03 November 2009
Afghanistan Has No Nationalist Imperative
Steve Coll has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and speaks with a lot of authority. However, his comment in the October 26, 2009 New Yorker ignores his own warning not to fall prey to “mirror imaging.” There is no nationalist imperative in the Afghan psyche. When that country has been free of invading foreign armies, civil order has been confined to localities within a political system of practically autonomous fiefdoms. That condition is not chaos; it’s just anarchy.
Certainly anarchy assaults Western liberal democratic (and autocratic, for that matter) sensibilities; but it suits the Afghan temperament. In part, this may owe to the topology of the country: an assemblage of cellular communities divided from each other by hard mountainous shells. The anomaly of Afghanistan has bedeviled Western, Russian, and Asian empire-builders for centuries, not just since the 1979 Soviet invasion.
Mr. Coll’s nation-building agenda (election reform, ethnic integration, political party growth, constitutional and governmental reorganization, eradication of corruption and drug-dealing, and non-violent dispute resolution) might well eliminate security-threatening disorder in a culture that values the rule of law. However, Afghanistan’s culture primarily values family and clan welfare. In this environment the American and Western objective of securing their own safety can best be assured by monitoring a place like Afghanistan, intervening in it when necessary, and letting it behave in its anarchic way the rest of the time.
Steve Coll has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and speaks with a lot of authority. However, his comment in the October 26, 2009 New Yorker ignores his own warning not to fall prey to “mirror imaging.” There is no nationalist imperative in the Afghan psyche. When that country has been free of invading foreign armies, civil order has been confined to localities within a political system of practically autonomous fiefdoms. That condition is not chaos; it’s just anarchy.
Certainly anarchy assaults Western liberal democratic (and autocratic, for that matter) sensibilities; but it suits the Afghan temperament. In part, this may owe to the topology of the country: an assemblage of cellular communities divided from each other by hard mountainous shells. The anomaly of Afghanistan has bedeviled Western, Russian, and Asian empire-builders for centuries, not just since the 1979 Soviet invasion.
Mr. Coll’s nation-building agenda (election reform, ethnic integration, political party growth, constitutional and governmental reorganization, eradication of corruption and drug-dealing, and non-violent dispute resolution) might well eliminate security-threatening disorder in a culture that values the rule of law. However, Afghanistan’s culture primarily values family and clan welfare. In this environment the American and Western objective of securing their own safety can best be assured by monitoring a place like Afghanistan, intervening in it when necessary, and letting it behave in its anarchic way the rest of the time.
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