Afghans, who since last October endured long waits to register to vote for president and provincial council delegates, went to the polls on Saturday to elect a new government.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, when it comes to Afghanistan, the devil is always in the details. Will this new elected leadership be up to the challenge of stabilizing this fractious land, torn apart by ethnic conflict, endemic corruption and what social scientists call ascriptive inequality, a land that has failed, from the time of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the Taleban resurgence today, to establish the kind of social institutions that would have helped it transform itself into a genuine nation state?
When Americans, along with their NATO allies, invaded Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, they toppled the Taleban in what appeared to be a blink. Unfortunately, this easy victory lulled them into falsely believing that a viable nation state in Afghanistan could be built just as easily. Call that, if you wish, another one of their “mission accomplished” moments. Twelve years and uncounted billions of dollars later, the US has nothing to show for it. Afghanistan remains a basket case. So what gives?
The belief that Afghans are an ungovernable people has become virtually the conventional wisdom that drives the public debate in the US, and perhaps elsewhere around the world where ethnocentric commentary is not a norm in the media. The issue is not that Afghans are ungovernable, for no people are but rather that for centuries they were held together — to the extent that you could hold Pushtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks together as a cohesive polity — by a social system unique to Afghanistan, where the idea of one-man, one-vote, and parliamentary democracy, were an alien concept. Throughout its history, the country has known nothing but established elites, or “professional rulers,” who saw government as their exclusive domain, a domain that elicited no political involvement by the majority of the population, especially those in the rural areas, who were left to carve out their own lives, their own way, so long as they did not challenge state authority.
Now the US has given itself the daunting task of reconstituting this long entrenched political culture — and doing it without giving the whole enterprise the stigma of foreign imposition. Despite the best of intentions, what the West is paradoxically doing there today is to restore that flawed system — however nicely that system is redefined.
To start with, along with the fact that elections in Afghanistan had never played a role in its political traditions, there is the contradiction inherent in reconciling US talk about democracy with the little power expected to be delegated to public institutions. The 2004 constitution, for example, created a government that in reality was no different from those governments of yore ruled by the “professional elites.”
It will become clear within a day or two who Afghan voters have elected to run their country. And why, you ask, is it doubtful that that Afghanistan will, any time real soon, meet the challenges of modernity and begin to transform itself into a viable nation state that derives is legitimacy from an equally viable social contract between ruler and ruled, checks and balances, accountability.
A country underperforms when it is unable or unwilling to accumulate human capital, which is a necessary function of progress in a society, and because its dominant political elite uses its control over national resources to uphold its privileges, a practice known in not so polite circles as corruption. Corruption, especially when it is rampant, never fails to have a corrosive effect on the body politic, in this case on education, on individual initiative, on social justice, on public services, on personal rights, on access to information, on health care and, well, name it.
Since the advent of NATO troops, too much money has been thrown at Afghanistan in the form of aid, the bulk of which has gone to that small but powerful elite of government officials, warlords and businessmen with the right connections. In 2010, for example, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world’s most corrupt country, with graft permeating all levels of officialdom. To be sure, this process will not just have a corrosive impact on society; it will immobilize it, and leave it repeating itself helplessly from generation to generation, running around the treadmill of immemorially posited norms.
