Iraq and Afghanistan

By Behzad Shahandeh

The surge in military operations in Afghanistan modeled on the troop increase in Iraq is being presented as the key to bringing stability to the war-torn country. This logic is flawed and will only lead to more misery, since the fundamentals of the two cases are totally different.

Iraq prior to 2003, not discounting the fact that the Baathist regime had been both immoral and inadequate, was a functioning state meeting most of the basic criteria of statehood, and exhibited some tradition of central authority and organization. The country's population was mostly urban, living in key cities of the valleys between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In addition, Iraq was endowed with educated people, an industrial base and working private and public sectors.

The fragile stability that Iraq now boasts should not be attributed to the surge, but rather to the consensus that different groupings within the society painfully reached in joining forces to rebuild a country possessing all the ingredients needed to forge a new state. The conflict in Iraq was always about competing groups striving to form a government on their own terms. Thus, the accommodation has come not because of the surge, but rather of an ``Iraqi Awakening" and reconciliation on the part of all Iraqis to start anew.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the above factors are missing. The country is more rural, and its population more dispersed, having an impenetrable terrain not conducive to central rule. It has hardly experienced a basic level of national organization or the sophistication that comes with urban living.

Nation building in Afghanistan will be a long and tortuous process. The country is bitterly divided not only across ethnic lines, but also religious and ideological divides. It is virtually in a civil war and will never become stable without the very divergent groups reaching a consensus to build, rather than rebuild, a state. The conflict is more about rejection of central authority than about the seizure and exercise of it.

While the civil war in Iraq was centered on the division of the wealth of the state, the one in Afghanistan is, at least partially, more primal and less material, and differs by the two groups pitted against each other. On one side is the city-based political coalition of the Northern Alliance, which has been formed by the country's ethnic minorities with selected warlords and relies on the narcotics economy. On the other side stands the religious extremist Pashtun movement, allied with other warlords and partly financed by narcotics, but whose political agenda is to establish an Islamic state with Sharia as the law of the land.

The other factors that further complicate the situation in Afghanistan are the country's limited infrastructure, a large illiterate population, and a rudimentary economy, that when combined with the above-mentioned political, ethnic, and religious elements make the challenge of accommodation significantly more complicated than in Iraq.

The country still has a long way to go to create an ``Afghan Awakening," as everything needs to be built from scratch, whereas Iraq was endowed with the fundamentals of state formation. Moreover, there was a realization, on the part of the Iraqis, that working together was a non-zero sum game where all stood to gain. On the contrary, Afghanistan is beset by a complex web of animosities in its society, while also suffering from a lack of infrastructures for state building.

It was not the surge that brought stability, albeit a fragile one, to Iraq, but a consensus reached within the society to rise up from the ruins of war and rebuild a new state because the fundamentals already existed. The absence of the latter, in Afghanistan's case, makes it a daunting challenge to achieve in the foreseeable future what Iraq has done, with or without a surge.

The writer is an Iranian professor teaching at the Graduate School of International Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. He can be reached at shahandeh2001@yahoo.com.