David Burchell, and a valuable addition to mounting evidence that an intelligent debate on Afghanistan is impossible in the antipodes ...

(Above: the ruination of western civilisation as we know it? More here).

There's nothing like a smug comfort zone being on display while smugly dismissing the smugness of others allegedly living in a smug comfort zone, and David Burchell delivers in spades in From war zone to smug comfort zone.

Burchell is a smug academic plying his trade in the outer west of Sydney, rather akin to the smug lives of we who live in the inner west, and his idea of a way to analyse the situation in to Afghanistan is to blame everything on a situation comedy:

If you were a sensitive, bookish adolescent in the 1970s, navigating your passage to adulthood through the maelstrom of the times with the aid of such compasses and sextants as were available, you are almost certain to bear to this day the moral imprint of that era's most popular and acclaimed TV program, the high-minded (if somewhat smug) Korean War army-hospital sitcom M*A*S*H.

I guess it's an angle, a hook, even if it's a profoundly stupid and smug one, and I guess it's better to scribble about something you know about rather than write about Afghanistan, even if the thesis proposed has a tenuous connection to Afghanistan:

Very likely M*A*S*H did more than any other single influence to shape the moral universe of an entire generation of high-minded (if also somewhat smug) young professionals, all of them staunchly and sincerely committed to the service of humanity in general, even as they tend to be rather dismissive of the intellectual capacities of their actual flesh-and-blood fellow humans.

Very likely? Surely that's a smug academic elision to sustain an argument utterly devoid of proof, but potent - at one with the force so to speak - for a smug academic intent on berating smug young professionals.

Perhaps it's because I never fell under the spell of M*A*S*H - preferring the original MASH by Robert Altman - that I failed to understand how a single situation comedy could universally transform the situation of liberal professionals and their reactions to military conflict ever since. Or at least the reactions to them of those who prefer to scribble columns for the lizard Oz rather than indulge in actual military service:

The special appeal of M*A*S*H for its devotees was its sweet-and-sour combination of contrasting but complementary moral flavours: on the one hand, that piquant savour of cynicism and world-weariness characteristic of the highly educated young; on the other that sickly-sweet odour of semi-demi-pacifism, of the type that has coloured liberal-professional reactions to military conflict ever since.

Uh huh. But wouldn't it be better for a smug academic simply to say that he dislikes the attitudes of smug liberal professionals, like George Bush, who prefer a career in politics say, rather than actual front line service where you might end up shot, bombed and dead?

On the one hand the idealistic-but-cynical young doctors of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital are appalled by the carnage and the human waste; on the other they stand outside the moral universe of the ordinary soldiers, who have walk-on parts only as the contents of stretchers or the mute occupants of body-bags.

Uh huh. And could that be because the sitcom - for typical reasons of sitcommery - is set in a base, and an operating theatre, so that the confined sets can be used to control costs? Or should we berate Dad's Army for being about the home guard, rather than pilots fighting the battle of Britain? Or should we just wonder what the fuck these musings have to do with anything, most particularly with actual meaning and insight?

And so M*A*S*H acolytes are enabled to relive time and again this same personal epiphany: all wars are essentially the same; all are equally futile and childish; and all serve chiefly as painted backdrops to our own personal passion play, out of which we refine and ennoble our personalities.

Whatever, though as a fine example of a futile and childish metaphor, surely Burchell's attitude to real war, in which real people fight and die - as a chance to examine the implications of M*A*S*H for young professionals - is moral humbuggery and smug academicism at its worst, laced as it is with a tone of rather pious sententiousness. Oops, I see that I've borrowed my wording from Burchell. Blather is catching:

Lately it's become fashionable to decry the absence of what is called a serious debate about our military involvement in Afghanistan. And so the Greens' call for a thorough parliamentary debate on the matter has been met in a tone of rather pious sententiousness. And yet, in truth, it's hard to know what a serious debate about Afghanistan in this country would look like, given that most Australians wearied of hearing about the elemental facts of Afghan life many years ago -- and given that most public opponents of the war seem to have little serious to say on the matter, beyond articulating, for the thousandth time, the central tenets of the political philosophy of M*A*S*H.

Well there's one thing for sure. If Burchell's idea of making a serious contribution to the debate about Afghanistan in this country is to waffle on about the political philosophy of M*A*S*H, then we are indeed deep in doodah. Could this just be a way of Burchell acknowledging, with a sideways knowing wink, that he once watched many episodes of M*A*S*H, but hasn't been to Afghanistan and simply doesn't have a clue about the situation on the ground? And so rather than dwell on the elemental facts of Afghan life, how much more jolly to scribble about M*A*S*H.

I have no doubt that Andrew Wilkie was perfectly sincere when he shed bitter tears in the house over the soldiers lost in what the ABC's Chris Masters recently titled "The Careful War" in Afghanistan's devastated Miribad Valley. And yet over the past few months Wilkie seems to have rehearsed almost every single possible interpretation of the conflict, only to return every time to the same familiar excuse that we would be better off letting the locals sort it out for themselves.

Indeed. No doubt when Wilkie - a Tamworth lad - went off to Duntroon, and spent twenty years in the military, scoring enough scrambled egg to turn out as a lieutenant colonel, he was undone by spending too many hours watching M*A*S*H, and so became a pacifist, or at least a smug liberal professional who turned to politics. Because that seems to be the implication of the smug Burchell's smug argument.

While it is perfectly reasonable for a former soldier to tend his sympathies for fallen comrades, we have to doubt whether serving members of 6RAR actually approve of the idea that their friends have died for nothing, and that the mission for which they gave their lives is best left incomplete.

Indeed. Perhaps now we should return to Vietnam, to set things right for those who fought and died in opposition to communism, and now find that Australian tourists are returning to the country in droves to discover a communist government still in power, and so the mission for which many hundreds of Australian soldiers gave their lives is at best incomplete.

Since we're talking in tones of pious sententiousness about completing a job in Afghanistan which serially the British, the Russians and now the Americans and their allies are unlikely to complete ... even though they announced years ago that the job was done and dusted.

Or perhaps it might be worth reading the thoughts of people who've actually been to Afghanistan, and discussed the situation there, and instead of blathering about completed missions, are willing to discuss political solutions, as Christopher de Bellaigue does in The War with the Taliban:

A more realistic version of events—one that I heard often in Afghanistan—contends that the military tactics being applied in Kandahar and Helmand are no substitute for a political strategy. There is a strong feeling among high-ranking Afghan and Western civilians who are involved in the effort in Afghanistan that the surge may wrest territory from the Taliban in the short term, but that only a political process of negotiation, reconciliation, and power-sharing can bring lasting peace and stability. These arguments, which I heard in detail, but on condition of anonymity, have some support in the State Department and the National Security Council. In the latter, as Bob Woodward shows in his new book, Obama’s Wars, military officers such as Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the NSC’s unofficial war “czar,” have expressed grave doubts about whether the current strategy will succeed.

But then he actually went to Afghanistan, instead of scribbling condescending, unedifying smug comparisons to the Korean war and M*A*S*H.

Oops, I see once again I'm borrowing unedifying adjectives from Burchell:

This week we are to be treated to the Senate's version of the same debate, which is unlikely to be more edifying. Already Bob Brown has recalled his own rather M*A*S*H-like experiences of the 1960s, when, as a young doctor putting draftees through their medical examinations, he took it upon himself to decide whether they should go, or else be exempted, by the simple expedient of asking them how they felt about it.

Yes, so much better to send the reluctant off to war. Chocolate soldiers to melt in the sun, while the righteous and the sanctimonious can blather about how easy it should be to send young men off to die.

The senator also shared his childhood memories from Oberon in central NSW, where he recalled among the wartime generation "a universal feeling that war was a bad thing"; again, as if all wars were the same, and as if the horror of war in general can be made an excuse for averting our eyes from all other horrors.

Yes, indeed, how peculiar to think war is a bad thing. And how easy to sit in an academic fortress in the west of Sydney and explain how important it is for others to fight the battle to preserve the alliance with the United States. And how easy to conflate the need for Australia to fight in Afghanistan to avenge the Bali bombings, and never mind that Jemaah Islamiah can be found in Indonesia and Malaysia and other southeast Asian countries. And how weird to think that in a democracy it's almost indecent and perverted for politicians to actually discuss, and perhaps even attempt to explain why we're still in Afghanistan, and what good we might expect to do ...

Meanwhile, Burchell has retreated from Korea, and trooped off to bitter memories of Vietnam:

It seems we are fated to live in a theatre of endless historical similitude, in which every foreign conflict is really Vietnam all over again, and calls for unfolding the same old faded banners and airing the same old moth-eaten sentiments. Until the accession of Barack Obama to the US presidency, Iraq was the new Vietnam, and whole forests were consumed in an effort to present it as the era's new "bright shining lie".

Surely now's the time for a post-doctoral thesis on the way Apocalypse Now transformed a smug generation of professionals and their attitude to war?

Nope, instead this howler:

Now that Iraq has abruptly disappeared from view ..

Yep, so much for poor old WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and The New York Times devoting its War Logs to information on Iraq and Afghanistan ... Talk about disappeared from view ...

... but we interrupted the smug Burchell 'disappearing Iraq from view' as he was just about to explain that ...

... Afghanistan has taken its place, and we are treated to endless implicit parallels between Hamid Karzai and Nguyen van Thieu, endless searches for the new My Lai, or for images as awful as that napalm-doused child, endless efforts to present Wikileaks as the new Pentagon Papers, as if we were trapped on a dizzy historical roundabout that never stops.

Indeed. And what would Daniel Ellsberg know when it comes to endless efforts to present the new paper war as a re-visiting of the Pentagon Papers:

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents. (here)

Yep, strange how history is a dizzying roundabout, wars go on, people die in bloody ways, and then return to the earth, and sends the likes of Burchell into a tizz.

Back to Burchell:

It would be hard to imagine a simpler or more self-evidently good cause than Afghanistan.

Except perhaps North Korea? Resulting in the splendid military action we've taken there to sort out that dictatorship as it prepares a new nepotic lad for the throne ...

I keed, I keed, instead we're doing it for Pakistan, which also shows that same simple and self-evident need for military action, the kind of good cause that would appeal to academics in the outer west of Sydney ... And what splendid news that we're about to move on Burma, before the military regime can indulge in yet another farcical election. How jolly spiffing and hockey sticks that self-evident good causes are a reason to wage war around the globe, what a jolly set of japes for consenting or even unconsenting chums ...

Except that ... weren't the allied forces in Afghanistan to remove al-Quaeda and the sheltering Taliban government, and isn't the aim not so much the simple, self-evident, smug, save the country and turn it into a liberal democracy cause, as to get the hell out of there with some semblance of style, and let the locals get on with the rorting, the bribing, the completely corrupt election rigging, the poppy growing, the tribalism and the warlordism?

There is scarcely another country on earth where human dignity has been so deliberately and disgracefully trampled upon, or where the progress of one-half of humankind, probably the most signal advance of the past two centuries, has been more casually routed.

As Human Rights Watch has painstakingly documented, in the Pakistani border regions where the Taliban has revived its authority, girls are once again being turned away from schools, and women are being confined to their own homes in perpetuity. Even now, as Time magazine reported, young Afghan women are being mutilated for defying the despotic authority of their families.

Uh huh. Which is no doubt why we need to extend the war to Pakistan, and Iran, not to mention the outrageous Saudi Arabia with its attitude to women, and the other countries which haven't yet managed to stamp out the vile practice of honor killings. Can we exclude the UK from the campaign, seeing as how a dozen women a year are victims of honor killings?

Of course playing the female card is a sure way to berate smug feminists who spent their early wasted lives watching M*A*S*H.

When the UAE's Al Aan TV network recently produced video evidence that the Taliban in the Pakistani border region of Orakzai are once more stoning women to death for infringing obscure religious laws, it occasioned barely a ripple of interest in the sophisticated West while educated women across the region were swept up into a storm of commentary and protest.

Uh huh. But when I read this kind of thing from de Bellaigue, I'm wondering about Burchell's sources:

Afghanistan under the Taliban had many features of a failed state—it was certainly an odious one—but so long as they observed the Taliban’s laws, members of the country’s Sunni majority could go about their normal business without fear for their lives. Life was more difficult for the mainly Shia Hazaras—a sect of nearly five million Afghans who are concentrated in the central part of the country—whom the Taliban reviled as heretics, and sometimes killed. Still, in many cases they were left in peace. Personal security—being able to plant, to harvest, to move around—is the most important issue facing Afghans today. The Interior Ministry has judged that only nine of the country’s 365 districts are safe. For many of the Afghans who work with the government or foreign organizations, traveling outside Kabul, even to visit relatives in the provinces, is too dangerous.

In a country without security, major humanitarian issues such as women’s education, the freedom to listen to music, or horrendous punishments for adulterers become less pressing. Certainly, from Shias and some women, the two groups that suffered most under the Taliban, I heard opposition to the very idea of readmitting the Taliban to power. Nonetheless a considerable number of Afghans say they would welcome back the Taliban; they feel there would be improved security and less corruption. And some quite Westernized Afghan women, such as the member of parliament Shukria Barakzai, whom I met in Kabul, believe that the Taliban should be given a stake in any future power arrangement.

In truth, in the end, whether under Obama, or a Republican president, the United States will depart the scene, leaving the country in worse shape than Iraq, where the High Court has finally ordered the politicians to pull out their fingers and do something (Iraq's High Court Orders Parliament Back to Work). And women will be brutalised, in much the same way as is allowed by the current western-backed regime, and it will take a generation or more for Afghanistan to recover from its current brutalisation by both sides in this ugly war ... and so long as it remains a conservative, patriarchal, agrarian economy, it will struggle to achieve Burchell's delusionary dream state of a democratic westernised country where the right to watch endless re-runs of M*A*S*H is enshrined in the constitution ...

In truth our Afghan problem is more or less the opposite of what the M*A*S*H brigade pretends. The difficulty is not how to extricate ourselves from a policy debacle on ostensibly pragmatic grounds; a position which also turns out, conveniently, to provide the occasion for a series of arcane rituals of moral self-cleansing.

Rather, the problem is to re-engage a weary and jaded public with what the conflict is really about: a primal contest between universal human values and an atavistic medievalism, where the latter is too often winning out over the former because, encased in our cocoon of high-minded complacency, and habituated to experiencing the world as a theatre for our private moral dramas, we no longer really care.

Oh dear. That's right, we're prattling about a crusade in favour of universal human values from the preening sanctimonious outer fringes of Sydney ... as if the current war is somehow going to make Afghanistan a triumphant example of universal human values. Bomb them back to the stone ages as a way of helping them escape their atavistic medievalism ...

Talk about high-minded complacency and a life spent watching too much television, and causes that ultimately have nothing to do with the pragmatic solutions that will eventually arise in Afghanistan.

Still, Burchell is right about one thing. Given the quality of his scribbling, it's impossible to imagine what a serious debate about Afghanistan would look like in this country, just as its impossible to imagine serious thought and care for the Afghanis fleeing the country, and turning up on our shores ...

It's possible to see that serious debate in other countries, but when M*A*S*H is held up as an emblematic problem, then the tone of pious sententiousness and pretentious crusading moralism gets too much to bear.

Still no doubt we can look forward in the future to an analysis of Hogan's Heroes, and the lessons contained therein, which explains why the heroic forces led by Hogan triumphed over the decadent aristocratic Junker Prussian forces led by Colonel Klink, and so made the world safe for women and democracy in what was one of the great battles against atavistic medievalism and the cavortings of Sergeant Schultz ...

(Below: what to wear on your next crusade for universal human values?)