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Despite attempts to impose democracy in Afghanistan the very approach appears to be undermining U.S. counterinsurgency. According to BBC election watch, As it happened: Afghan election 2009, the elections were marred by widespread and deadly Taliban attacks, patchy turn-out and claims of fraud. It is learned, through Nader Naderi, Director, monitoring organization of Free and Fair Elections in Afghanistan (FEFA) that the Taliban had first threatened and later actually amputated ink-stained fingers; in the countryside they set up roadblocks to keep people from getting into polling stations; in major towns they launched bomb and rocket attacks to keep people homebound. In many areas no one dared to designate polling stations for women.
Envisioned to stimulate necessary mechanism of governance required to hold 'something of Afghanistan' accountable for the aid and assistance injected in the theatre of doom, the ongoing presidential elections have yielded fierce reaction from the leading Pushtoon population. Taliban and their nationalist allies, who constitute majority of the Pushtoons have rejected the election as a fraud concocted to validate prolonged stay by the 'foreign occupiers'. They would only participate in the elections when US and NATO troops withdraw. Moreover, these elections have obliged Karzai to shed all that dignifies by enforcing bills that legalize marital rapes and allow husbands to starve their wives on their refusal to have sex; teaming up with notorious drug/warlords - all to fortify his chances of winning. Clearly this doesn't look quite like the investment the American and British taxpayers had in mind and lies far beyond the premise of receiving fresh body bags every week in return for enormous aid packages.
In the past week the world gaped at Karzai running like a headless chicken for the most under-handed and unprincipled election campaign ever, grossly compromising the very substance and purpose of democracy by committing conspicuous national crimes ranging from signing deals with notorious warlords to passing inhuman laws against women in order to appease conservative Shias for their vote. This is the place where the world is fighting to free its peoples from regression and extremism for the past eight years; after all this time and elephantine proportions of man and material the COIN stays somewhat unspent as the policies introduced to put an end to repression are only breeding more repression and corruption in return. Conversely, to say that the very imposition of democracy and supplantation of favorable governance system has itself sabotaged COIN would not be completely unwarranted.
In the words of Montesquieu whose beliefs and philosophy span American constitution, sustainable democracy can only prevail in a balanced society where the skilled man, the accountant, the manager and the secretary each works in harmony on what he knows best and does best. No one can imagine or attempt, as Emile Faguet states in "Cult of Incompetence 1912", to make the accountant change places with a commercial traveller or a mechanic. Likewise Afghanistan or for that matter Iraq along with a hoard of states in the Global South are still under the process of evolution as a society that has yet to develop discernable division of roles and institutions that serve a necessary prerequisite to sustainable democracy. To impose one would be completely futile, and would not only distract US and its allies from the primary goal of larger concern but will also frustrate them on account of its futility.
Democracy most likely will not be institutionalized in Afghanistan in the foreseeable future given the country's deeply engraved warlordism. Democracy in itself is a different goal that cannot be separated from the variable of time required for an organic societal evolution and therefore, cannot be emulated, enforced or simulated by outside forces. Which is why in Afghanistan imposition of democracy is only undermining the pre-existing system of Loya Jirga making it all the more ungovernable in the wake of constant and fierce threat from the Pashtun jihadist insurgency.
Elections are of no substance unless they are reflective of the people's will. Furthermore, the will of majority in a country of strikingly low literacy rate, may not necessarily lead to most distilled judgments for the good of the society even if it is successfully carried out in a place like Afghanistan. To consider Counterinsurgency in consonance with nurturing democracy is to find a simile between creatures of two different galaxies each of which are parasitical for the other and must be dealt separately in time and in principle.
Jennifer Andrew
