Crutch

     Once you've depended on something once, it can be hard to learn to do without it. If a parent helps you with your homework one night, you're liable to immediately go to them when you have a difficult problem in the future, which will make for a sticky situation in college, if not sooner. When a foreign power has been holding your country upright for years, you may struggle to find your feet when they start to turn away. Same same. Either way, the metaphorical crutch you've been leaning on goes poof, and you discover your legs have atrophied.

     I did not pick the second example at random. If you've been reading the news at all, you probably know that Afghanistan is having more than a little trouble putting itself together after give-or-take three decades of war. Neither the US nor NATO nor any other "Western" power is in charge there - there is a government running most of the country. Or trying to. Attempts at stability aren't exactly helped by incidents like this. A police officer searched a vehicle (an only intelligent policy in an area where, bluntly, lots of people want to blow something up) that turned out to belong to the son of the most important military commander in the country. This guy proceeded to have his minions (unless they were flunkies) beat the crap out of the policeman. (The difference between the technical definition of minions and flunkies is that minions have to take orders, i.e. if they were soldiers and the guy was their CO. Flunkies are just hired muscle, and unlike minions, do not count as abuse of official power.)

     Say what you want about the United States's involvement in the Middle East, we never did anything quite that entitled. For all our attempts to encourage democracy everywhere we go, this event and others like it make Afghanistan seem more like a feudalism, with military commanders regressing into warlords inflicting their will on commoners as they please. This impression is reinforced by the whole father's-influence thing, especially when one learns that the son, too, is a ranking military officer. (Did he earn his rank, or just inherit it?) And as in medieval history, the central government oftentimes fails to, or cannot, control the ones who theoretically answer to them. (Although in the Dark Ages, the commoners didn't have the ability to go on television and tell the entire planet. Maybe progress isn't a myth.)

     So how does this affect the plans for troops to leave Afghanistan next year? Don't go thinking this is an isolated incident, this policeman could very well be the only one with the nerve to report it. Does the West have an obligation to stick around and help fix the place, or would that just be "America playing the global police force"? Maybe they genuinely need our help, others would say. Still others would reply that there's nothing we can do, we're throwing good money after bad, et cetera. Perhaps the solution can be reached through policy and diplomacy, rather than a physical presence. Who knows? No one, probably, but ten to one plenty of people have an opinion. Let's hear it.