Is Nation-Building an Option?

On August 16th, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said, “When you adopt someone’s culture you believe it to be superior and you end up becoming a slave to it…What is happening in Afghanistan now, they have broken the shackles of slavery.”

While this may be rich coming from a Pakistani leader who studied at British private schools and made his fame and fortune playing the ultimate British colonialist game, cricket, one wonders if he has a point.

The tragedy of the last few days in Afghanistan will have many people thinking about nation building for many years. From every perspective, this approach has failed miserably in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya – three Muslim countries in which the West intervened to implant Western-style democracy.

One of the main questions that policy makers should be asking if it is realistic to engage in nation building in nations that are so imbued in their traditional cultures that they see Western democracy and concepts of human rights as a threat to their fundamental beliefs and indeed, inimical to their culture.

Western concepts of governance and human rights have taken millennia to achieve – millennia filled with war, oppression, massacres, injustices, inequalities, religious and ethnic persecutions, and the various “isms” of the 20th century.

And even today, if one analyzes the United States, it is far from being a model democracy. An attempted coup on January 6th, and legislation passed by many Republican led legislatures to bar access to voting by African Americans and other minorities stand out as examples of the disdain for fundamental individual rights by many Americans and their democratically elected leaders. 

So, is it realistic for us to expect cultures that are radically different in their values and essence from our own will embrace an alien culture? 

Is it feasible to assume that they will achieve in a decade or two what we ourselves have not fully achieved in three millennia?

That was the hope that the West had of its intervention in Afghanistan for the past two decades.

So, the question is, can fundamental values be imposed from outside the culture, or must they develop from within the culture as part of a historical process?

According to an article in the Washington Post by Craig Whitlock of December 9th, 2019, Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015 that  “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” . He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modelled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

“Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. “The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.”

In public, U.S. officials insisted that they tolerated no graft. However, in confidential interviews made public by the Post, they admitted that U.S. authorities turned a blind eye while Afghan leaders — allies of Washington — reportedly stole at will.

U.S. officials told interviewers that, “by allowing corruption to fester, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the nascent Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order”.

So, there we have it. 

The United States and its allies didn’t really know the country or society that they were trying to change, had no real game plan for executing this massive exercise in social engineering, and had no exit strategy. They had no spending discipline or strategic planning capability. 

We have seen the result, and it leads me to believe that one cannot force social change at the barrel of a gun or by opening a wallet. It takes years of “soft power” to create the basis for real change in any society, and, to date, Western governments or publics have shown little patience and vision to do the job right.

Edición: Laura Espejo