http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/NathanaelBlake/2006/03/24/191213.html
 
Hawking hell
Mar 24, 2006
by Nathanael Blake
 
While serving in British India during the nineteenth century, General Charles James Napier was reportedly approached by a delegation of locals upset at a ban on the practice of Sati (widow burning), defending it as customary.
 
The reply they received was that it was a British custom to hang those who burned widows, and if the natives followed their custom, the British would follow theirs immediately afterward.
 
Sadly, Presid! ent Bush is no Napier. Responding to the case of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man who faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity, Bush professes to be "deeply troubled" and promises that "we have got influence in Afghanistan, and we are going to use it."
 
It’s nice to know that we’re going to hold this shiny new democracy we’re building to account, like one would a wayward puppy. "Bad theocrats; no biscuit!" Perhaps we should start rolled-up newspaper drives to help win the War on Terror.
 
Rahman’s case is particularly damaging to the Bush Administration, because Afghanistan is supposedly the success story in said war, proving that freedom and human rights can be spread by the American military.
 
However much we wish for that to be true, we have done little to ameliorate the culture there. Military forces exist to hurt people and break things, and our troops are the best in the world a! t those tasks. Nation-building, however, is outside their scope.
 
Buildings can be constructed and institutions created, but culture is the fundamental force driving a society. As T. S. Eliot once observed, "No culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion." And fundamentalist Islam remains the creed of Afghanistan. The Taliban was not a foreign pathogen, but a malignancy naturally arising from within that state.
 
Conservatives ought to be wary of what Eric Voegelin called the "sincere but naive endeavor of curing the evils of the world by spreading representative institutions in the elemental sense to areas where the existential conditions for their functioning were not given." For a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan to develop a functioning representative government and respect for human rights, it will require far more than toppling a dictator and letting the people vote.
 
Too many of us were charmed by inspiring pictures of ink-stained fingers, forgetting the harder truths of human society.
 
Changing a culture requires patience and often the willingness to be ruthless. Neither of these is palatable to Americans, who haven’t the stomach for long wars and occupations, nor for Machiavelli’s dictum that there is "greater security in being feared than in being loved." Though Afghanistan is more secure (for the moment) than Iraq, its culture is just as seeped in fundamentalist Islam and sectarian violence.
 
Giving Afghans the vote does little, for as H. L. Mencken cynically observed, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." The people of Afghanistan want Sharia law, and they’re going to continue getting it good and hard.
 
Because it presumes that the problem is merely institutional, instead of inheren! t in the culture, the president’s approach to the War on Terror is failing. And ironically, given the humanitarian emphasis he has, it is producing masses of unnecessary casualties.

While we’re on the subject of Christians suffering under the president’s quest to spread democracy, let’s look at Iraq. As Lawrence Kaplan details in The New Republic, Iraqi Christians are fleeing the country by the thousands to avoid a vicious persecution that the U.S. is doing nothing to halt. America won’t even offer asylum; as Kaplan notes "While over 40,000 Iraqi Christians have fled their homeland since the invasion, last year the United States permitted fewer than 200 Iraqis to immigrate." The reason for such indifference is simple: the administration is determined to represent Iraq with the best spin possible, which necessitates pretending that problems like this don’t exist.
 
From the ashes of Bush’s foreign policy is emerging the phoenix of ! the "To Hell with Them" hawks, which recently merited a National Review cover piece. This movement retains the conservative willingness to use force, but jettisons the idealistic flight of fancy that the Middle East can be remade in our image. Unlike leftist critics of the administration they do not object on principle to invading Afghanistan and Iraq. They don’t, however, think it possible to easily reform these nations, and would like to get out as soon as we have made certain there is no further threat to us.
 
Nor are they much concerned with niceties like civilian casualties; as National Review’s John Derbyshire put it, "Rubble doesn’t make trouble."
 
If we do need to stick around on soil not our own, it would be best to do so in the old imperial style, unequivocally ruling the territory rather than ostensibly handing power back to the locals, only to rush in to "influence" them every time we are perturbed by ! an unsavory custom of theirs.
 
In the end, those demanding Mr. Rahman’s death are right in proclaiming that he is a threat to their entire society. The most basic instincts of self-preservation drive them, for he has challenged the core of their culture’s metaphysical vision: that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.
 
As for us, we must determine our foreign policy, and since Afghanistan’s government exists by the grace of America, we should begin by resolving not to let this man die for the sins of his nation.
 
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Nathanael Blake is a senior in microbiology at Oregon State University, where he writes for The Daily Barometer and The Liberty. His weekly Townhall.com column explores campus culture and politics generally.