We Can’t Export Democracy Because We Don’t Have Any to Spare
After more than 2,400 U.S. service member deaths, about 50,000 Afghan civilian deaths (some of those from U.S. drone strikes), 66,000 dead among Afghan military and police and tens of thousands of Taliban casualties, the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan has come to a close, leaving the Taliban in control of the country.
What is the lesson we should learn from this catastrophe?
Perhaps it’s the warning about classic blunders so clearly elucidated by Barzini (Wallace Shawn) in 1987’s Princess Bride? “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
Or perhaps it’s this: “When the Taliban offers to unconditionally surrender to you, take the deal.” (That really happened, way back in November 2001. George W. Bush and Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld turned them down.)
But, no, wrong again. The lesson we are supposed to take away from this monumental tragedy, the one gravely intoned on cable news, by politicians, and by the president himself is: “The United States should not engage in nation building.”
This is rather comforting. It means that rather than face the hard truth that our strategy of worldwide military domination has failed, once again, we can shrug off those pesky doubts and criticisms with the bittersweet thought that, like a superpower Don Quixote, we dreamed an impossible dream, we tilted at windmills, we tried to bring democracy and (dare we say it?) civilization, to yet another backward (non-white) corner of the world, but despite our best intentions, it just can’t be done. Maybe next time we’ll listen to the hard-headed realists and not even try.
This is sort of the punditocracy equivalent of a, “Good job! You lost, United States, but you tried your hardest and that’s what counts. We’re very proud of you.”
We are a very noble people with noble goals, we keep telling ourselves. There’s just this one pesky, little detail — there’s no evidence that we ever engaged in nation building in Afghanistan.
What does “nation building” mean, anyway? Shouldn’t it involve, you know, actual building? Was there an Afghanistan Infrastructure Week that somehow didn’t get any media coverage? Perhaps we built hundreds of new schools, bridges, health clinics, shopping malls, roller skating rinks and gave free wi-fi to everyone in the country and were just too modest to brag about it.
Or maybe not.
As they say, follow the money, and every time, the money will lead you to an inescapable conclusion. The U.S. does not engage in nation building, we engage in dictator propping up, corrupt government funding, contractor enrichment and most of all, making war.
According to Forbes magazine, between 2002 and 2021, the United States spent 145 billion on aid to Afghanistan and that does sound like a lot. Of course, most of that money, almost 89 billion, was to supply weapons and training to the Afghan military and police. (Let’s not dwell on that.) Only 3.2 billion went to humanitarian aid. That’s over 20 years.
Meanwhile, we spent over 2.2 trillion on fighting the war.
Clearly, there were some genuine, modest efforts to improve the physical and what Joe Biden calls the social infrastructure of Afghanistan. But whatever we did was insignificant compared to the needs of the country, and minuscule compared to the amount we spent on guns, bombs, drones and bullets.
Why don’t we learn from our foreign policy mistakes? Because we never identify our mistakes. We’re doing it right now. Our mistake isn’t that we want our military to do nation building. Our repeated mistake is using our military to subjugate other nations to our will. Or maybe it’s not a mistake. Maybe that has been our country’s unstated intention.
Somehow, amidst all the hand wringing and recriminations, it’s been overlooked that Afghanistan was only the preliminary bout for the real war the hawks and neocons wanted — the one in Iraq. Why didn’t Rumsfeld accept the Taliban’s surrender? Because his beady eyes were already focused on the Ramallah oil fields. The ongoing conflict with the truly Al Qaeda-supporting Taliban provided the pretext for the removal of the non-Al-Qaeda supporting Saddam Hussein.
However, we can’t admit that our goal was military domination of the region, so we chastise ourselves for being too “idealistic” in trying to transform those recalcitrant, intractable countries.
I may not be a foreign policy expert, but I guarantee that if we had spent, I don’t know, like 2.2 trillion to modernize Afghanistan, we would have succeeded in nation building, but good. But we couldn’t spend that much on nation building in Afghanistan because we can’t agree on spending that much on nation building right here, in our own nation. Health clinics, rural internet access, quality public education, clean drinking water and the like are things the conservatives don’t want to spend money on right here in the good ole USA! USA!
So, we’re left with the self-congratulatory moral that we, “can’t export democracy.” Why not? Apparently, the Afghan people just weren’t ready for it. We’re good at democracy, we’re told, because we are culturally (by which they mean, ethnically) superior. The Afghans, unfortunately, not so much. We gave them billions and what do we have to show for it? Better not to mention that tragically, we gave billions to prop up an obviously corrupt government that had no interest in building their nation but only in lining their own pockets.
Here in the USA! USA! we’re encouraged by the former rapist-in-chief and his supporters to look down on what he called, “s-hole countries.” People in those countries, we’re told, just aren’t capable of understanding the ideas of Jefferson, Hamilton and John Locke, not the way we Americans can. Too bad you can’t export ideas, except maybe, “Drink Coca-Cola,” and Hamilton the musical.
This is a remarkably rosy outlook for a country that just lived through an attempted coup by a sitting president. As the events of January 6th proved, the of idea of democracy doesn’t have that strong a hold on many American minds. Maybe we’re not as superior as we think.
Maybe our democracy doesn’t rest on our supposedly lofty national character, but on the complex balance of powers in our society, the way, for example, trade unions hold in check the power of corporations. This balance exists because of the relatively even distribution of wealth in society. It rests on the existence of an organized working class, an educated middle class, and a relatively broad owning class, who all believe democracy is working in their interests.
Of course, we need democratic ideas to hold it all together, but those ideas are not sufficient. Under conditions of extreme income inequality, democracy just isn’t possible, no matter how good your constitution. (Ours really isn’t that great, anyway.) If you want a country to have the democratic society of a prosperous nation, then maybe you should help it become a prosperous nation or at least stand aside and stop preventing it from becoming one. That would be real nation building. But most of the time, what we actually engage in is more like nation demolition or nation looting.
The developing nations are only “developing” because rich countries have stunted their development through hundreds of years of colonization, exploitation, and military aggression. Then we add insult to very real injury by insisting their problems are the result of some sort of cultural (ethnic) inferiority.
Our mistake in Afghanistan wasn’t that we were nobly trying to, “export democracy.” The mistake was we were pursuing a demented policy of 19th century-style colonial aggression both there and next door in Iraq.
Meanwhile, right here in the USA! USA! one of our two political parties is doing everything it can to prevent people from voting. Meanwhile, growing income inequality is a serious threat to our own democracy. Extreme concentration of wealth warps our politics and our media. Armed racist mobs egged on by cable news storm the Capitol. As the flood waters rise thanks to another climate-change fueled storm that our political system is incapable of addressing, people going without electricity or clean water once again may start to wonder who is living in the s-hole country now.
They may start to wonder if it’s time for some nation building.
