After Hamid Karzai's latest act, appointing all the members of the electoral commission so that in future it won't do troubling things like point out his widespread involvement in voting fraud, any attempt to defend NATO policy in Afghanistan on the grounds of democracy promotion sounds fairly stale. Does anyone remember those justifications circulated at the time of the original invasion - that by overthrowing the Taliban we'd be able to secure rights for women living behind the burkah? How quaint and outmoded they seem now.
"We were puzzled and disturbed last year when the Obama administration didn’t — or couldn’t — persuade Mr. Karzai to run a reasonably clean race," writes the New York Times. "Aren’t tens of thousands of American troops and billions of dollars in American aid enough leverage?" Well, no, unfortunately they're not. Karzai is no fool; he knows that politically and militarily the US is deeply exposed through its commitment to solving Afghanistan's problems, and that no president could deal with the domestic political fallout of straightforwardly giving up and going home. At this stage, like it or not, the Karzai government is the only game in town. The presence of US troops is no leverage when they're only there to meet self-interested commitments.
Moreover, corruption is a systemic phenomenon; blaming Karzai alone falsely implies that simply putting a different person in power would end a condition endemic to Afghan life.
What's most disturbing about the current situation is the increasing divergence between political debate in the West about the situation in Afghanistan, and the geopolitical realities facing the Western powers. If you switched on to most TV channels or read most blogs, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the choice that NATO faces is withdrawing and letting the Taliban thrive, or staying and building a democracy. But this language of democracy building is only marginally more hubristic than the old Rumsfeld axiom that democracies emerge simply by removing dictatorships.
Unfortunately, at the moment it looks like what the United States and other powers are engaged in in Afghanistan, is building a military dictatorship. Probably this will be a military regime that maintains a pretence of electoral democracy, but it will be a military dictatorship all the same. With virtually no exceptions, this has been the condition that pre-capitalist states have developed into following American interventions in the past, and despite the world moving on there's little so far to suggest the outcome will be different here.
Why? First, because when it comes to a choice between the liberal, democratic aspirations of Western foreign policy and fundamental questions of national security, the second always wins. It may not seem to be a choice in the formulation commonly trotted out by politicians. But when wars against insurgencies become conflicts of attrition, pressure for withdrawal grows on the home front and this inevitably raises the possibility of a trade off. If Karzai can exploit the military operations taking place at the moment to build an Afghan army capable of keeping the Taliban insurgency pinned down to a small few regions of Afghanistan, then the West will take that deal even if it doesn't come with a functioning democratic system.Obama has to date oscillated between the rhetoric of liberalism and the policy of a more traditional conservative. But when it comes to foreign policy in the midst of a financial crisis, sooner or later everyone's a realist.
Second, and related, the basic actions of the NATO forces in Afghanistan today are focused upon a single task: securing territory in a sustainable manner by creating an overwhelmingly powerful military, capable of claiming a monopoly or near monopoly over the use of violence. This incentivises leaders to promote the interests of the army above all others. But more fundamentally, it means that there will be only one real power left on the ground when NATO withdraws.
Democracy doesn't happen in nations because everyone agrees consensually that it's a good idea: it happens when centres of power develop which are capable of effectively restraining one another, thus requiring formalised procedures to manage dissent. First, an independent landed aristocracy restraining the monarch, then a yeoman class of small farmers requiring obligations from the aristocracy. After that, a middle class of merchants, traders, and businesspeople, and finally mass movements of workers, petty bourgeois employees and tertiary sector workers: these groups represent not just different parts of a society but also alternative sources of power, ones that are capable of resisting each other and thus forced to reach some kind of modus operandi. Madison was never more right in point out that faction must quell faction. And in effect, none of these groups exist in Afghanistan.
Instead, in Afghanistan, you have a society of militarised tribal groups dominated by powerful local bosses or warlords. Any central government must therefore have sufficient strength to be able to either dominate or co-opt these powerful groups. Even constructing this kind of a balance of authority and power is a difficult task: just ask Chiang Kai-Shek. So it's ridiculous to expect a Western state suddenly to appear. Since neither side is concerned with the issue, democracy just doesn't come into it.
Think Of the Children
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