Wall Street Journal - November 28, 2001
Nation-Building: Too Important To Be Left to U.N.
By David Rieff. Mr. Rieff is writing a book on humanitarian aid.
The decision by the Northern Alliance to send a delegation to the U.N.-sponsored conference on Afghanistan, which began yesterday, is being hailed as an enormously hopeful sign. In a fatuous demonstration of the triumph of hope over experience, the president of the Security Council called the conference -- being held in Bonn -- "an indispensable first step toward the establishment of a broad-based representative government in Afghanistan." Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Northern Alliance, its control over the Afghan capital of Kabul secured courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, is a reluctant participant at best, and any commitments it makes are unlikely to be honored in practice. The other factions that are attending -- the Iranian-backed opposition known as the Cyprus group; the loyalists of the aged King Zahir; and Pashtun groups that either opposed their ethnic brethren in the Taliban regime, or at least broke with them in time to get a seat at the negotiating table -- are no more committed to "representative government" (whatever that means in the Afghan context) than the Northern Alliance.
The U.N. position is that the talks are supposed to lead to a loya jirga, or a grand council of Afghanistan's tribal and religious elders. There will, of course, be nothing representative about such a meeting except in the sense that all traditional vested interests in Afghanistan other than the Taliban will be represented. In other words, like the Bonn conference, it will be a meeting of precisely those leaders who over the past two decades have brought Afghanistan to its current state of ruin and horror.
Indeed, though the Taliban are now hated by the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people, they were initially welcomed because they were seen as an alternative to the groups the U.N. and the international actors now present as the prospective founding fathers (no mothers need apply, it goes without saying) of Afghan democracy. If it weren't so tragic, it would be almost funny.
And yet it is impossible to watch this intense process of bogus democratization unfold without thinking that we have been here before. Indeed, it is hard not to fear that the U.N. effort is on the brink of recapitulating practically every error that world body has committed in its nation-building, conflict-resolution, and peacekeeping efforts from Somalia to Kosovo.
As in Somalia, various pre-Taliban warlords -- notably Northern Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Uzbek Gen. Rashid Dostam, the Iranian-backed Ismail Khan, and the Pashtun leader Haji Qadir, who until recently was an associate of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar -- believe it is their turn to wield power in Kabul. As in Rwanda, the great powers and the West seem to believe that with enough humanitarian and development aid, people who want to kill each other, and have for a generation, can somehow be reconciled. As in Kosovo, there will be no adequate commitment of international police to ensure even the beginnings of a society in which rights are respected.
To say this is not to question either the justice or the necessity of the U.S. decision to go to war in Afghanistan. But believing that destroying al Qaeda and the Taliban was imperative is hardly the same thing as believing that anyone has a coherent plan for rebuilding Afghanistan. If anything, the reverse is the case. Indeed, the willingness of the U.S. to turn the job over to the U.N. should demonstrate where the issue really sits on Washington's list of priorities. For the U.N. is being used as it has so often been used in the past -- both as a fig leaf for the great powers and as a welfare agency for failed states.
A serious commitment to Afghanistan, the ultimate failed state, would involve making the place an international protectorate. That is the only form of government that has the slightest hope of ameliorating the lot of the people of Afghanistan. But the efforts of the various U.N. officials, and of its two special representatives -- the former Algerian foreign minister, Lakhdar Brahimi, and the Spanish diplomat, Francesc Vendrell -- have all been in the service of the illusion that no such protectorate is necessary.
No doubt, they are making the best of a bad situation. A protectorate would involve not just humanitarian relief workers and international civil servants but massive numbers of Western troops. Yet the last thing the U.S. or any of the major coalition partners want is to send soldiers to Afghanistan. Faced with Northern Alliance displeasure, even Tony Blair's bellicose British government is now having second thoughts about a comparatively small deployment.
The sad truth is that while Colin Powell is right to say that the U.S. and its allies have an enormous obligation "not to leave the Afghan people in the lurch," that is just what they are doing by pretending the Afghans will choose democracy if afforded some diplomatic help and a lot of money for rebuilding, yet politically left to their own devices. To the contrary, left to their own devices these Afghan leaders will simply take up where they left off before the Taliban overthrew them.
Indeed, the only regime that would at least offer a possibility that the future of Afghanistan would be better than its hideous recent past would be an international protectorate in which the warlords had little or no say. For the process of democratization is going to take decades, and, politically incorrect though it may be to insist that this is a job only the West can do, it cannot be entrusted to people who wouldn't know a human right if they tripped over it. No amount of U.N. window-dressing, high-flown rhetoric, and humanitarian aid, can change this fact.