File Photo: Men dressed to represent all Afghan ethnic groups stand during a parade in Kabul, Afghanistan on Thursday, April, 28, 2005. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)


What is to be done to rebuild Afghan society?

The goal, to borrow from Partha Chatterjee, is "to give to the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a community." Or to be more precise, the goal is to help the occupiers to see the ways in which the people of Afghanistan are attempting to do this for themselves.

There is a tendency to view the places we invade through the abstract concept of "population." In particular, people are reduced to demographic census data, particularly ascriptive ethno-religious categories. In Iraq, we were told that there were three relevant groups: Sunni, Shi'a, and Kurd. These identities were often treated as primordial and paramount, as if ideology or lived experience could not forge alternative or more salient bonds. These labels were attempts to frame "the other" as pre-modern, i.e. outside of history and ideology.

In Afghanistan, the population is commonly categorized as Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimak, Turkmen, Baloch, etc. Slightly more sophisticated treatments de-construct these groups down to the supposedly "atomic" level of the tribe. Of course, macro-ethnic categories are important for understanding a significant part of the history and some of the contemporary dynamics of the people. But these categories have rarely been sufficient for political mobilization. However, when these macro-ethnic categories are coupled with the occupier's mandatory ritual of elections, a simple calculus of power and legitimacy can be fashioned to further reify the foundational categories. In other words, this combination of categories and ritual allows the imperial power to ask and answer the question: "What is the proper combination of different ethnic groups in government to 'reflect' the population at large?" This is a strategy that reifies ethnocracy and at best produces a fragile consociational democracy (i.e. the Lebanese "solution") or at worst an overbearing control democracy (i.e. the Sri Lankan "solution").

There is an alternative concept which is often elided in this construction: the people as a community or set of communities (this is similar to but not identical with the rather fluid Afghani conceptualization of qawm). According to Chatterjee, the community is a group that makes collective claims based on appeals to ties of moral solidarity. The community however need not mimic the nation even though the modern state is suspicious of any moral solidarity that is not co-terminus with the nation.

Setting aside the suspicions of the state, we must look for the actual ways in which people come together to make demands and act politically. Why? Because the idea of governance that we seek to export will not work. The notion of civil society is a fictional legal construct wherever there is a marked distinction between the governing class and those who are governed. This distinction between the governing class and the governed is a function of legal and extralegal property ownership. In one of the poorest societies in the world, one should not expect that the fiction of bourgeois civil society will gain much traction without significant marginalization of the governed. Rights will need to be supplemented with entitlements and mechanisms will need to be developed to mediate the claims of the governed.

If democracy, as opposed to elected ethnocracy, is the objective, then an alternative strategy merits exploration. NGOs cannot merely be appointed to mediate and secure participation if the goal is to permit the practice of democracy among the governed.




File Photo: An Afghan disabled demonstrator lies on street during their protest in front of the presidential palace in Kabul, Saturday, May 8, 2004, Afghanistan. About 500 disabled demonstrators participated in the protest demanding their rights from the government. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Labels: afghanistan, political society, south asia