Iraq and Afghanistan

In two interesting papers, Andreas Wimmer and colleagues argue that Afghanistan and Iraq are ineffective states, unable to control or service the people for whom they are responsible. He argues that in this condition of state collapse, the first task of the international community should be strengthening state institutions rather than the establishment of functioning democracies. It is an appealing argument, and one I have made in other forms many times in this blog. We need, for example, to be less concerned with establishing “civic society”, that basis for good democracy that has become so popular in the literature. What we need are administrations that can provide health, education, security, and legal services that are both effective and acceptable to the greater part of the population.

The problem then becomes: How does America get from the position it has painted itself into to the position that Wimmer would have us occupy? Fortunately, it would appear that his goal is, attainable in Afghanistan. Although we have talked a great deal about democracy there, we have committed relatively little money and relatively few troops to the enterprise. The same for the larger international community. This leaves us an opportunity to put further democratization on a back burner and concentrate on creating effective state services. Sometimes the two overlap; sometimes they do not. One of Wimmer’s suggestions would be to talk less about international human rights, particularly issues such as women’s rights, and concentrate on establishing an effective system that will make possible any rights at all. Similarly, if Karzai goes ahead with the planned parliamentary elections, we should not be too exercised about the fine points. If a legislature is established that is widely accepted, then the government can function, and functioning is the first step.

The situation in Iraq is more difficult. We have made so much of the democracy side that we will be disappointing large segments of the population if we do not carry on in this vein. This will be true of both the secular and religious groups, for they are both figuring out how to manage the system we have promised for their own ends. But there must be priorities. Violence has been the story of Iraq’s political life for too long. We should support almost anything that brings down the level. It is what we want and what the man in the street wants, if not necessarily his political leaders. Likewise, we have identified, falsely I would suggest, but nevertheless have, capitalism with democracy. Iraq today is almost entirely a state-run economy. People “out of work” means primarily that the state no longer has the positions that Saddam had open for the average person. The job the United States and the Iraqi government must resolutely tackle is to get the economy functioning, at any ideological cost. If this means reestablishing some of the state institutions that characterized the former state, we should at least temporarily do that. It is no time to throw “cold water” on the people in a misguided attempt to move them immediately into a capitalist economy. Get the society working, then reform it, should be our approach, regardless of how far this may diverge from the standards of the modern liberal society that we hold out as the future for all peoples.