbed.
When it is damaged by the forceful means deployed against it, a barbaric leadership like this will actually be first expected to increase its aggression. It will behave in this way because this is all it knows how to do, and in order to encourage the strange and destructive groups in the Western media, academy, and politics, in their claim that the forceful measures are achieving the complete opposite of their goal. According to them, it's better to adopt policies of surrender and protection (which they call "helping moderate forces"; "opening channels for dialogue"; "offering a political horizon"; "giving them something to lose").
Against this increased aggression, it's suitable to adopt the recommendation of the philosopher of my Golani division: "What does not go by force, goes with more force." This policy isn't universal, or appropriate for every case and all time. It clearly wasn't suitable, for example, against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and significantly not even against the Egyptians in the 1960s and 1970s; and it's of course not useful against China today. It is appropriate against a weak, barbaric and violent enemy which rejects compromise.
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The strength of these weak actors comes solely from their extremism, from their indifference towards the lives of their people and the suffering of their society and from the reluctance of developed democratic societies to engage in violent conflict with them. They can only be deterred, and even then only temporarily, when the democracies prove their ability, and especially their determination, to harm them repeatedly in the most damaging way possible.
The United States often failed because of its non-selective addiction to the ethos of improving the lives of members of other societies. The Americans have indeed contributed much to human freedom and welfare, but the prerequisite for these successes were the willingness of the supported society to take on its shoulders the bulk of the burden and to develop an open pluralistic ethos, which moves away from internal destructiveness and external aggressiveness. A society that rejects all of this does not deserve support and will fail anyway. Like in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gaza. Like the barbaric regimes in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. It's a shame to corrupt them with goodwill which is needed elsewhere.
Dan Schueftan is the head of the International Graduate Program in National Security Studies at the University of Haifa.
