Ideology and Electricity

As America prepares to finally leave Afghanistan, having broken the Soviet record for Time and Money Wasted in the Graveyard of Empires, two new books review the Soviet experience there and reveal that the bringing-the-wonders-of-modernization-to-the-primitives strategy never had a chance.

Christian Parenti in The Nation:

These days, NATO forces occupy Afghanistan, yet a few pictures of (Soviet-backed former president) Najibullah still hang in Kabul. Why? Then as now, the war in Afghanistan was not simply between invaders and Afghans. It was also a conflict between Afghans: between the populations in the cities supporting modernization, even forced modernization, and those in the countryside violently opposed to any social change. And each force has been allied with powerful outside backers. During the cold war the Soviets supported Kabul, while the United States and Pakistan supported the rebels. Today, for an array of perverse reasons, the United States supports the aspiring state builders in Kabul (many of whom are the very same people who served with Najibullah), while Pakistan, America’s nominal ally and well-funded vassal, still supports the religious and traditionalist rebels.

There is a class of urban Afghans for whom the core political question has always been: Does that ideology come with electricity? These are people who have sought to extend the writ of Kabul over the countryside, and ever since the 1920s they have faced violent opposition. Once their vehicle was constitutional monarchy. Then it was a presidential republic, then Soviet-style socialism, and then Najibullah’s last-ditch nationalism. Now it is the deeply flawed experiment in liberal democracy imposed by NATO. Not surprisingly, former communists are still modernizers and can be found throughout the more competent portions of what is nominally known as the Afghan government.

Read the whole thing.