Afghanistan’s George Washington?
Nation-building in Bonn.

akers of states and givers of laws stood at the top of the old-fashioned hierarchies of greatness. To conditores imperiorum — creators of commonwealths — was given the highest fame, whether they were legendary figures like Romulus, or real men like Washington and Franklin, Hamilton and Jefferson, Madison and Adams. The great lawgivers came next in the pyramid: legislatores such as Lycurgus, Solon, Justinian, and John Marshall.

What opportunities exist for that kind of greatness today? In the West, very few, for the heroic foundation-laying work has been completed. There does, of course, continue to arise, every half-century or so, the need for what the old-fashioned connoisseurs of greatness called patres patriae and salvatores imperii, fathers and saviors of their country: Lincoln and Churchill, for example, or F.D.R. and Reagan. But for revolutionary, state-making greatness, there is little need, in this part of the world; the machinery now in place works.

How different the situation in the East! Even before the events of September 11, you could hear the history-making goddess's call, bawling incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, on some faintly audible Oriental frequency. Wanted: a great man — or rather a generation of great men (and women), capable of rising up in an Islamic state and demonstrating, in a concrete effort at state-making, that the traditions of Islam are not incompatible with individual liberty and private rights, or with the rule of law and the legitimate forms of constitutionally-ordered government.

The precedents are there, at least in theory. One supposes the State Department has gathered up this theoretical material — the work of so many Islamic Lockes and Muslim Montesquieus — and sent copies to the conference on the future of Afghanistan now convened near Bonn, to be distributed as background material for use by the Afghan delegates. (Memo to Secretary of State Powell: If our diplomats haven't yet done this, they ought to get the department's mimeograph machines busy.) For this revolutionary material exists — the work of quiet scholars laboring obscurely in various parts of the Islamic world, thoughtful people who have attempted to show that the traditions of Islam, properly interpreted, contain materials from which a theory of democratic practice and a form of constitutional government can plausibly be derived. Some of these efforts are more convincing than others; but even if it could be conclusively shown that all of them were far-fetched and overstrained, it would nevertheless be in the American interest, and perhaps the interest of the Muslim peoples as well, to subsidize them to the hilt.

When, in 1998, I visited North Africa, I met people there who discussed the work of these intellectuals with quiet enthusiasm and cautious hope. I remember especially the story of a reclusive scholar in Cairo, the master of a fastidious Arabic prose style, who published, in the 1920s, a slim volume in which he argued that the traditions of the despotic regimes were unfaithful to the teachings of the Prophet. His work was denounced as heretical by the authorities of Al-Azhar; it was said that the devil had dictated his words; but even the imams were awed by the high grace of his learning. His admirers liked to think of him as an Islamic Martin Luther, one who struck a blow for freedoms that have too often been thwarted through the despotic corruption of religion.

And yet, the dreams of the intellectuals have borne no fruit: No statesman has yet succeeded in translating their ideas into a practical political program, or in making those ideas the basis of a functioning Islamic state. There is little evidence that the liberal theories of these philosophes are capable of inspiring the Muslim masses; and even the bright students in the universities seem to be drawn, not to the ideas of the indigenous Jefferson manqués, but to those narrow and suicidal dogmas that have darkened the face of Islamic learning.

Perhaps it is not simply a want of great men with which we are here concerned; conditions, too, conspire against the creation of a flourishing form of Islamic freedom. We have heard much of these conditions in recent weeks — have heard how poverty, primitive economic conditions, and the absence of any practical experience of a liberal society make the establishment of a new form of civil order unlikely in the Islamic world, at least for the time being. (Turkey is an anomalous bright spot on the otherwise grim horizon.) Islamic regimes have rarely been sympathetic to modern ideals of individual liberty and constitutional government; and when, in recent years, they have drawn on the models of the modern West, they have generally gravitated toward the most deplorable ones: the socialism Gamal Abdel Nasser championed in Egypt, the one-party dictatorship adopted by the Baath party in Iraq and in Syria, the fanatical nihilism which some have detected in the ideals of the Islamic terrorists.

The Northern Alliance fighters and tribal chieftains in Afghanistan promise to be magnanimous, to engage in no vendettas, to break the cycle of violence, and to deal justly with the criminals they apprehend; they vow to address the question of political power, the reorganization of the state, and the distribution of the spoils of war responsibly and equitably. But they may simply be telling the war correspondents what they think their sponsors in Washington and London want to hear. Is it really likely that there is a nation-builder like George Washington among the tribal warlords, jealous enough of fame, and conscious enough of the judgment of posterity, to put the interests of the whole ahead of those of a particular faction or tribe? Or that, if such a prodigy indeed exists, he will find men of the caliber of Adams and Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton — men whose honor he can trust, and on whose competence he can rely?

It is unlikely that we will see such a miracle in Kabul. We can supply the Afghan chiefs with money and food, and with advice on the drafting of constitutions and the calling of parliaments; we can fill the bookstores of Kandahar and Kunduz with new editions of those Islamic Martin Luthers whose work might serve to counter the fanatical visions of the reactionary mullahs; we can even superintend, at a discreet distance, the compilation and publication of a sort of Islamic Encyclopédie devoted to the work of those Muslims who believe that Islam is not incompatible with law and liberty, and whose blueprint for a liberal and democratic Muslim state could serve as a Federalist Papers for a new generation of Falasifah, as the Islamic philosophers of the golden age were called. Above all, we can work to avoid making the mistake of President Wilson, who failed to intersperse his homilies on the virtues of a democratic order with advice phrased in an idiom which regional nation-builders could understand — wisdom drawn from their own ideals and traditions, and expressed in their own languages and dialects. (It is precisely because so many Islamic intellectuals have rejected the idea that the American Revolution can serve as a model for their own struggles that a new, Islamic version of a pamphlet like Common Sense is necessary — a pamphlet composed, not by Englishmen or Americans, but by the best of the liberal Islamic thinkers). We can do these things — or see to it that they are done — but they are unlikely to be enough. The odds against success are daunting.

Still, before we surrender to a premature pessimism, we should remind ourselves that, although the Founders of the American Republic possessed many advantages that the men who will lead a new Afghanistan do not possess, the efforts of the Americans, in the 1770s and 1780s, appeared — at the time — almost as hopelessly quixotic. The American Founders set themselves to take on the most powerful empire of the day; and they sought, too, to impose an enduring republican political order on a vast extent of territory and a large and heterogeneous mass of people — something which all the experts of the time agreed could not be done. The Americans defied the experts, and made history. Can the tribal leaders and freedom fighters in Afghanistan — helped, not hindered, by the money and arms and printing presses of the most powerful nation of the day — do something similarly audacious? Betting men would doubtless balk at the wager. And yet what odds do you suppose the London bookies were giving George Washington in 1776?