Iraq and Afghanistan

In a recent Op-Ed, Rory Stewart who runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and has been much involved In Afghan and Iraq affairs lashes out at what he sees as the foolishness and pretension involved in our project to make Afghanistan into a fully functioning democracy in the next few years. He claims that few Afghans have any idea of what democracy is, and even if they knew, they have many other items higher on their agenda. He is contemptuous of the frequent assertions that the people prefer democracy to shari'a law. Repeating the claim doesn't make it so. In many areas they prefer to have Taliban rather than foreign troops in control. Elsewhere, warlords are often in power locally because the people prefer them to the alternatives. He attacks our misconceptions only because they lead to poor policy.

This is not to say that the American amd NATO effort has had no achievements. The streets of Kabul are relatively quiet, the Hazara minority nearby is more secure and prosperous than it has ever been. With the right kind of international assistance the country can become more humane, prosperous and stable.

The difficulty with Stewart's analysis is that it leaves the United States and NATO with no overarching ideological objectives. We have defined success in terms of democracy. We have not given ourselves an alternative. As I have written elsewhere, such an alternative is badly needed. We need to realize that many countries in the world are much higher on the scales of human happiness without democracy than are others with democracy. We should not be apologetic about supporting Musharref, a military dictator next door in Pakistan. He deserves our support because he is able to hold a fractious country together and resist the siren song of Islamic fundamentalism. By doing so, he is able to support a higher level of human rights in many regards than would be possible if the true opinions of Pakistanis were to be heard through the ballot box. Likewise, we may well end up in Afghanistan with a "controlled democracy" that does not allow enough dissent to really become democratic, but which is able to preserve the peace, cut down on dependence on opium, and improve the educational standards of the people, particularly the women.