As information about Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan--a coalition offensive purportedly against a key Taliban stronghold of 80,000 residents called Marjah--becomes available from web muckrakers like BagnewsNotes and Truthout, I can't help but think of the following passage from Jean Baudrillard's essay on Simulacra and Simulations:
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true...
...Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
In many ways, we can see Afghanistan as a governing assemblage of simulacra: democracy, humanitarianism, human rights, community capacity building, reconstruction, and the war on terror. Unfortunately, the bodies of the dead, maimed, sick, and injured--from all sides--remind us that the desert of the real is also a very brutal place.
Photo credit: Paolo Alfieri (his flickr-stream of Afghan landscapes is pretty stunning)
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