The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture. School of Oriental and African Studies. University of London

Transcription

1 The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture School of Oriental and African Studies University of London Kant, Hobbes or... Machiavelli? Facing the grim choices of state-building in Afghanistan 2011 Antonio Giustozzi The debate about state-building in Afghanistan is complex and does not lend itself easily to be summarised. We can however identify two ideal-type philosophical positions between which the debate has been shifting in recent years. At one end is the liberal-progressive view, which for ease of reference will be referred to hereto forward as the Kantian view. This view essentially holds that the aim of intervention in Afghanistan should be about developing a social contract between state and society in Afghanistan. At the other end is the pessimistic-conservative view that Afghanistan is doomed to remain in a kind of state of nature indefinitely, or at best develop into an authoritarian state. For ease of reference we shall refer to this position as the Hobbesian one. Both sides in the debate have some points to make. The Kantian party holds that intervention in Afghanistan does not make much sense if the ambitious project to bring Afghanistan into what the Western perception is of the late XX century (if not XXI century) is not upheld. Much money and many lives would have been wasted if those aims were to be abandoned. The Hobbesian party argues that those aims were never realistic in the first place and that in any case they have failed; the Afghan state is beyond reform and moreover the Afghan leadership has no intention to let western interventionists reform it. Kantians argue that the compromises on the principles of liberal interventionism are exactly the reason why the situation has been getting worse instead of getting better, despite the massive financial and human resources invested. The Hobbesians retort that it is the naivety of the Kantians which caused the impressive resources invested in Afghanistan to be seemingly wasted with little effect: elections, parliaments, development projects thrown in without coherence or planning. The actual situation on the ground is inevitably much more blurred that these ideal types seem to suggest. The dividing line between Kantians and Hobbesians is often difficult to draw, except for some opinion makers, mostly sitting comfortably away from Afghanistan. Western officials in Afghanistan sometimes takes the Kantian line, reminding their Afghan counterpart how the plan is to build institutions and create a capable Afghan state. Some other time they argue to their Western colleagues and to their home constituencies that the situation of war and emergency requires short term fixes that sound rather Hobbesian: recruit and support local strongmen and their retinues, tolerate corruption and nepotism and arbitrary arrests and torture. The two position I have highlighted, however, are the two ideal types between which the Western policy debate has been shifting. Back in , it was difficult to find any Hobbesians ; at least at the rhetorical level, there was a consensus that a bright future was lying ahead for Afghanistan a season of state building, reconstruction and recovery. Beneath the surface, however, divergences started emerging quickly within the Kantian consensus; the Emergency Loya Jirga of 2002 was the first evident point of friction, where the opportunists showed their lack of faith in the Kantian project and opted for

2 compromise with the Hobbesian reality of Afghanistan, the strongmen who had fought the civil war. The splinter away from the Kantians would take a few more years before emerging in an identifiable Hobbesian party, when the main western capitals started seriously reconsidering their options. Year 2006 was the turning point, as the obvious resurgence of the Taliban shook the self-confidence of western policy makers; it took two more years before such declining confidence translated in an open debate about the aims of the war. Gradually, the Hobbesian party has been gaining ground, eventually turning into a solid majority among policy makers; the Kantian party only holds a few positions in the US state department, but is stronger in the UN and NGO worlds, unsurprisingly. There is no question that the Kantian dream of quickly achievable perpetual peace and social contracts was an inappropriate approach to the problems of state-building and reconstruction in Afghanistan. Kantian views are well entrenched in post-world War II Europe for historical reasons, perhaps as an ideological understanding of the new post-war political settlement. The concept of social contract, so popular in western academia, is particularly problematic beyond pure philosophical abstraction; there are indeed few if any examples of social contracts between states and civil societies evolving out of mutual consensus. Still, this was what was supposed to happen in Afghanistan: no matter how weak the central government, communities and social groups were expected to enthusiastically gather around and agree to a project of state-building in Afghanistan. Even before things started really going astray, it was becoming apparent that different components of Afghan society had very different ideas on how to proceed and how an Afghan state should look like; some were not particularly interested in having a state in the first place. Different international actors, mainly regional and western, started sponsoring different sections of Afghan society, soon paralysing state-building and turning it into a wholly incoherent mess. By 2011, the Afghan environment looked not much less Hobbesian than in ; the Kantian party would however argue that this was as much the result of the incompetence, second thoughts and lack of direction which characterised the state-building effort, as it was of any feature of Afghan society. The Hobbesian party, in its eagerness to dismiss Afghanistan as a tribal country which cannot be turned into a modern state and has therefore to be dealt with pragmatically, lends however itself to the accusation of only postponing the problem and probably not by much. The idea that perhaps Afghanistan is one of those areas of the world which is better off without a state is naïve, when it is not a sign of bad faith. The implications seems to be that the tribes could be managed remotely, a bit like the British Empire used to do in its Pashtun fringes until 1947, or Pakistan has tried to do since in the FATA. Perhaps this romantic view was appropriate for Afghanistan before the contact with the west; since then, however, tribal Afghanistan has been in steady decline and the Taliban themselves are an expression of this decline of the tribes, as much as they are of the persistence of tribal patterns. The persistence of clerical power (the Taliban) highlights how tribal leaders and structures have struggled to reclaim their ground. The mere demographic patterns kicked off by external influence in the shape of the availability of medicines and basic medical treatment destabilises tribal society; similarly travel, exile, education, modern media and war have all contributed to undermine the legitimacy of the tribal way. This might not make the state a necessity, but it certainly makes reaching a new equilibrium without the formation of a state very difficult. The point both the Hobbesians and the Kantians seem to miss is that states do not necessarily have to look like post-world War II Europe s. Even the Hobbesians seem to nothing else for Afghanistan than an enduring state of nature and do not usually argue in favour of the formation of a Leviathan of any kind; perhaps because they even more pessimistic than Hobbes himself, or perhaps because they realise that it would not be politically correct. Beneath the surface, some voices can be heard 2 P a g e

3 making a case that the Afghan army one day taking power would not necessarily be such a bad thing, but nobody has dared going public with such views. In my view, the problem of Afghanistan is not substantially different from that of any other country: how to conjugate long-term state-building with short term political survival. Granted, Afghanistan likely belongs to a category of countries where state formation might be particularly difficult; however Switzerland would have been seen as a basket case 300 years ago and then things took a virtuous turn. Arguably therefore difficult does not mean impossible in state-building. Contrasting Kant, Hobbes and Machiavelli may look surprising to the northern European observer, as Machiavelli has a bad reputation in this part of Europe, even worse than in Italy itself, where a majority of the intellectual class has emancipated itself the Catholic Church and has re-habilitated Machiavelli long ago. Machiavelli was writing of another basket case, late Renaissance Italy, as Italy s stubborn internal divisions were about to seal its fate vis-à-vis the emerging powers of the time. He tried to figure out how what realistically is the prime concern of political elites, that is short term political and physical survival, could be reconciled with long-term state-building strategies. Those who only read The Prince cannot appreciate this, but that small book was an act of political opportunism on Machiavelli side, as he desperately tried to get out of his political exile and court the favour of the autocrats in order to be re-habilitated. His magnum opus, The Discourses, present a radically different balance of short term survival techniques (which dominate The Prince) and of institution building strategies. Machiavelli was a convinced republican in an age when this was no small feat. It is not a matter of proposing here a replacement template for the failed or failing Hobbesian and Kantian ones; rather to illustrate how even in difficult circumstances a mix of long-term and short term strategies is always conceivable in state-building. The mix might vary in composition, with short term strategies often prevailing over long term strategies, but if the long-term perspective is lost, the effort is doomed. Without institution building, a state is subject to the vagaries of patrimonial rule and to crisis of succession every time the ruler is ailing. Institution-building can take various forms, but in the context of state-building it is synonym with long-term strategies. We could perhaps judge of the developmental character of a government on the basis of how much it invests in institution building. The current understanding of institution building among western policy-makers, however, is biased (even more than flawed), because it assumes that the only relevant historical experience is what the French call the Anglo-Saxon one. That is, one based on a minimal or modest role of the state and on reliance on a flourishing of civil society as the main driver of development. On the surface, America s development in the 19 th century might seem suitable for Afghanistan, except that: civil society in such cases includes a major role for robber barons, who in fact where the main engine of accumulation; external wars played a key role in shaping up the identity and character of the American state and Afghanistan is not allowed to pursue this path. In fact Afghanistan cannot even fight its own internal war and use it as a state-building strategy: the main effort in the conflict is still being exerted by foreign armies, which many Afghans (although not necessarily the majority) resent as an occupation force. Apart from having a delegitimising impact on the Afghan state, it removes the need for the Afghan regime to mobilise or develop whatever resources and strategies are available to defeat its enemies. It is striking indeed the extent to which the Afghan government and more in general Afghan society are under-mobilised in what is in fact a war of national survival; should Afghanistan lose it, it would 3 P a g e

4 de facto return to the pre-1919 predicament, of having to surrender its foreign policy to a foreign power. Losing it for Afghanistan means in this case any outcome which constrains the sovereignty of the state in the long term (i.e. not as part of a temporary strategic alliance). Such an outcome could plausibly take place even if the Western capitals managed to end their participation in the conflict successfully from their own point of view. The combination of a massive foreign involvement on the government side and of a civil society (which like in America s case includes robber barons intent on accumulating ruthlessly) leading the development effort, with a weak government in the back seat, seems to leave few options for the Afghan state to emerge strengthened from the conflict, if emerging at all. Both Kantians and Hobbesians see little need for a strong Afghan state, although as mentioned above some Hobbesians have been muttering of the army taking power for some time. The Kantians believe that a strong state in Afghanistan would inevitably be an authoritarian one and that s why they reject this option; the Hobbesians believe that it cannot be achieved on solid bases anyway and that the kind of manipulative practices employed by the British Empire in the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands are a safer bet, at least in terms of safeguarding Western interests. We have to accept the hard fact of life that in the short term concerns of fighting a war inevitably come at the expense of institution building; what is needed is quick, decisive action, which typically strongly institutionalised institutions cannot deliver. Personal charisma is in great demand, virtuous princes (Machiavelli s expression for statesmanship) are needed to fight the enemy off, when all the incentives in place would advise accommodation and profiteering from the ongoing war effort. The princes might in reality be driven by personal ambition or by personal hatred, rarely by real virtue, but the point is that without them little happens. If institution building takes place at all, it will be on the background. The question is why. War profiteers and opportunists have little interest in any institution building; at best they might allow others to busy themselves with it, but might also sabotage it if they perceive it as opposed to their petty interests. That is clear; but where would statesmanship come from? And why would charismatic leaders want to develop institutions, whose main purpose is exactly to reduce reliance on the arbitrary power and precarious skills of a few individuals? This in my view is the key question to be answered to untangle the dilemmas of state-building in Afghanistan. Machiavelli linked virtuous institutions to the strength of the state (his model was republican Rome); in other words he supported institution building not on ethical grounds (although privately he might have done so as well), but on the ground that they represented a path to insulate the state from the vagaries of charismatic leadership, succession problems, the arbitrary rule of individuals and from the tendency of even the most virtuous individual to decay after having been exposed to overwhelming pressure for years. Although Machiavelli and his Italian contemporaries did not succeed in establishing solid institutions in their age, there is a stream of historical interpretations which sees a similar pattern in the evolution of European monarchies from the XVII century onwards; institution building and the separation of powers evolved as strategies of political survival in a context of strong competition among states. It follows from all this that the only realistic option for the evolution of a strong Afghan state is the self-interest of Afghan political elites, either the current ones or future ones. When they will see that institution building enhances the survivability of the political regime, they will start investing in it seriously. Moreover, it is only Afghan elites and their advisers who can adapt foreign templates to local circumstances and gradually fine-tune them. States always imitate each other, but rarely successfully copy each other. The key is local adaptation. No institution building template imported 4 P a g e

5 straight out of some donor country can ever work, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere. So it could not be Kant or Hobbes and not even Machiavelli, but an Afghanised version of them or of whatever else. While a political elite might be forced or bribed into adopting a foreign template, it will only start adapting it to the local circumstances once it is strongly motivated to do so. A key aspect of institution building is that it is a strategy to widen the sense of ownership of the state; that is to give a stake to the wider population in the political regime, either in response to demands to below or more often in response to the need of the elite to mobilise the subjects for some ambitious goal (typically war but not necessarily), whether physically or financially (tax); it also contributes to enhance oversight and therefore to maintain the functionality of the state machinery. This is usually how social contracts start developing. At this point it also becomes clear why the Afghan government has little interest in institution building: so far it has not needed to involve its own population much; it hardly taxes it and relies on mostly mercenary recruitment (paid by others) in the armed forces as opposed to conscription. Sheltered under the mighty power of NATO armies, the Afghan government sees all the costs of an institution-building strategy, but feels it needs none of the advantages is the year of transition, when the Afghans are supposed to be taking over gradually from NATO in fighting the war; if that will really happen, it might turn into an opportunity for the Afghan government developing some greater interest in institution building. Any trouble that the Afghan government may face in the transition would actually strengthen the incentives to do more to mobilise the population; riding to the government s rescue every time a problem arises would be counter-productive in this regard. Perhaps then a genuine transition is the last chance to stop the Afghan vicious cycle from spiralling further downwards. 5 P a g e