2021年9月9日 星期四

A Rough Beast Returns 神學士回歸 拜登是否想到「二度降臨」


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2021/09/10 第350期 訂閱/退訂看歷史報份
 
 
紐時周報精選 A Rough Beast Returns 神學士回歸 拜登是否想到「二度降臨」
America's Afghan War : A Defeat Foretold? 美出兵阿富汗 注定失敗收場
紐時周報精選
 
A Rough Beast Returns 神學士回歸 拜登是否想到「二度降臨」
文/Maureen Dowd
譯/陳韋廷

神學士回歸 拜登是否想到「二度降臨」

As President Joe Biden watched Kabul descend into hell, did he think of his beloved William Butler Yeats?

當拜登總統看著喀布爾墜入地獄,有沒有想到他心愛的葉慈?

He is the poet Biden recited as a teen to conquer his stutter. And Biden has quoted Yeats before while talking about the Middle East.

葉慈是拜登在青少年時期為克服口吃而背誦過的詩人。拜登以前在談到中東時曾引用葉慈。

"The Second Coming" eerily sprang to life in the president's helter-skelter exit from Afghanistan, a land that still prizes falconry and falcons flying in widening gyres.

詩作「二度降臨」詭異地復活了,就在總統慌慌張張地離開阿富汗時。在這塊土地上,放鷹狩獵以及獵鷹在日益廣大的錐鏇中飛翔仍備受珍視。

When Yeats writes about darkness dropped in the sands of the desert and a slouching "rough beast" with "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun," he could be describing the Taliban. Anarchy loosed upon the world, a blood-dimmed tide, and the worst, full of passionate intensity.

當葉慈描寫落在荒原沙漠上的黑暗和一頭無精打采的「淫獸」,「空洞無表情之凝望一若驕陽」時,可能是在描述神學士。無政府狀態在世界上、血淋淋的潮水及最糟糕的強烈激情上蔓延。

Biden did the right thing getting us out of there. But he did it badly.

拜登讓我們從那裡脫身是正確的事,但他做得很差。

The pandemonium drew comparisons to some of the worst debacles in modern American history: the fall of Saigon and the Bay of Pigs. A baby hoisted over razor wire into the arms of a Marine. Afghans clinging to the wings and landing gear of an American jet as it took off, then plunging to the tarmac; later, human remains were found on one of the wheels. A 17-year-old Afghan soccer player falling to his death off the side of a plane.

這場混亂被拿來與美國現代史上一些最嚴重崩壞相提並論:西貢陷落與豬玀灣事件。一名陸戰隊員將嬰兒從鐵絲網上方吊入懷中。一架美國飛機起飛時,阿富汗人緊緊抓住機翼和起落架,然後直墜於停機坪上,後來在其中一個輪子上發現了人的遺體。一名17歲阿富汗足球員從飛機側面墜落身亡。

Allies expressed their furious sense of betrayal, with British lawmakers raging against Biden in Parliament. Biden's abrupt unilateral path was "throwing us and everybody else to the fire," said one.

盟友們表達了他們強烈的遭背叛感,英國議員們在議會中猛批拜登。其中一人表示,拜登突然的單邊行動「把我們和其他人都推進了火坑」。

Americans are not built to occupy feudal countries under scorching suns halfway around the globe. Even the British long ago had to face the folly of that — in particular in 1842, when some 17,000 British and Indian army soldiers, wives and servants were killed as they tried to retreat through the snowy mountains to Jalalabad.

美國人不是為了在地球另一端的烈日下占領封建國家而生。即使是英國人很久以前也被迫面對這種愚蠢場面,尤其是在1842年,大約17,000名英國和印度軍隊官兵、他們的妻子和僕人,在試圖穿過覆滿白雪的山地撤退到查拉拉巴時遭到殺害。

Donald Trump could have made safe and orderly passage a part of his deal when he negotiated his 2020 "surrender agreement," as his former national security adviser H.R. McMaster called it in an interview with Bari Weiss..

川普的前國家安全顧問麥馬斯特接受韋斯訪問時說,川普在談判2020年的「投降協議」時,本可將安全有序的過渡納入協議。

We all know Trump is a terrible deal-maker. Biden could have told the Taliban he was not abiding by Trump's fatally flawed deal and renegotiated it to avoid this pell-mell disgrace.

我們都知道川普是一個糟糕的交易者。拜登本可告訴神學士,不會遵守川普有致命缺陷的協議,並重新談判,以避免這種混亂的恥辱。

But Trump and Biden were so impatient to get out, their screw-ups merged into strangulating red tape.

但川普和拜登急於撤軍,他們搞砸的事情逐漸變成綁手綁腳的官樣文章。

We didn't know 9/11 was coming, even though we should have. We didn't know Jan. 6 was coming, even though we should have. We didn't know the Potemkin government in Afghanistan that we'd propped up for two decades would fall in two seconds, even though we should have.

我們不知道911事件會發生,儘管我們應該知道。我們不知道1月6日的事情會發生,儘管我們應該知道。我們不知道我們支持了20年的阿富汗金玉其外的政府會在兩秒內垮台,儘管我們應該知道。

What else don't we know?

還有哪些我們不知道的事?

 
America's Afghan War : A Defeat Foretold? 美出兵阿富汗 注定失敗收場
文/Adam Nossiter
譯/李京倫

美出兵阿富汗 注定失敗收場

It was 8 a.m., and the sleepy Afghan sergeant stood at what he called the front line, one month before the city of Kunduz fell to the Taliban. An unspoken agreement protected both sides. There would be no shooting.

早上八點,阿富汗東北部城市昆都士一名昏昏欲睡的阿富汗士兵站在他所謂的前線,此時距離昆都士落入激進組織神學士手中還有一個月。有一項心照不宣的協議保護阿富汗政府軍和神學士雙方。沒有人會開槍。

That was the nature of the strange war the Afghans just fought, and lost, with the Taliban.

這就是阿富汗人與神學士開打又輸掉的奇怪戰爭的本質。

President Joe Biden and his advisers say the Afghan military's total collapse proved its unworthiness, vindicating the U.S.' pullout. But the extraordinary melting away of government and army, and the bloodless transition in most places so far, point to something more fundamental.

美國總統拜登和他的顧問都說,阿富汗軍隊全面潰敗,證明政府軍不值得支持和美國撤軍是對的。不過,阿富汗政府與軍隊潰散速度超乎尋常,以及到目前為止阿富汗多數地方實現不流血的政權轉移,凸顯一件更重要的事。

The war the Americans thought they were fighting against the Taliban was not the war their Afghan allies were fighting. That made the U.S.' war, like other such neocolonialist adventures, most likely doomed from the start.

美國人以為這場戰爭在對抗神學士,他們的阿富汗盟友卻不這麼看待,這使美國的這場戰爭就像其他這類新殖民主義冒險一樣,一開始就注定很可能失敗。

Recent history shows it is foolish for Western powers to fight wars in other people's lands, despite the temptations. Homegrown insurgencies, though seemingly outmatched in money, technology, arms, air power and the rest, are often better motivated, have a constant stream of new recruits and often draw sustenance from just over the border.

最近的歷史告訴我們,西方強權到別人土地上打仗,看來誘人卻很愚蠢。當地叛亂分子看似在金錢、技術、武器和空中優勢等方面遠遠不如人,卻能不斷招募新血,並經常獲得鄰國支援。

Outside powers are fighting one war as visitors — occupiers — and their erstwhile allies who actually live there, something entirely different. In Afghanistan, it was not good versus evil, as the Americans saw it, but neighbor against neighbor.

外來強權打仗就像訪客或是占領者,而對於住在當地的強權前盟友來說,有些事截然不同。在阿富汗,政府軍與神學士的關係並非美國人眼中的正邪對立,而是鄰居互鬥。

Each time the intervening power in all these places announced that the homegrown insurgency had been definitively beaten or that a corner had been turned, smoldering embers led to new conflagrations.

每當外來強權在這些地方宣布徹底擊敗當地叛亂團體或戰況好轉時,悶燒的餘燼總會演變為新的大火。

The Americans thought they had defeated the Taliban by the end of 2001. They were no longer a concern. But the result was actually far more ambiguous.

美國人以為在2001年底就擊敗了神學士,神學士不再是問題,但其實結果遠為含混不清。

"In the long run all colonial wars are lost," the historian of Portugal's misadventures in Africa, Patrick Chabal, wrote 20 years ago, just as the Americans were becoming fatally embroiled in Afghanistan.

研究葡萄牙在非洲厄運的歷史學家查巴爾,20年前在美國捲入致命阿富汗戰事時寫道:「長期來看,所有殖民戰爭都會輸。」

The superpower's two-decade entanglement and ultimate defeat was all the more surprising in that the America of the decades preceding the millennium had been suffused with talk of the supposed "lessons" of Vietnam.

超級強權美國與阿富汗糾纏20年,而且最終戰敗,更加讓人驚訝,因為在西元2000年前的數十年間,美國內部一直在討論所謂越戰的「教訓」。

The United States thought it was helping Afghans fight an avatar of evil, the Taliban, the running mate of international terrorism. That was the American optic and the American war.

美國以為在幫助阿富汗人對抗神學士這個邪惡化身、國際恐怖組織的同夥。這是美國觀點和美國人的戰爭。

 
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