Moore's "England" - The Difference that Matters

England

with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral;   with voices - one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept - the   criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy   with its equal shores - contriving an epicureanism   from which the grossness has been extracted,   and Greece with its goat and its gourds,   the nest of modified illusions: and France,  the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,"  in whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one's object -  substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional   shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,   all of museum quality: and America where there   is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,   where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;   where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;   the wild man's land; grass-less, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written   not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,   but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!  The letter a in psalm and calm when  pronounced with the sound of a in candle, is very noticeable, but   why should continents of misapprehension  have to be accounted for by the fact?  Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools  which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?  Of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite,  of heat which may appear to be haste,  no conclusions may be drawn.   To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not loooked far enough.  The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment,  the cataclysmic torrent of emotion  compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language,  the books of the man who is able to say,  "I envy nobody but him, and him only,  who catches more fish than  I do" - the flower and fruit of all that noted superiority  if not stumbled upon in America,  must one imagine that it is not there?  It has never been confined to one locality. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * It is rare when prose is so good that it rivals poetry. Perhaps that was what Pound meant when he stated that "poetry should be at least as well-written as prose" at a time when the  dominant prose-writers were Henry James, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Moore was the master of a prose style which did indeed rival the felicities of organized prosody. Her extremely eccentric syllabic matrices suggest that for her--at least as far as straight prose (which has its own rhythmic and rhetorical rules just as rhyme and syllabic counting does) went, a rigid form was, a priori, a basic precondition of managing a "denatured" (poetically dry) sentence style, of "setting it" artificially outside of its essential prosaic context,  into a formal shape that was both visually, and aurally, "poetic." If you can make rhyme  seem natural enough, within the syntax and flow of ordinary speech, there is less and less resistance to the implied monotony of its recurrence. In this way, at least, poetry can be made to seem as accessible as elevated conversation, which would seem to be very much what Moore is striving for, generally, in her poems.  I choose this poem, "England," precisely because it doesn't seem to me to have an over-riding,  complex argument, requiring a finicky deconstruction of terms and ironic twists, but is rather an evidently simple entertainment, addressed to a question that has interested serious American novelists (such as James and Wharton) and poets for at least six generations (since the mid-19th  Century): That of the difference between European and American culture (and language),  the forbear and the "descendant", the Mother-tongue and the bastard child. The enumerations of cliche with which the poem begins are intended to capture (or burlesque) the familiar characterizations of cultural-intellectual stereo-types which form the foundation of our habitual senses of these national (Old versus New) differences.  America--"the wild man's land"--is where "American" is spoken "which cats and dogs can read!" The implied satiric self-deprecation of this pose is not defensive, but prideful. If American English is regionally various, then it must follow that mere pronunciation cannot be a basis for determining any inherent superiority between "English" (or British) and American pronuncia- tions. If the difference between British and American culture is one of type, and not of degree, then the important observation is that any regional (local), provincial, riparian, in situ civili- zation has as much integrity as any other. Human beings seem incapable of conducting business anywhere, over time, without developing complex terms of interaction and traditional codifica- tion at least as remarkably unique and compelling as any other. "It has never been confined to one locality" means just that, that the minor differences we may remark between shared  linguistic traditions cannot be the basis for "continents of misapprehension."  The implication of this insistence upon America's cultural integrity ignores the subtle distinctions employed by writers like James and Wharton, who appear to believe that only Americans' innocence, purity or boldness can match the nuance and inscrutability of European fastidiousness. What Moore does manage to do is brilliantly mimic the proposed edifices of thousands-year-old cultural artifacts, which then are methodically leveled in order to render their essence-- "substance at the core." If decorativeness is what we really think about the supposed superiority of European culture--and it almost always is, in the end--then that decorativeness is no less "regional" or "local" than any other. Oceans may separate us, but modern communication and the familiarity of intercourse make that irrelevant. Continents of misapprehension. Oceans of difference.

Paul Caponigro -- What Is and What Is Not 'There'

Paul Caponigro [1932- ] has been for several decades one of America's premier landscape photographers. Originally a disciple of Minor White, Caponigro has continued to refine the spiritual or mystical side of black and white imaging, well within the tradition of clear focus, which has dominated serious art photography since the 1930's. Caponigro's work hasn't been limited strictly to landscape as subject, as he has carried on a parallel investigation into arranged still-life, though, again, well within the naturalistic tradition of flowers, rocks, leaves, screens, etc., unlike the artificial applications of some post-Modern practitioners, like John Pfahl, for instance.

                                                                                 Caponigro circa 1974

But Caponigro's "mysticism" isn't specific to a discipline, as his mentor White was--frequently making direct references to Zen or Gurdjieff. Caponigro has been quoted as saying that White felt a necessity for a philosophical justification or underpinning for his photographic statements, whereas he (Caponigro) doesn't. Nevertheless, Caponigro has frequently expressed his approach to image-making in this way: "One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'." The musical metaphor is relevant, as Caponigro has been a pianist all his life. 

    

                                                                          Nahant, Massachusetts 1958

Speaking generally, Caponigro's work has always had a certain restrained quietness about it. He's not out to capture the most dramatic scene, the big all-encompassing vision of grandness and operatic fulmination. His work has, from the beginning, been about the intimate regard for a suggestive quality in the material world, frequently discovered by accident, or through the examination of objects discretely posed. His images usually set up a dialectic between opposites:  Light & dark, near & far, attraction & repulsions, familiar & bizarre, large & small--but almost always, one is tempted to linger. The images invite, but they seldom overwhelm your attention. The point seems to be to instigate a relaxed, leisurely meditation from a neutral vantage, to open a clear line of communication between thing and mind, allowing nature and form to "speak".     

                                                                      Revere Beach, Massachusetts 1958

Formally, Caponigro's images have a "roundedness" or "wholeness" and balance--typical of Weston and his followers--which keeps them on an even keel. They don't challenge your sense of the dimensionality of vantage, or of the viewer's "permission" with respect to what's being presented or proposed. His abstractions don't make subject-matter irrelevant, but preserve objective identity:  Things are what they are. Beyond this, they may simply suggest further metaphorical alternatives: The picture of an apple--its white-dotted shiny skin--may suggest a galaxy, the apple of a god's eye, the universe in piece of fruit.      

                                                                           Apple, New York City 1964

Caponigro has made photographic pilgrimages to remote places:  To England to photograph the "megaliths" left by pre-historic peoples.  To Japan.  And he lived for several years in New Mexico, whose dramatic, dry landscapes were so unlike his native New England. 

 

                                                Inner Stone Circle, Castlerigg, Cumberland, England 1977

Caponigro's skill--to evoke a quiet sense of presence within the frame that both demands our attention and curiosity, while not insisting upon any partisan interpretation--clearly derives from his reaction to the pretense (noted earlier re: Minor White) of specific pointers. His titles are dry, but without connotation or suggestion. Landscapes may be "beautiful"--as the above image taken in England is--but they have something to tell us. But what? The message seems to be that, unlike the peremptory chance of the "captured" moment, the visual experience requires patience, and relaxation, and openness. We must be willing to allow the silence of a purely visual apprehension to enable us to absorb the relationships of things as they present themselves, on their own terms--their weights and situation, their placement(s), the forces which influence them, how time and decay and use have molded and shaped them. 

What is: The residual evidence of the inertia of time. What time throws up on the shore of the crumbling present, the hiss and fission of foam, dragged back under by the inexorable inertia of the forgotten, the abandoned. Time leaves us: From the moment of our birth(s), we are leaving all this, in a slow, gradual elegy of image, sound, sensation. Photographs are the ghosts of that memorial, the gallery of fleeting moments.     

                                                                           Eucalyptus and Fern 2004

Minimalism Part V: Zukofsky's Later All

Louis Zukofsky's collected short poems were first gathered in the consolidated paperback original All: The Collected Short Poems: Series One (1923-1948); and Series Two (1956-1964). The earlier volume began with "Poem beginning 'The'" (a work which seems to me to be a take-off on Eliot's The Waste Land, published just a couple of years earlier), and concluded with Song #29 ("Mantis"). The chonology of the poems written in the 1940's and '50's is a little vague, there's some overlap and shifting of arrangement in LZ's collection in those decades, but it's pretty clear that the second volume demonstrates a growing interest in short poems, with less reliance on a rhetorical prosody, and more emphasis on alphabetical and even visual qualities.

Or at least that's the way Robert Grenier saw it, when he introduced a selection of LZ's minimalist works to his students at the first poetry writing course he taught at Berkeley in 1967, which I attended as an undergraduate. At that point, Creeley had moved definitively into his Pieces period, and it seemed as if everyone was either going to follow him (as LZ before him) down that road, or would choose an opposite example, like Ashbery, whose long poems were just beginning then to appear ("The Skaters," and later "Fragment," "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and so on). I thought of Grenier in those days as descending in a line from LZ to Creeley to himself, though in those days Bob (G) was so heavily under the shadow of Creeley that he may have had difficulty defining himself in relation to adopted mentor. He was struggling to find an individual voice, and you could just hear it, in works such as "tyke/Darrell" or some of the early poems that would eventually find their way into his collection A Day At The Beach (which went through a number of successive incarnations before finally being published in 1984).

What Grenier saw in the second installment of LZ's All, was poems for his own (and others') use: Zukofsky had the mind of a classical poet, but employed in/upon Modernist free (or invented) forms (Williams's "new additions to nature"). That was a purpose LZ--old radical ("or surd") that he was--would have appreciated--work as vehicle, not decoration for value--use as value. 

The earliest "example" of LZ's minimalist tendency is apparent in his narrow stripped-down lyrics from the 'Thirties, like Song #16:

Crickets'

thickets

light

delight:

sleeper's eyes,

keeper's:

                Plies!

lightening

frightening

whom . . . ?

doom

nowhere . . .

where eyes . . .

air,

are crickets'

air

  *  *  *

You can just see Zukofsky at the precipice of an apprehension of language that is not iterative: The effects he's after here are more immediate than mere syntax, they hinge on quick echoes of mirrored, or syllabically translucent qualities, the "hearing" of mental cognates and proximal similarities. The terms are reduced to primal meanings with the rapidity of instantaneous associations. Later, these possibilities would be explored further, and sharpened like spear-points against the inertia of expectation and impatience:

           A round

Isn't this a lovely field

in winter?      

  *  *  *

Who in snow

Has lain

Does not complain.

Whittle--

Whittle--

Wee Willie.

  *  *  *

                       See: 

My nose feels better in the air.

  *  *  *

HARBOR

The winds

agitating

the

waters.

  *  *  *

      FOR

  Four tubas

         or

 two-by-fours.

  *  *  *

THE

The 

desire

of 

towing

  *  *  *

These are not "read" but perceived with the complete simultaneity of recognition, the way we respond to street signs. 

The verticality of "the/desire/or/towing" is pulled down from the titled capitals, as if words (or letters) had a weight, as degrees of magnetism. The definite article proposed as a linear pointer, pendulant--pendant--dangling--dependent. A diadem.

The isolation of the word "agitating" as a quality superimposed upon the fluidity of matter ("water") is nearly visual:

a -gi-ta-to  -  a nervous zig-zag  -  to move with an irregular, rapid, or violent action.

Anyone who has ever lain in snow, knows the curiously euphoric quality of that, indeed it may even resemble "the peace that surpasses" the ultimate fear of death itself. So we whistle a ditty--the purest, loneliest sound against the emptiness of a winter's day, whittling down the poem to a handy shape, a lullaby to a drowsy baby. 

A movement for four tubas or two-by-fours: Can you hear the tuba's bwomp-bwomp deep-throated blare in there? What's in the sound of long boards dropped in air? If we set the poem as a quartet of four instruments, then it's a game of musical bridge, each horn playing off the other three. Two times two is four, but who (or what?) is it for? Nothing but itself. 

This process of winnowing, or whittling away (of) what--then--are nonessentials, throws the remaining residual scaffolding of words (language) into stark relief: It becomes its own material, like inscriptions on stones, or signs in (neon) light. Marks in space. 

When we get down to the level at which words are perceived "originally"--that is, with the least iterative baggage or modal contextuality--we get back to their purest first (best) sense. 

Are the number of such possible reductions limited to the number of permutations available to use? It might seem so, given their elusiveness. But is that an illusion buried under the quotidian of layering? Can we peal back the skin(s) to find the empty center of our meditation? Is language the nut, or the shell?      

   

              

Vacation hold

Please note we will be away for five days beginning tomorrow, so no new posts will appear during that period.

2 on the Aisle: The Caine Mutiny [1954] & Patton [1970]

Disclaimer: Readers should be aware that I have no military service in my background. My Stepfather never served (he was born in 1901), and my real Father was a conscientious objector in WWII. Nevertheless, my interest in war movies is not colored by a lack of sympathy for, or a naive rejection of the necessity for, the military life-style in general.     

Military narratives often focus on the problems of command. Like traditional theater, which is frequently devoted to the problems of royalty, these stories follow the brass through its private journeys and official duties, revealing telling detail, contradictions and weaknesses in character, and the challenges and responsibilities of directing the energies and campaigns of bodies of men and materiel. 

The Caine Mutiny [1951] was the central work of Herman Wouk's career, a novel about a mutiny aboard a mine-sweeper in the Pacific Theater during a typhoon in World War II, which was later adapted to the stage (The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial [1953]), and finally to the screen in 1954. The plot is atypical for Hollywood: Rather than the gung-ho version of American soldiers or sailors, this is a psychological study of a captain who fails under the stress of command, endangering his ship and crew, and eventually is embarrassed in a dramatic court-martial trial. Even more unusually, Wouk further complicates matters by taking sides against the mutineers, in open sympathy with the discredited Captain Queeg (played by Humphrey Bogart, in one of his best roles). The action is seen from the perspective of a novice ensign, Willis Keith (late of Princeton), through whose eyes everything is seen as if it were, well, a movie; he's a man to whom things happen. Willie is naive, and something of a bumbler. He's a poor judge of character, and is rather headstrong. 

The setting is similar in its way to another WWII classic, Mister Roberts [1955]. Both stories/films are set on small ships, have typically "wacky" crews, and are far enough away from real battle action to allow the author/director to concentrate on the interaction of characters. In both, the Captain is an uptight disciplinarian, lacking imagination, who tries to blame the crew for his own shortcomings and failures; in both, a courageous, but unimaginative first officer (Fonda as Mister Roberts, Van Johnson as Lieutenant Maryk in Caine) attempts to mend fences and keep things from falling apart. In Mister Roberts, the Captain's cruelty and abuse of command are treated as amusing irritations; in The Caine Mutiny, Queeg's failure becomes the occasion for a serious morality play on the theme of the misuse of power, and the corrupting influence of irresponsible intellectual playboys. 

As Captain Queeg descends into his paranoid delusions, we can see (and begin to enjoy) his fall from grace and eventual embarrassment in the court-martial. "Not so fast!" Wouk seems to be saying. The defense attorney, Barney Greenwald (played by Jose Ferrer), attacks Lieutenant Keefer (Fred MacMurray), for having executed the plot to seize command (by planting the seeds of mutiny in the mind of Maryk), as the "real Author of the Caine Mutiny." The irony of identifying the fictional "author" of the mutiny as the guilty party (who will "write [his] novel, go to Hollywood, and make a million bucks") is not lost on the audience. The moral ambiguity of turning the spotlight away from Queeg's pathetic failures, and pointing it at the cynical, spineless Keefer, strikes us today as a somewhat reactionary stance. Is Wouk telling us that incompetence under fire is preferable to intellectual curiosity? Does Greenwald speak for Wouk, or is Wouk trying to have it both ways, as the "real Author" objectifying the fictional Author as a personification of his own guilt? 

Under conditions of war, behavior may not be measurable in the same way as it is during peacetime. 

In Patton, George C. Scott, after having been formally reprimanded by Eisenhauer for slapping a shell-shocked young private in a first-aid tent, asks "What is [this] compared to war? The sonofabitch should have been tried and executed for cowardice!" The screenwriters--Francis Coppola and Edmund North--attempt to portray Patton from the inside out, as an adolescent fantasist and petulant megalomaniac. His German enemies see him as the quintessential commander--ruthless, uncompromising, and efficient. Meanwhile, the Allied Command, worried about public relations and how things will appear, is wary of and embarrassed by Patton's frankness and aggressive manner. 

The point of Patton seems to be that military valor, as a quality or hybrid predisposition, is limited to the context in which it thrives. Patton, whose daring and audacity ("Toujours l'audace") brought his army victory in the European campaign, was that enigma "the perfect warrior" who could not survive outside the engagement of irrevocable conflict. 

Comparing the two figures, we have on the one hand a small-minded, "by-the-book" incompetent, who attempts to cover his failures by blaming his own staff, and on the other, a self-obsessed, arrogant demi-god whose dreams of glory are born on the backs of his soldiers. Both are caricatures of responsible leadership.                                                               

In each film, the central authority figure becomes the vehicle for an elaborate construction of character--in Scott's version, a blustering, vain, "realist" convinced of his own righteousness, unwilling to be tamed--and in Bogart's version, a slinking apologist, hiding behind rote regulation and whining self-pity. 

These two films get at the heart of America's divided sense of the value and purpose of militarism--as a style of life, and as an interpretation of the meaning of human conflict. In each case, we seek to identify a reliable protagonist, but in neither case, are we allowed a sympathetic, unambiguous example. When you open up the interior psychological reality of individual character, you inevitably discover contradiction. The violence of open conflict, and the stress of authority to direct it, are in a sense irreconcilable. Men are not machines. In a democracy, the humanistic qualities we value as responsible citizens, are in direct opposition to the qualities that make efficient soldiers. We expect of our leaders that they will serve virtuous ends, but may be forced to employ terrible means to accomplish them. These narratives are about how those contradictions twist and maim individual men, distorting their natures in the service of cruel alternatives.  

Linda Butler - An American Original

Linda Butler's career presents as a seamless record of continuously evolving success, as she has moved from triumph to triumph, her progress marked by a series of themed monographs--four to date--each of which has represented not just an expanding unique vision, but ground-breaking approaches to documentary photography.  

Paul Strand showed how an individual photographer, with a clear, sympathetic attitude towards a specific region--people and animals inside a landscape, of their place and time--might present a unified series of images, each of which, because of the integrated relationship between parts, could be greater than its sum, a metaphysical balance between matter, light, texture, culture, character, mood and meaning. Strand was known to be a stickler about his prints, producing indelible tonal intensities which communicated even through the offset reproductions which were used to produce his series of books. Strand was very ambitious, and it sometimes seemed/seems as if his overriding conviction overwhelmed his subjects, turning them into symbols or personifications, perhaps even caricatures of their actual selves. In any event, Strand set a standard which was a combination of the best aspects of the WPA era's fidelity to a populist, indigenous people, of the most serious abstracts of nature and man-made artifacts, into a synthesis expressed through the highest standards of the photographic art.

Coming down through this tradition, Butler's challenge has been to select subjects whose potential interest and significance could yield new tonalities and perspectives, and allow her to achieve a persuasive personal vision. 

Unlike Strand, Butler's vision is softer--though giving nothing away in terms of focal precision--but frequently conceived from more unusual vantages, sometimes even suggesting surreal disorientation, or pondered absence.  

Butler's four books--on the Shakers, on rural Japan, on Italy, and on the Yangtze River Valley in China--each broader in purpose and implication than the last, have redefined the regional monograph tradition. 

Butler's work may resemble Strand's in its balance between human and non-human, as well as marking the presence/absence of human habitation and effort, but its feeling is subtler and much more delicate, summoning delicate gradations of emotion and memory, regret and affection, than Strand ever demonstrated.              

                    
Her last book was published by Stanford University Press, and is a literal elegy to a part of the world that we are soon to lose completely, as China completes its gigantic dam project which will bury hundreds of miles of territory and culture under a huge engineered lake along the great Yangtze River.

This was a project that demanded wide views, both to record what will soon be lost to history, as well as to provide a sense of scale of the landscape--as impressive and awe-inspiring, in its way, as the Grand Canyon.   

      
Butler's choice of black and white, as opposed to color imagery, was clear from the beginning--her vision is decisively within the tradition of magic shading--long straight-line scales, without losing the intensities of rich blacks and evanescently luminous shoulders. 

    

Working mostly with interior spaces, her first book on the Shaker communities--which have been maintained meticulously to preserve the quality of life they represented to their now-long-since-vanished inhabitants--exploited the soft natural light falling upon rustic, man-made objects, a quiet, modest quality of silence, meditative and devout, clearly religious in tone. See the bottom four images, taken directly from the book, and the separate one of cooking utensils hanging against a wall.   

 

The Rural Japan monograph--too large to be considered a mere portfolio (as one might describe the Shaker book)--was a fulfillment of the potentials of the first book, replicating the interest in common objects and spaces, back- or side-lit, explorations of the man-made environment, bearing the touch of care and the intimacy of common use. The camera caresses and glories in the textures and variations within the material world, allowing each thing--a boat, a simple door, a pool of carp--to stand in the poised dignity of its presence, cherished and whole. 

     

The Italy monograph breaks new ground, exploiting the potentials of subtle toning of prints. Rather than the "antique-ing" one often gets with these "split-tone" techniques, Butler's use of it extends the tonal dimension by adding another layer or lustre to the highlights, as if they were being illuminated by a different place in the visual spectrum. These images are more mysterious and even perhaps obsessive, than anything she had done (or at least published) previously. This book continues the tightly conceived attention to things--which both disclose as well as contain their meaning--which had characterized the earlier two. 

        


With the Yangtze River book, her attention moves out into a broader sphere, giving us panoramic views of the world, within which settled traditions and vernacular identity exists. Do we have the right and privilege to wreak awesome change upon a landscape which supported and sustained so many people in relative harmony with nature? 

   




I'm always a sucker for interesting dune shots, and these two are among my favorites. Alongside her "project" books, Butler also obviously is building her inventory of classic traditional photographic subjects.   

Each big step she has taken has been an event worthy of the high point of an ordinary career. In photographic terms, she is still young enough to be considered in her early prime. I eagerly await each subsequent cycle of her interest. What will her next book address? (Images mounted on her website show views of the devastation wrought by Katrina.) How will her work change to suit it? She hasn't taken a wrong step yet!

Afghanistan - Quagmire

Of all the things I'm certain of at this moment, one of the most certain is that America can accomplish nothing in its military campaigns in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, like a number of other countries in the Near and Far East, is not really a nation at all, but a loose federation of tribal or regional precincts. These regional divisions are hundreds of years old. These places have no history of representative government, are usually fiercely independent, and have a familiarity with, and willingness to engage in, constant warfare. It's virtually a way of life in the "tribal areas" of Northeast Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan. In order to maintain the kind of ordered society in which a central rule of law prevails, in which "terrorism" or "feuds" are not constantly being waged in broad daylight, there has to be a strong central government. Afghanistan and Pakistan, by all accounts, are not federalized nations as we define them in the West. They are nations in name only.  

A strong invasive military force, equipped with sophisticated firepower, can easily overcome small bands of guerrillas, but this is only half the story. When America prevailed in Europe during the Second World War, the vacuum left by the defeat of Germany, was quickly filled by the Soviet Union in the East, and by reinstatements of democratic regimes in the West. 

Try to imagine what will happen when America finally leaves Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. My guess is that none of these puppet regimes are likely to survive more than a few weeks, before wholesale violence and open civil war erupts. The history of the Middle East tells us that hard-line dictatorships (or rigid monarchies) are the only effective means of central control in these countries. Their methods are repugnant, undemocratic and even bestial. Is it even realistic to imagine that Afghanistan could ever be a parliamentary democracy with elections and police and armies loyal to their leader(s)? 

Look at the former Yugoslavia. It bears little resemblance to its former national shape. Tito ruled with an iron hand. Once the oppressive dictatorship was removed, the country fell into bloody, ethnic civil war. Isn't this what we can reasonably expect to occur in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, once our support is substantially removed? These aren't really nations at all, just loose federations waiting to collapse once their supports are removed. And once the fighting starts in earnest, there won't be much anyone from outside will be able to do to influence the outcome, short of more direct military participation.  

One fallacy of American foreign policy over the last 10 years: That the best, most effective way we can defend ourselves against terrorism, is by "taming" or "cleaning up" the weak Third World states where "extremists" and "insurgents" can hide, train and plot. The simple fact is that an act of terrorism is extremely easy to accomplish, by anyone in any country in the world. It has been conclusively shown that a handful of fanatics, acting in secret, can mount a terrific terrorist act--a bombing, a plane hijacking, a mass poisoning, etc.--and that there is really no way to prevent this. And yet we still act as if subduing the "tribes" in the rough mountains of Central Asia will "make the world safe" again from terrorism.  

This is nonsense.

The sooner we abandon these quagmires in the Middle East, the better off we'll be. We could carry on a limited "automated" campaign against bin-Laden almost indefinitely, without taking responsibility for any of these nations. If history demands that they return to the stone age, so be it. In the end, we won't be able to save these places anyway. They'll either have to make themselves over, or smolder with hatred and violence for another century or two.

The real problems need to be addressed: Overpopulation, dwindling resources, the spoiling of the environment. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan pale in comparison to these.