Iraq and Afghanistan

For some years now the world has been moving toward more widely practiced freedoms. There has been and always will be some backsliding among those countries that achieve for a time a high "freedom rating". Right now we are interested most directly in what is happening and has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The critical problem for Afghanistan is the increasing dependence of the economy on the growing, processing, and overseas distribution of opium. Opium is now over fifty percent of the economy and represents nearly all of the nation's exports. This dependence of the farmers is reflected in a growing ability of the warlords to maintain their armies and control in much of the country. There is no easy way out of the box in which the country finds itself. I suppose the country could have a fully functioning democratic narcostate, but experience in Colombia and elsewhere casts doubt on this outcome. The end result may be a state pressured by the United States to act forcibly against opium in ways that neither the people nor the warlords will accept. This would seem to give an opening for a Taliban comeback.

The critical problem in Iraq is that of often hostile communities that are likely to find it even more difficult to live together under democracy than they were under authoritarian rule. The country could either split up or relapse into a prolonged state of violence between ins and outs, Sunni Arab and Shi'a, Kurds and the rest, Fundamentalists and secularists — and within each of these groups many subgroups struggling for a place in the sun.

The more general problem with democratic transition, and one reason why we now notice some "backsliders" is that the measures of freedom or democracy are faulty. (Freedom and democracy are not the same thing, but this is a difficult discussion that I do not want to enter into here.) One free and fair election accompanied by several independent newspapers are sometimes enough to get a rating of "free". But the real test of democracy is bound to come later. Remember that nearly every former colony in the post-colonial world came to independence after a free and fair election. The first post-colonial government was, then, "democratic". But too often there was either a coup or political and social conditions that did not allow for the first generation of leaders to be displaced through democratic processes, and sometimes both. The most recent example may be what happened in Zimbabwe after it finally became free of British control, direct and later indirect, and Mugabe was elected. Democracy has been on a downhill trajectory in the country ever since. The test of democracy must, then, be at least a minimal degree of democratic continuity. A country should not really be considered a democracy until there is an election (and accompanying campaigning, free media etc.) that allows for a change in leadership to a new party, or to something approximating a new party.

These comments suggest that the road to democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Middle East, may run into boulders that we have not yet noticed. We should be looking out for them as we press forward. But this does not mean that real possibilities are not opening up, that there may, in fact, be a democracy coming back to Lebanon and developing in Palestine. We should also not undervalue the "partly free" or controlled democracies that may come first. These can represent real progress for the people concerned, just as we have seen in Malaysia and Singapore. For the near future, such democracy may be an attainable and desirable way station on the road to freedom for many peoples.