Culture And Nature
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One of Andrew’s readers chided him for for describing Afghanistan as a place with an “an utterly alien culture, institutions, religion and polity,” and in this follow-up post Andrew qualified his claim. This reminded me of the Ralph Peters column that I mocked for its “thought experiment” that Pashtuns were for all intents and purposes from another planet. Without question, Peters’ “experiment” is far, far worse than Andrew’s overstatement and it is significantly different from it, because Peters’ column was not an attempt to acknowledge profound cultural and religious differences, but on the contrary was a very clear effort to essentialize those differences and claim that they were practically differences according to nature. The purpose of this was to vilify Pashtuns in the Taliban to such an extent that their humanity was in question, which is another way of claiming that anyone who does not happen to embrace our “values” or our power projection into their part of the world cannot really share our nature, because we “know” that our “values” are universal.
Recognizing vast, significant differences between cultures and religions is sane and necessary, and I can understand very well the impulse to push back against the fantasies of universalist theories that hold that these differences are superficial and unimportant, but it is vital that we understand the distinction between what Peters was arguing and what Andrew is arguing. Essentialist arguments betray their basic hostility to history and culture in that they are blind to the possibility of change over time within and across cultures, they cannot fully accept that culture is a human invention, and hold instead that cultural difference must be rooted in essence rather than in will, which in turn denies the importance of human agency in history and endorses one of a variety of determinisms. The equally fantastical universalist notion that traditional tribal societies from a very different religious tradition can and should be molded and remade into a post-modern managerial democracy, because such a regime represents the inevitable, single model of human progress, substitutes an ideologically-defined determinism for other kinds. These two fantasies, the essentialist and the universalist, seem to co-exist in complementary tension with one another in their shared antipathy to real respect for culture and historical contingency. Andrew was indulging neither fantasy, and Peters was to some extent indulging both.
Filed under: culture, philosophy, politics
Thank you for that – excellent!
Afghanistan wasn’t a “traditional tribal society” before the U.S. invasion and won’t be after the U.S. leaves. Before the invasion it was a theocratic dictatorship ruled by a movement that originated in Pakistani refugee camps where traditional Afghan social structures had been obliterated. At the moment the options for after the U.S. departure look to be either a return to that dictatorship or, if they’re very lucky, an extremely corrupt quasi-democratic state (but not so democratic that you can’t still be sentenced to death for criticizing the Koran). I don’t know if Afghanistan can be moldeld into a “post-modern managerial democracy,” but that’s what the Afghans would prefer; Karzai’s terrible kleptocratic government enjoys much more popular support than the Taliban.
shoebill, with all due respect, Afghanistan is the veritable contemporary epitome of a tribal society. It was tribal before the British came and it will remain tribal after we leave. Didn’t we already learn the lessons on this over the course of a whole gory year of trying to pacify Tikrit? To concentrate on the Islamic coloration of the society is to risk missing the forest for the trees. Apostasy can be forgiven at times, but tribal loyalty is family.
There is NO state in Afghanistan. Even the Taliban couldn’t do that, not that they wanted to create one. There is a collection of tribes and localities. Law enforcement, to the limited extent that it exists at all and depending on how one defines it, its strictly a matter of local authority. The Taliban is fine with that. Their aspirations are brutal, but realistic. They could give a c*** whether they create an “Afghani” identity or not. Karzai’s government has little power beyond a narrow ability to sometimes extort within a small geographic area. Do you really think they care what edicts get passed down from Kabul over in the Khyber Pass or in any other part of the horribly huge and permeable border with Pakistan?
Our best, quickest way out would be to cut some selective deals with powerful and stable tribally oriented warlords, give them tons of cash, guns and respect, stop screwing with their heroin trade, and split. And then pray.
That would be the kind of deeply cynical stuff that wouldn’t please Kaplan, Brooks or Kristol. But it’s the smart play. Then again, I “withdrew into realism” quite a while back.
I have no clue as to what to do about Pakistan which, if we aren’t careful, will be the whole problem soon.
Just to clarify further, to the extent that the Taliban has any national goal in Afghanistan it is to extinguish national identity rather than to develop it. Nationalism is a serious barrier to their vision of a renewed and resurgent Caliphate.