Western ideological doctrines played a crucial role, and Liberalism in particular provided a way of disciplining unfree subjects and (purportedly) better preparing them for civilised self-governance. Afghanistan and Iraq became twenty-first-century laboratories for a liberal state-building premised on supposedly universal values, including individual freedom, free-market economics, democracy and strong state security institutions.
This endeavour failed, despite the lavish resources invested in it. The coalition was, after two decades, forced to withdraw in a chaotic and uncoordinated manner. Although there were many reasons for this, I argue that the deeply flawed assumptions of neoliberal interventions that engendered a legitimacy crisis were foremost among them.
Liberalism in particular provided a way of disciplining unfree subjects and (purportedly) better preparing them for civilised self-governance.
Vastly unequal power and hierarchy were imposed on relations between the official West and non-European world and this produced a sense of righteousness, embodied in an appeal to ‘universal’ norms and values. The colonial/imperial ‘civilisational mission’ was therefore reinvented, in our time, as the export of Western norms, ways of governance and, above all, democracy. This resulted in local cultures and values being viewed with indifference or even contempt. These neoliberal measures were particularly ill-advised in a country where social values and group solidarity surpass individual interests.
Even when intervening powers acknowledge local notions and practices, they co-opted them in an attempt to bestow legitimacy on exogenous political decisions. Consider, for example, the US-led coalition’s adaptation of the Afghani jirga practice, and specifically its use of the elders’ assembly as a decision-making framework to resolve disputes within local communities.
In 2002, it was expanded at the national level into an emergency Loya Jirga. While jirga is a consensus-based practice in its native Afghani culture, the lead nations (the US, UK, Germany and Italy) misleadingly presented it as a manifestation of democracy and turned it into a voting system and a way to bestow a semblance of legitimacy over unpopular parameters set by Western actors and Afghani warlords and human rights violators at the 2001 Bonn Conference.
These neoliberal measures were particularly ill-advised in a country where social values and group solidarity surpass individual interests.
In subsequent years, the local population was largely excluded from externally funded, designed and implemented state building projects that did not respond to the country’s specific cultural or economic needs. For example, large parts of the funds committed to projects flowed back to donor countries in the forms of consultancy fees and profits, as observed by Thomas Barfield, the American social anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s.