Afghanistan's democratic mirage
By Park Jung-won
After the United States withdrew most of its remaining forces from Afghanistan, it took only three months for the Afghan government to collapse in the face of attacks by a resurgent Taliban. Soon after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government discovered that they were perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, the militant Islamist group led by Osama bin Laden, and that they had been hiding in Afghanistan.
When the Taliban regime, which then ruled the country, rejected U.S. demands to extradite Al-Qaeda's leadership, the United States invaded with the support of the United Nations Security Council's resolutions. Initially, the U.S.'s goal was to find Al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime, but its mission subsequently evolved into the project of establishing a democratic state in Afghanistan with U.N. assistance.
Many analysts point out that the U.S. should have withdrawn from Afghanistan after achieving its original goals as part of the “War on Terror.” At the time, however, there was also a clear global tendency to carry out democracy-building projects in post-war countries in the name of “humanitarian occupation.”
There had already been encouraging examples in that direction in post-war or post-civil war territories, with the support of the U.N. after the end of the Cold War, even if the extent of success in each case varied, such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and East Timor.
However, such efforts appear to have failed in Afghanistan. One of the decisive reasons for this failure seems to have been the inability to understand the nature of Afghan society as it is, as well as the lack of any capacity to implement an effective strategy for building and sustaining democracy.
In his 1989 essay, “The End of History?” political scientist Francis Fukuyama, having witnessed a dramatic turning point in human history against the backdrop of the rapid deterioration of the Soviet Union and communism in general, claimed that economic and political liberalism had triumphed as the dominant forms of human governance.
This confidence in the mutual compatibility of liberal democracy, human rights and economic development was based on a belief in the infinite possibilities of the welfare state within a liberal democratic structure.
The welfare state's demonstrated effectiveness, in which economically disadvantaged and discriminated minorities in a society could be provided a minimum of economic stability and respect for human dignity, was the justification for such an optimistic view.
But the welfare state ideal was not always borne out by reality. Indeed, societies, as a result of inherent human faults and unfavorable circumstances, are not always guided by a kind of Kantian reason. Some countries, especially those that have recently experienced particularly traumatic episodes of colonization and civil war, do not have the “state capacity” to create such democratic welfare states immediately.
Some scholars of democracy agree to the idea of “democratic recession” posited by Larry Diamond, and acknowledge that these post-war (or post-civil war) countries might not be able to maintain democratic accountability by satisfying the demands of the people, because they currently lack “state capacity.”
Contemporary Afghanistan is composed of over ten ethnic and linguistic minority groups. Since these tribal groups have been hostile to each other, often fomented by direct and indirect foreign intervention, in the absence of efficient political and institutional mechanisms for integrating such groups into a power-sharing agreement, Afghan society was not likely to become a stable democratic society.
Afghanistan's 2004 constitution, created under U.S. influence, contained positive provisions on women's and other rights, yet it also provided powerful presidential authority that ignored the reality of Afghan society. It did not reflect the heterogeneous character of a country highly divided by its multi-tribal, multi-ethnic composition.
In other words, unless these different groups entered Afghan institutional systems smoothly through “power-sharing,” it was impossible to create an integrated society within the framework of liberal democracy. Under these unfavorable conditions, it would have been a miracle to establish and implement a stable political, economic and social system.
Another issue is the fact that nearly two-thirds of Afghanistan's population is under 25 years of age. Due to years of war, many of these young people have been poorly educated and find it extremely difficult to obtain a stable job to make a living and set up a family. In these circumstances, joining the Taliban to earn money by doing chores such as planting landmines may seem a worthwhile choice.
This miserable picture resonates with the thoughts of the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who observed that human beings will readily relinquish their personal freedoms if they feel that making a living is impossible in a disorderly society.
Without the acknowledgment of this reality by Afghan leaders and their foreign allies, the cherished dream of building a democratic state in Afghanistan will be nothing more than a mirage, however much money and assistance is poured in from outside.
Park Jung-won (park_jungwon@hotmail.com), Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics (LSE), is professor of international law at Dankook University.