The Democracy Fetish
Please, stop all the cheerleading for democracy in Afghanistan.

December 5, 2001 12:05 p.m.

he 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."