So Hamid Karzai was shamed by his colonial overlords into staging a second round of the election, after a UN-backed fraud investigation stripped him of his original majority.
This was a result of intense pressure from foreign leaders, and a good talking to from John Kerry. A triumph for democracy.
Simon Jenkins, in a great article for the Guardian, starts by pulling apart the current international scandal over the Afghan elections, and finishes by pulling apart the arrogant liberal project of nation-building. It's excellent food for thought. I’m going to include some quotes below the fold, and follow up on some of Jenkins’ thoughts.
Over to Jenkins:
The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston... In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and Nato incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5%.
Karzai was installed by America, in order to buy and bribe his way to power with American cash, so it's slightly comical that the Americans and their friends now throwing a hissy fit over some rigged votes. Do they really think elections are miracle cures for bloody imperialist rampages? Put a piece of paper in a box and suddenly the Taliban will go away?
Of course not. But election fraud would make the whole war, the thousands of dead and injured, the whole aid effort and the painstaking capacity-building from all those UN agencies and NGOs look... well, pointless and expensive. Because in the lexicon of liberalism, there are only two things worth fighting for: democracy and freedom, and apparently those are the same thing.
Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, American voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by "being given democracy", much as Victorian Britons gave them God and the Queen.
So far there are two issues raised. The first is whether an election is at all a meaningful symbol of democracy in such a broken country. The second is what we are trying to achieve by imposing democracy in the first place. Do we have Afghans' best interests at heart, or are we saluting an abstract ideal? Do we need to do it for them, or do we need to do it for us?
Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the west decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.
It’s clear that this hubris exists when you consider that we had the option, all those years ago, of limiting the campaign in Afghanistan to a military operation only: go in, deal with the security threat of the terrorist camps, find and kill bin Laden, leave. But no, instead we believed that as an occupying force we had the responsibility to flood the country with cash and try to turn it into a Western-style democracy overnight. And now here we still are, hemorrhaging blood and money, unable to finish either the military objectives or the nation-building.
People say it was the war in Iraq that took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. I say it was our instinct to become proselytizing missionaries for the church of democracy. Afghanistan was a national security issue: now that there is no longer a credible threat, it’s a moral, ethical, political and military nightmare with no solution in sight.
Note that Jenkins singles out liberalism for criticism; and that liberals were and remain among the strongest advocates for nation-building and democracy-building initiatives in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
As liberals I believe we need to rethink our rights and responsibilities to other nations. We should take democracy down from its pedestal in our minds, turn it over in our hands and have a good look at how it works. We should remember that it is not a goal, not an end in itself, but a means to an end: emancipation and justice.
We need to get off the merry-go-round of war and aid. It takes us nowhere, and the politicians are cranking the handle on behalf of the military-industrial complex. We may have to let go of some of our ideals, but that's only so we can get a firmer grip on our principles.