Re-Arming Afghan Civil Society

by Ibn Yousof (Afghanistan)

I have always been a supporter of the invasion of Afghanistan by the US and its allies. At the start of the operation in 2001, their stated aim was “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” I grew up hearing stories from my dad and my uncles about the beauty of Afghanistan in their youth and the country’s history of giving birth to some of Persia’s brightest minds like ibn Sina (Avicenna), Rumi, and Behzad among others. Of course, this image of Afghanistan directly contradicted the Afghanistan that I saw on the television throughout the 1990s, the one in which the Taleban banned dancing and all the windows in every house were painted black. So, like most Afghans living in the expatriate community, I hoped an invasion would bring something more than just a hunt for Arab terrorists and the end of Mullah Omar. I hoped it would usher in the Afghanistan that I daydreamed about, an idealised one that I’m not sure ever even existed.

But nine years on, the picture looks shakier than I like to admit. The Afghan people are trapped in a limbo between two styles of governance that do not fit in with their society: a Western-style democracy and a Wahhabist Taleban emirate. They believe in the ideals of freedom, equality, and national pride, but they need to be empowered to build a system that embodies these ideas in a uniquely Afghan way. This is the heart of the issue. The international community has imposed a system of governance that is exported from France and the USA. Rather than having the Western democratic system designed and imposed, Afghanistan needs a natural process of giving birth to its own revolutionary thinkers and champions of freedom in order to ensure long term stability.That would come at a price. Such a social revolution would be tumultuous at best. But it would have been easier if the opportunity was seized from the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. It’s not too late, at least not yet. The international community needs to channel more of the current flow of human and material resources to instiling the values of open society and self-governance in the Afghan people so that they can take the pure knowledge of these concepts and convert it into something of their own.

Much of the onus lies on Afghan youth outside of Afghanistan as well. This is a point that I feel is never made often enough. Many of them are in a sad state, marginalising themselves into street gangs and expressing what I call ‘BS nationalism’ through gangster memorabilia like guns painted red, black, and green or rap songs about how being Afghan is synonymous with doing drugs and fighting and somehow that’s ‘cool’. The Afghan youth need to take up the intellectual mantle of Rumi and Avicenna and re-empower their homeland. It is the only way that we can prove that our society is capable of creating an Afghan system of government and society that we can all live with.

My hope is that a combination of all these factors and more would allow for the mental shift in both the international and Afghan communities that would naturally repel Talebanisation and reconcile democracy with Afghan identity. Once again, it’s not an easy process. In fact, revolutions in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt show us that it can be very violent. But as Avicenna, being a scholar of the natural sciences, would remind us, in the bigger picture a wildfire makes the forest grow healthier.

I know I haven’t gone into too much detail about what a plan for social revolution towards a uniquely Afghan system, in my mind, looks like. But that’s because that would be far too long to go on here and I’m not an expert on state-building (yet ). So what I’m going to do is write a series of articles over time covering various important sectors of civil society and how I think they can be further empowered. I’d love to hear your views as well on what this process would look like. I welcome comment and debate.