Hegel in Helmand

Is democracy an antidote to terrorism? Today’s Observer is skeptical about our ability to make this happen, but approves of the logic:

“On a theoretical level, the moral and strategic goals are joined. A democratic Afghanistan would be less likely to incubate terrorism. If there were no Taliban, there would be no need for the occupation.”

And so, goes the argument, to disrupt the chain of terror that links the Afghan mountains with British streets, we must midwife free elections, non-corrupt institutions and human rights. Ballots are the enemy of Islamist bombers.

In the popular mind, that language was tainted by the war in Iraq, where the idea of liberating and democratising a nation that had just emerged from the nightmare of a psychopathic despot was damaged by subsequent anarchy, communal bloodletting, a refugee exodus, rampant criminality, and outrage over the lack of WMD, Saddamist links with AQ, torture, and incompetence in high places.

Nevertheless, this idea persists. Its advocates, at least in the UK, recast it in a more anodyne developmental language: ‘delivering sustainable governance’, ‘instituting nonviolent political processes’, and bringing order into ungoverned spaces – you’ve heard the vocabulary. At its core, there is still a working assumption that combating Al Qaeda is bound up with a profound liberal project of transforming failed states. One can’t help but suspect that the use of the watered-down language of foreign development appeals because it puts the same idea in less inflammatory language.

(If I were a bereaved parent of one of the British soldiers killed in the past few days, I wonder whether I would be satisfied with the consolation that my son was killed to ‘deliver governance’ and ‘build capacity’? Either we use the words ‘liberate’ and ‘liberalise’ plainly, or we ask ourselves why we euphemise it with the bloodless talk of technocratic jargon.)

The military men I’ve met who do believe in what they are doing put it more eloquently: they are fighting to offer the Afghans a better and freer life and lift Afghanistan out of being an impoverished hothouse for AQ. Right or wrong, at least that describes it directly.

But must we democratise to defend ourselves? Putting aside the vast issue of expense and difficulty, is the actual assumption correct?

Thanks to its own overreaching brutality, the crackdown by the state, and some quite sophisticated as well as quite unpleasant methods used against it, Al Qaeda is now an endangered species in the society of…Saudi Arabia. Not exactly a nirvana of pluralist, liberal, open politics, of women’s emancipation or a healthy Enlightenment spirit of intellectual freedom. But militant jihad is no less unwelcome in Saudi Arabia for that. Even people living under tyranny dislike being blown up, and tyrants don’t necessarily welcome the presence of terrorists in their midst.

As for ‘incubation’, what of free-market, open, democratic societies like Britain in the 1990’s? Being a free country did not prevent the growth of backyard terrorist cells in the First World.

On the other side of the coin, Lebanon has a good measure of democracy in its politics. Imperfect, sure, and often poisoned by outside interference. But democratic certainly. One party involved in Lebanon’s democracy is Hezbollah, an armed movement, a welfare provider, and a participant in national elections. This doesn’t stop them using classic terrorist methods when it suits them – kidnappings, attacks on civilian populations for political purposes, suicide bombings. Being democratic is not the enemy of being terroristic – in fact the former can be invoked as a mandate to justify the latter. Hezbollah can claim a powerful mandate from the masses, to use a Monty Pythonism, as it justifies its grisly methods.

There are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world who share our distaste for AQ’s global jihad, including Islamists themselves, many of whom wish to keep their jihad local and not pick a fight with the American superpower and its allies. And there are terrorists who win elections.

The broad hypothesis that liberalisation and democratisation is the path to counter-terrorism seems more based on unproven assumptions about world-historical patterns of economic and political teleology – a kind of Hegelian and Atlanticist vision of progress and modernisation – than about the links between security and liberty.

This has very direct policy implications. The commitment to democracy and anti-corruption, and a strong central state, will tie us down vastly more with our resources, money and manpower, than a more minimal commitment to backing local powers whose interests coincide with ours.

In the case of the Taliban, while their ultimate position on elections is not clear, they do pose as a credible counterstate, offering services and ‘governance’ to the masses. They are fighters but they are also judges, law-and-order providers and economic regulators. And they can also pose as the protectors of a threatened agrarian class, growing the only highly profitable crop. They can claim some kind of legitimacy rooted in popular will. An Afghanistan animated by popular political passions will not necessarily be one hostile to illiberal and jihadist forces, in other words.

I’ve been a little critical of evasive language here. So its only fair that I state my own unheroic position clearly: Al Qaeda is a non-trivial and malign force but ultimately one that is self-defeating. Our objective in Afghanistan should not be to purge it via the medicine of democratic governance, which is too hard, too expensive, too dangerous and too unnecessary. (that is not to deny that Afghans may well decide to develop their own democracy with or without our assistance. It is to question whether we should be engaged in a large-scale military campaign to do so on our own timetable.)

Instead, our goal should be to leave Afghanistan as a place where AQ cannot operate safely or unmolested. They may seek to set up shop again there, but they will be hunted, harassed and permanently trying to stay alive. To do this, we need to craft a coalition of all those, no matter how unpleasant, who share this minimal aim. It means cutting deals with bastards, keeping a lighter presence, and doing rough work in the shadows, and feeding money and material support to those willing to help out. Not a perfect or humane alternative, and one where innocents will be killed, but a more realistic and affordable one.

Illiberal? Absolutely. But thirty years of endless war sounds like an even worse illiberal state.