The College Hill Independent

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Lessons from an Unfinished Reconstruction
From Afghanistan to Iraq and back again
. . . by Alex Provan
[Illustration by Roger Whiting]

IN THE PAST TWO weeks, the Bush administration dealt a preemptive strike against those countries that oppose war with Iraq by beginning talk of what the post-Saddam Hussein order might look like. At the same time, the world was politely reminded what happened the last time we tried this. On February 27, Afghan president Hamid Karzai visited Washington, D.C. to encourage the U.S. not to let the current focus on Iraq hurt reconstruction in Afghanistan.

Recently, Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be two sides of a geopolitical scale in which Iraq is carrying more and more weight. The most prominent evidence of this is that President Bush has charged his special envoy to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, with the additional task of handling relations with the badly splintered Iraqi opposition groups that would govern after Hussein is deposed.

Shifting resources away from Afghanistan when reconstruction efforts are just beginning to make a visible impact could endanger the stability of the Afghan government. Such an action could also cast doubt on America’s promises to rebuild Iraq if there is a war and if American forces win that war. Ironically, American officials are looking to Afghanistan as an example of what could go right in Iraq precisely as their focus on Iraq threatens the recovery of Afghanistan.

Welcome to Kabulistan
The receding specter of the Taliban has revealed that most of Afghanistan’s countryside was always and still is ruled by regional warlords who control territories outside the influence of the central government. This makes it hard for the new Afghan government to operate outside Kabul, much less begin the process of reconstruction and democratization.

“Many people there say they want democracy,” says Michael Corkery, a reporter for the Providence Journal who spent six months last year in Afghanistan reporting on life after the Taliban and is currently stationed in Kuwait, waiting to cover war with Iraq. “But actually applying a framework in a society where power derives from tribal affiliation, money, and weaponry is extremely difficult.”

Not that anyone expected Afghanistan to transform from a feudal society into a prosperous democracy in a little over one year. But the gradual transformation might frustrate the flow of aid from Western countries. Last year the U.S. Congress passed a $3.3 billion, four-year aid package for Afghanistan. Recent budget constraints and the cost of mobilization for war on Iraq have forced the Bush administration to set reconstruction aid below the levels set by Congress, making it difficult for aid programs are to extend their reach beyond Kabul.

International aid groups like Care International argue that limiting peacekeeping to urban centers has had the effect of “increasing incidents of factional fighting and highway robbery elsewhere, threatening an already-fragile recovery.” But the sporadic yet consistent spate of bombings in Kabul over the past year hints at the dangers of moving reconstruction efforts into the countryside while the seat of the government has yet to be secured.

Scales keep tipping, though. The Bush administration recently announced that it is moving Special Forces that were training Afghan peacekeepers to Iraq and the Philippines, despite Afghanistan’s ongoing problems. Since the amount of refugees—2 million—that have returned to Afghanistan is more than triple the original estimate by the U.N., the amount of aid for each family has shrunk significantly. The country is experiencing its fifth consecutive year of drought. Regional commanders and anti-government forces continue factional fighting and occasional bombings like the ones on March 7 in Kabul and March 6 in Jalalabad. The opium trade in Southern Afghanistan continues to flourish, but without it farmers would starve. In Corkery’s words, “It’s one thing to establish an elected parliament. But there will be no order in Afghan society if people are hungry or they are living in unsafe conditions.”

Right, but back to Fanon…
As important as the logistical questions of reconstruction are the onerous moral and ethical questions. Is it possible to build democracy in a tribal society, or must it grow from the evolution of social, economic, and political institutions? Can this growth be accelerated? Is it chauvinistic to perceive of society as evolving toward democracy, to impose Western democratic institutions on a different culture? It is inevitable that critics question whether or not reconstruction is a process of doing what is right for Afghans or what is right for the Western world.

In A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon describes the French urge to remove the veils of Algerian women as a colonialist desire to demystify and control what is culturally foreign. For Fanon, the veil is a tool of cultural resistance against the imposition of values meant to insure foreign interests. The veil prevents the colonizer from seeing the face of the Algerian woman, from knowing it, from exploiting it. Though this may seem overly relativistic, it is worth acknowledging the importance of cultural identity in preserving the social fabric of a community, especially during times of crisis. There is an inherent divide between Western democracy and Afghan cultural and religious history. While reconstruction cannot ignore oppression carried out in the name of culture or religion, it must also respect local norms and traditions, maybe even ones that seem fundamentalist or anachronistic.

Right or wrong, politically correct or culturally chauvinistic, it is clear that reconstruction will not change Afghan society overnight. A recent U.N. report found that women in Afghanistan still face stringently enforced restrictions instituted by the Taliban in many parts of the country, and that nearly a dozen schools for girls have been destroyed in the past year.

The Afghan form of government and the Afghan culture will not change simultaneously. After all, democratic institutions did not exactly evolve naturally from an Afghan society ripe for change. What we are seeing is the unavoidable lag time after these institutions are put in place and before people embrace Western democratic ideals.

What is to be done?
In light of such complexities, the Afghan reconstruction effort has done fairly well. International peacekeeping forces and non-governmental aid organizations are gradually limiting violent reactions to the new order, extending the Afghan government’s power, isolating extremist elements, building roads and phone lines, and providing food for Afghans. These institutional reforms and aid efforts are a step in the direction of increasing the freedoms and opportunities of the Afghan people. But the absence of a trained civil service, along with the lack of transparency and accountability in government, has led to widespread corruption, particularly embezzlement by provincial officials of Karzai’s government.

Fareed Zakaria, author of the new book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, argues that the spread of democracy often comes at the expense of liberty. When unstable, underdeveloped countries are pushed too quickly toward democratization the result is often unstable, corrupt regimes, marred with ethnic infighting and built on precarious institutional frameworks. Previous traditions of corruption are merely embedded in a new form. The government may change, but this change in form may distract from the real aim of democratization, which is to increase the quality of life of a country’s citizens.

Fortunately for Afghanistan, it is possible to avoid these problems by establishing democracy and, simultaneously, maintaining incremental reforms that improve people’s living conditions and root out corruption. Despite criticisms that Karzai’s administration is merely a puppet government implemented by the West, for the West, the power vacuum in the wake of the Taliban’s collapse left few other options for establishing a legitimate political order.

Next contestant, please
In the event of war with Iraq, reconstruction will involve the economic challenge of rebuilding infrastructure decimated by American bombs. In Afghanistan, bombs merely reduced rubble to rubble, which saved us the cumbersome task of destroying something only to rebuild it.

While this simplifies the task of rebuilding Afghanistan, it adds to fears that war against Iraq will be a much larger financial burden. President Karzai’s assurances that “the United States will continue to support Afghanistan and that the attention there will be focused and continuous, and that Iraq will not reduce attention from Afghanistan,” seem more hopeful than practical.

Under the Taliban, infrastructure and political influence were limited to urban centers. Iraq’s relative modernity allows Hussein to come in contact with millions of people every day—most of Afghanistan’s population lacks any previous contact with such a centralized authority. This could make it easier to convince the Afghan people of the benefits of democratization, as long as it does not transgress their cultural norms, but harder to do the same in Iraq. War may not be easy. But looking at Afghanistan to see what to do in Iraq reveals that trying to change a country’s political culture makes dropping bombs seem like child’s play.

Alex Provan B’05: making the world safe for democracy.

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