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COMMENTARY
November 8, 2003
Afghan dreams
While there is something heroic in the attempt to endow Afghanistan with a modern Western-style democratic constitution there is also something quite ludicrous about the project. It seems certain to fail. And it seems certain to fail because of the assumptions that underlie it -- in particular the assumption that "democracy" is possible in a society that is tribal. Yet the thing is tried because no alternative is thinkable (to the post-modern mind). This is where the heroism comes in a characteristically post-modern heroism in which an attempt is made to create an order out of something defined only by what it is not. Example the draft Afghan constitution -- which will be presented for amendment to a tribal congress called a Loya Jirga soon -- has been praised for specifically excluding Islamic Sharia law as a principle of order. But no alternative to Sharia is named or suggested. Will it be Roman? Napoleonic? British common law? This is not an academic question: law is a system with its own logic and a system based on vague notions of what feels right at the moment is not a system of law. Nor can it be invented ex nihilo to suit all contingencies. Nor can or will it replace the unwritten ancient codes of honour. Now the paradox here is that Sharia is a system of law and justice specifically adapted more than a thousand years ago to a tribal social order. It would probably make more sense in Afghanistan than almost anywhere else in the world. The reason for not adopting it is because there is an intention to de-tribalize Afghanistan. But that intention is more in the nature of a vain hope than of an act of will. The constitution looks outwardly American -- no prime minister but a president and vice president upper and lower houses an independent judiciary. But one in which the president -- we assume it will continue to be Hamid Karzai if he can be kept alive -- has extraordinary power. A prime minister would provide an alternative centre of power -- not a good idea in Afghanistan. And in a country with a long history of cabinet shoot-outs and the like they have wisely made it impossible for the vice president to permanently succeed the president. More glaringly a unitary state is being declared -- one without formal provinces. This is especially "heroic" in a country where the central power has as today seldom extended much beyond the valleys around Kabul. The real situation on the ground is a country divided along ethnic linguistic and religious lines into half-a-dozen major regions in each of which a "warlord" or strongman has unchallenged authority. One can only wish good luck to them . The Taliban are trying to regroup -- less successfully than Western media reports would indicate. They do however enjoy free passage at most times of day across the lawless frontier with Pakistan and have their own tribal loyalties to call upon in the Pashtun south and east of the country. Now the warlords are needed to keep the Taliban in check. So that a scheme which requires the new Afghan army or its foreign protectors to remove the power of the warlords is a scheme that advances the interests of the Taliban. A wiser course -- one which President Karzai pursues in practice but not in theory -- is to govern the country as it has always been governed by give-and-take between the regional interests gradually winning the warlords over to the economic advantages of free passage through their jealously-guarded domains and letting the society "modernize" at its own pace. But we live in a world today governed by crackpot theories rather than by human experience. So that problems we shouldn't have must be created. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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