The hardest question that President Obama faces is political sustainability here, not military strategy there.
Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009
by Jonathan Rauch, NAtional Journal
In 1833, President Jackson, no slouch when it came to firm leadership, advised, "Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking." Conservatives who deplore what they see as President Obama's indecision about Afghanistan overlook the first clause. Obama is right to think, and think hard, before acting.
While pondering advice from his military and diplomatic teams, he could do worse than consult two recent books from way off the military and foreign-policy grids. Neither is about Afghanistan; in fact, neither more than briefly mentions it. What the books have in common are intriguing insights into the problems of state building. By implication, both suggest that the path to a stable Afghanistan -- to a benign central government that can defend itself and control its territory -- is longer than most Americans realize.
"We're certainly talking years, and probably decades," Douglass North says. "It's a daunting process, and it's troubling, because I don't think most people appreciate that you'd be getting into something very costly. You've got to be willing to devote an enormous amount of time and resources."
North, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of three authors of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, an immodestly titled and immoderately stimulating book published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. His co-authors are John Joseph Wallis, an economic historian at the University of Maryland, and Barry Weingast, a political scientist and development expert at the Hoover Institution.
"All societies face the problem of violence," they begin. In particular, all societies must find a way to cope with the fighting that arises as factions compete for resources or supremacy: what Thomas Hobbes once called the war of all against all. Social orders emerge in order to contain and control this violence.
Two recent books suggest that the path to a stable Afghanistan is longer than most Americans realize.
"All of human history has had but three social orders," the authors write. The first, which characterized most of prehistory, was the foraging order. In hunter-gatherer societies, small social groups managed violence by means of kinship and face-to-face contact. In time, between 10 and five millennia ago, what the authors call the limited-access order emerged. This is a much larger social order -- it could be as large as the Roman Empire -- that is governed by a dominant elite or coalition that stays on top by controlling and distributing patronage and privilege. How you fare, in a limited-access order, depends on who you are and whom you know.
So predominant is the limited-access order in human affairs that the authors refer to it as the "natural state." Only in the last few hundred years has an alternative emerged: the open-access order. It allows political participation and economic access on equal terms according to impersonal rules. Broad, government-enforced rights replace selective, government-distributed privileges.
Open-access orders are more politically stable and economically successful than their precursors; in fact, today they dominate the world. But developing a culture based on rule of law under which dominant elites willingly surrender their monopoly on power can take centuries, if it ever happens at all. Only a mature natural state -- one with durable institutions, a military under firm political control, and elites who are acclimated to the rule of law -- can make the transition to an open order.
Alas, Afghanistan is not even close to maturity. It is an example of a fragile natural state, one that "can barely sustain itself in the face of internal and external violence." In such a state (Haiti, Iraq, and Somalia are other examples) political or economic shocks lead easily to mayhem, coalitions shift rapidly, and "all politics is real politics: People risk death when they make political mistakes."
Violence and Social Orders is much more textured than I can convey here. Suffice it to say that if North and his co-authors are right, the United States should not even hope to build a modern liberal state in Afghanistan. The only plausible mission, rather, is to push the fragile social order toward maturity, a process that must begin by creating security. "That, in Afghanistan, is an immense problem," North says.
A book by James C. Scott arrives in much the same place, but by way of a very different path. Scott is a political scientist and anthropologist at Yale University who has spent his career studying peasants and pastoralists. In September, Yale brought out his fascinating work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Scott's subjects are what he calls "barbarians by design," hill peoples of Southeast Asia who have managed to stay largely ungoverned by modern states.
If Douglass North and his co-authors are right, the United States should not even hope to build a modern liberal state in Afghanistan.
Today, Scott writes, "virtually the entire globe is 'administered space,' and the periphery is not much more than a folkloric remnant." For most of history, however, states were islands in an ocean of statelessness. Typically, state control established itself in lowland country where agricultural plots were fixed -- thus taxable -- and subjects were accessible and settled. Only recently, with the development of such "distance-demolishing technologies" as paved roads and high-speed communications, has state control become ubiquitous.
Even so, some regions have remained resistant. By hovering on the edges of civilization, mountain peoples can enjoy many of the products of modern economies without paying the price in taxes and cultural assimilation.
We in the West like to think of such peoples as precivilized, waiting for Americans to come along with the gift of good government. Wrong, Scott writes. "Hill peoples are not pre-anything." Rather, they are deliberate holdouts whose social structures "are constituted as if they were intended to be a state-maker's or colonial official's worst nightmare. And indeed, they are largely so." Rugged mountain redoubts discourage intruders; mobile populations and portable crops evade tax collectors; fluid, nonhierarchical political structures frustrate diplo-mats; guerrilla tactics enervate invading armies.
Though Scott's book focuses on Southeast Asia, the mountain territories around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border answer well to his description. No wonder that governments in Kabul and Islamabad have barely tried to govern those areas directly -- until they became havens for the latest holdouts against civilization, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Can stateless hill peoples be pacified and brought under central control? "It's do-able," Scott says, "but it takes a lot of money, a lot of technology, a lot of troops, a lot of roads." For the Thai central government to extend its writ to mountain redoubts took two or three decades, even with modern technology's prodigious road-building and jungle-clearing prowess.
And Afghanistan? Every attempt at centralization in 100 years has failed, says Thomas Barfield, a Boston University anthropologist who has studied the nomadic cultures of Afghanistan since the early 1970s, and whose book Afghanistan: Power and Politics will be published in June. "We [Americans] come in with the model of one country, one government, one law," he says. "Historically, areas like Afghanistan have not been governed that way."
What has worked and could again work, he says, is to consolidate and improve governance in the 10 percent or so of Afghanistan's land area (cities, irrigated lowlands, and the like) where most of the people live; then make deals with local power brokers in the mountain regions. Over time, the attractions of the cash economy and stable governance will bring the peripheral areas into the state's ambit, but "the process often takes generations. The first generation says, 'We're proud and free.' The second generation says, 'We're poor and there's nothing to do.' "
Success in Afghanistan, Barfield says, thus requires patience and, especially, commitment. "In Afghanistan, the perception that you're either a winner or a loser turns into reality."
Five scholars, two disciplines (economics and anthropology), one conclusion: Richard Holbrooke was right when he wrote in 2008, before taking on the job of special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration: "The conflict in Afghanistan will be far more costly and much, much longer than Americans realize."
For Americans, the hard part is not surging, it's staying. The hardest question that Obama faces as he decides whether to double down in Afghanistan concerns political sustainability over here, not military strategy over there.
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