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attempt to forge a democracy in Afghanistan is well underway, seemingly
with an important supporter behind it: the Afghan people.
At least that's
what we're hearing from the more enthusiastic democracy boosters,
including James Woolsey, who wrote a Washington Post op-ed
a week or so ago titled "Objective: Democracy."
The boosters
make much of the fact that Afghans cheered, got shaves, flew kites,
bought VCRs, played music, and looked at pictures of Indian actresses
when the Taliban quit Kabul a few weeks ago.
But this demonstrates
that people don't like living under Islamic totalitarianism —
and little else. It tells us nothing about whether Afghans want,
or have an aptitude for, democracy.
Funny, but
there was all this celebration and elections for comptroller of
Kabul hadn't even been held yet. All this jubilation and Jamiat-i-Islami
and Harakat-i-Islami hadn't even begun their primary campaigns for
mayor of Mazar-e Sharif.
Peter Beinart
of The New Republic, in the most touchingly naïve statement
of all the democracy boosters, writes that the joyful reaction to
the liberation of Kabul suggests "that the aspirations of the
Muslim world deeply resemble our own."
Well, yes and
no. All people, even Afghan Muslims, like to listen to the radio.
But to extrapolate from that that everyone wants a constitutional
democracy (or that the objective conditions exist everywhere to
create one) is the worst sort of wishful thinking.
The World Values
Survey, for instance, asks people around the world what they think
of various institutions and ideas, including democracy, and oddly
enough, the answers differ around the world. Apparently not everyone
has gotten the message that their values are supposed to be universal.
When it comes
to Afghanistan, we can certainly encourage the Afghans to hold
a national election, but that is hardly the same thing as establishing
a democracy, which depends on many things besides the ballot box.
Where is civil
society in Afghanistan? Where is globalization, or at least an openness
to integration with world society? Where is the rule of law?
The absence
of all these factors — plus the presence of plenty of automatic
weapons, and young men with experience doing nothing besides using
them — makes democracy in any meaningful sense an unlikely
proposition. We shouldn't make it the benchmark of our success there.
In many ways, it might even be counterproductive.
What Afghanistan
needs most is stability. New democracies in the Third World are
notoriously unstable.
Also, it will
be a temptation to want to impose a centralized state on the Western
model in Afghanistan, where authority probably is best left to tribal
chieftains, who hold power without having won election campaigns
on promises of HMO reform or school vouchers.
As
James Robbins has pointed out on NRO, Afghanistan's "golden
age" (such as it was) was under a monarchy, the reign
of Zahir Shah from 1933-1973, when he pursued a reformist agenda
while "respecting the traditional powers of the Afghan tribal
leaders."
It was the
modernizers, the Communists, the Taliban, who — in that order
— set about trying to destroy the power of the tribes, thus
crushing pluralism in Afghanistan and creating the predicate for
wrecking the country.
There is another
problem with the premise of the democracy boosters. If democracy
is what this war is all about, why are we allied with Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf? Obviously because some things —
airfields, cracking down on militants — are more important
than elections.
As long as
Musharraf keeps his boot on the neck of the Islamists and generally
does what we want, why should we care whether or not he holds an
election for the next decade? If he pursues free-market reforms
that tend to help create a civil society and the rule of law, maybe
democracy would actually stick there ten years from now.
In any case,
it seems very unlikely that it will stick in Afghanistan. But two
or three years from now — when we have a truer picture of Afghan
politics — the democracy boosters will have shifted their attention
to the next country that supposedly proves that democratic values
are universal.
Let's hope
that at the very least the Afghans will then still have the freedom
to listen to the radio and fly kites — which is what all the
cheering has been about lately.
The
Case Against Clinton
If you haven't already, check out
Byron York's dissection in the new NR of the Clinton
record on terrorism. Andrew Sullivan has called it "devastating"
and James Taranto of opinionjournal says it will "infuriate
you."
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