First of all, Afghanistan has a democratic government now. It is the democratically elected government of Afghanistan that wants international assistance — including Canada’s — in order to maintain itself against its enemies, namely the Taliban. ~Akrasia

This is cute.  Afghanistan has a democratic government!  Hamid Karzai is the President of Afghanistan!  The “Afghan government” has requested our “assistance”!  How quaint.  The famed loya jirga of 2002 was consensus-based politics, Afghan-style, in which the local heavies agreed to let Karzai be a powerless figurehead on the condition that they were allowed to continue doing what they were doing in their precincts.  This agreement has been honoured, and Afghanistan now has as much of a democratically-elected government as Pakistan.  There’s nothing surprising or scandalous about any of this.  At least, that is, not to those of us who don’t think that Afghanistan is a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.  For those still operating under this pleasant fiction, it could be most alarming.

But Akrasia is not very clear on what democracy is, now, is he?  In a later comment he writes:

Suffice to say, it was an integral part of the western Allies’ (Britain and U.S.) post-war strategy that Germany and Japan be reconstructed as demoractic states. To suggest that Britain and the U.S. ‘didn’t give a crap’ is a patent falsehood. (How could it be otherwise with respect to Japan, which had no historical experience with democracy?)

When getting on the high horse of superior historical knowledge, it is best to know how to ride.  Alas, Akrasia sets himself up for a hard fall on this one, since his lecture to Pithlord declares that Japan had no experience with democracy, when it had enjoyed some considerable experience with universal manhood suffrage and elected government under a constitutional monarchy for the better part of three decades before the military effectively took over in the 1930s.  Even then, the structures and fictions of elected, representative government, with which the Japanese allegedly had no experience, were maintained.  To top off this supposedly damning indictment, he ironically invokes Santayana’s famous dictum about historical ignorance.  Not finished yet, Akrasia also manages to squeeze in an especially crass reference to Chamberlain and appeasement before he is done!  If he is ever out of work, I’m sure The Weekly Standard will have a place for him. 

Filed under: democracy, foreign policy, history, politics