Ishmael's joke

Rory Stewart in the October 1 Times Literary Supplement:

At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael imagines himself appearing on a bill, sandwiched between two great events. One is the “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States”; the other is the “Bloody battle in Affghanistan”.

The joke lies partly in incongruity: the lack of any connection between the United States and a landlocked country 7,500 miles away, a country so exotic that Herman Melville gives it the double letters that he elsewhere reserves for cannibals – Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans and the rest.

This is a place that could have no conceivable relevance to a Presidential election in the United States.

Over a century and a half later, Afghanistan mattered to presidents. It had become the theatre for “the longest war” in American history and, at $3 trillion, perhaps the most expensive.

The investment in Afghanistan alone dwarfed in real terms the entire Marshall Plan for Europe after the Second World War. Over one million US servicemen – and more civilian contractors – passed through Afghanistan on tours.

Every anthropologist, political scientist, journalist or linguist with the slightest connection to the place, or even to the idea of intervention, was guaranteed generous employment....