Myth About a ‘Democratic Afghanistan State’

In the West, the image of Afghanistan is largely one of ‘traditionally’ weak structures that have been destroyed by 30 years of war, along with most of society’s structures. The Taliban with their anti-statist stance underscored this picture.

They scrapped everything states usually do, closed schools, destroyed museums, and refused to decide on laws. Theirs was an ideology claiming that all law required already existed in the form of sharia. Western social engineering started, based on an understanding of a Western, idealised Weberian state of rational bureaucracy to replace these structures (Kühn 2012, 27; 2013, 70-1). Many of the structures in place, such as authority of elders, maliks, or khans,⁸ or the complex tribal structures (mainly in the south and east) have been severely transformed by the war. Mujaheddin commanders and mullahs,⁹ seizing opportunities provided by militarisation and islamisation, had tried to appropriate such authoritative positions, often by force. Traditional structures lost influence, but hardly disappeared.

More importantly, while democracy is a cherished concept for Afghans, the idea of a competitive democracy ran counter to the politics of honour and face-saving. The presidential elections of 2014 are a case in point, where widespread fraud notwithstanding a double-leadership was introduced to allow the election loser Abdullah to become member of the government. The post of Chief Executive Officer, unknown to the Afghan constitution, was created to resolve the standoff between the two remaining candidates after the rigged 2014 elections. Similar leverage was hardly available in local and provincial elections, leaving opposition candidates often unable to arrange for power-sharing or post-splitting arrangements. So openly appearing as a loser caused many tensions, bitter accusations, and kinship-based loyalties hardening between followers, while cooperative arrangements were preferred and informally practiced (Brick Murtazashvili 2014).

In the Afghan understanding, losing face undermines one’s standing as it questions the ability to defend one’s interest. Being seen as weak becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as others will act towards a losing person accordingly. Not losing hence becomes an undeniable imperative. otherwise, weakness is projected onto a family, which analogously appears as weak. Appearing weak, in turn, provides for existential dangers to individual leadership from inside the family, as someone, sometimes a brother or cousin, may feel forced to reinstate a powerful family’s fame by replacing the weak leader. Outsiders may also take advantage of such opportunity; sometimes seizing women, property, and influence from a weak leader was practiced. In its simplification of social relations, there is significant similarity between realist thinking in International Relations and this culturally formed model of inter-familial politics in the absence of a hierarchically ordering state.

Electoral systems where the loser gets no share of the power, to return and try again four or five years later, let alone a winner-takes-all presidential system seem unsuitable for a society working along these rules. Juan Linz (1990) has warned that presidential systems in polarised and fragmented societies— which Afghan society undisputedly is—may not work to bridge the gaps but deepen them. Such a system institutionalises the loss of face and automatically provokes dissent and dissatisfaction, and resistance. Moreover, it seeks to unhinge the ontological position that society allows for smaller groups— families, tribes, ethnoi—to take: freely arranged social relations devoid of hierarchical, and thus imposed, order by a higher authority. Disputed statehood in Afghanistan, hence, is about much more than the question of whether a party or leader proposes the right political programme. Questioning political authority, similarly, reaches a lot further than merely asking which questions the state ought to address; it asks instead if the state ought to be implied in social relations at all.

Preserving personal autonomy means keeping the state at bay, not accepting its claim to universal superiority, organising social relations, and expanding influence over society (Jung 2001).

The myth of the Afghan state involves double meanings about the hierarchical nature of the state. Designing a new state after 2001, international actors pleaded for a highly centralised state that should become a focal point for power; over time, it was intended to develop the credibility and stamina to counter the multiple challenges coming from the fringes (certainly not limited to the Taliban). This was a departure from Afghan statehood, where state and rulers were hardly accepted in a way in which European kings of the Absolutist era were, who managed—at least in principle—to keep rivals at bay and to monopolise violence until the state’s particular way became accepted as universally ‘true’ (Bourdieu 1998, 84). The multiple different modes of settling disputes, punishing delinquents, and so on in the Afghan case give ample evidence that this unitary understanding of state rule hardly ever existed in Afghanistan. Highly particularistic relations between head and parts of the state existed in the stead of hierarchical relations to nominally equal citizens. Generally, the state in Afghanistan is not simply rejected but its reach is neatly determined and periodically renegotiated. This can be explained by the historic genealogy of Afghanistan as a buffer state between the British and Czarist empires.

State formation was top down, by kings who even borrowed their title of king (transforming the meaning of emir or khan) from the European idols. With Western penetration of global social relations, the state form became a necessity of the system. So ‘Afghans’ accepted a king as a necessary hinge function between their plural social formations and the outside world, but hardly as someone ruling over them. Over time, the reach of central rule was ever disputed and sometimes fiercely fought over.

However, due to the political economy of Afghanistan as a rentier state dependent on foreign funding, the relation was one of give-and-take, of particular relations, negotiated between equals, and highly personalised. When a king died, the successor did not only have to keep 15 cousins at bay but also had to renegotiate agreements with strongmen influential in the provinces. The local men would know how to evaluate the weakness or strength of the successor, and terms of agreements would be renegotiated accordingly, usually in favour of the locals, in exchange for support.

In other words, the state was and is a necessity dictated by the international system and is negotiated between different, and shifting, power centres. No one, however, actually questioned the state in Afghan his- tory—apart from a more recent pan-Pashtun movement which would rather merge Pakistan’s parts of Pashtunistan with Afghanistan than secede from Afghanistan. Generally, no demand for restructuring of the state’s borders or secession was seriously voiced—which ought not be confused with acceptance of a state as a mode of organising society.

Conclusion

Understanding these different, but for the Afghanistan campaign of the West, guiding myths allows explaining at least partly the course of the intervention since 2001 and why resistance in Afghanistan against the Western-model state has been so pronounced and sustained. Expanding on Blumenberg’s ideas on myths, this chapter has directed attention towards basic truths, coined as myth, shaping policymakers’, military’s, and supporting publics’ assertions, which in turn influence the way aspects of politics are selected and evaluated. Blumenberg makes the case of detaching myth from explanations of creation but understands them to reproduce basic ideas in a certain form appealing to an audience. Their sustainability is guaranteed by oral (that is, narrative) tradition.

The analysis of myths, understood not as false beliefs but as epistemological software structuring action, analysis, and consequently subjectivities, promises a better understanding of the logics of action of players in contexts like Afghanistan.

Logic, in this way, is not to be understood as a rational evaluation of costs and benefit but a weighing of selected arguments—the selection, of course, sometimes deeply influenced by the underlying myths. What is selected in each concrete case, in the narrated form or representing Afghanistan in a given context (military brief- ings/debriefings, staff meetings, strategy planning, and so on), is already an expression of myths at work. The relative durability of myths about Afghan’s fighting mode, Afghanistan’s role as safe haven, or Afghan statesociety relations supports naturalising these qualities as beyond time and context. The work of myth can be observed in the arguments of proponents and critics of the intervention alike, for example, when the latter make the case for knowing the history of Afghanistan better as a precondition for successful statebuilding. Indeed, confusing myth and history is the default mode of under-complex analogy.

Enlightenment’s critique of myth as irrational is replicated in describing Afghans as following mythical (hence necessarily untrue) beliefs. It is part of the work of myth itself to seamlessly incorporate both rationalist arguments denouncing irrational political behaviour and their function of stabilising the productivity of the guiding myth itself. In addition to the ‘work of logic’ which myth is, myth contributes to trusting the order of things—even if the order of things is undesirable. As myth is not a logical other to science and knowledge but its supportive twin, several myths revolving around a particular subject of narration support each other. It is in this sense that we can draw lines from Afghan history to terrorism and contemporary statehood, which are all part and parcel of the particular myths of Afghanistan, of which only a small part could be presented here.

In forcing us to analyse myth as productive and guiding for knowledge production in International Relations, a Blumenberg-infused study of myth is reflexive and tells us as much about ourselves as about the object of study.

Myths, vivisected in their mutually enforcing, underpinning, and productive impact, can helps explain perspectives on a subject. Such an analysis also helps analysing the narrative construction and intellectual grounding of politics. In Afghanistan, as anywhere, narratives and counternarratives compete constantly to define the spaces of the say-able and the do-able, thereby carving out the essence of the myths. Just as Blumenberg describes it for classical myths, these were later enshrined in scripted form and thus frozen. Similarly, questioning the myths of Afghanistan as described here would mean challenging foundational knowledge. Putting taboos on topics and possible action is the exclusionary flip side function of myth. In withholding some topics from public scrutiny, myths are powerful to pre-shape evaluations of political possibilities and potential ways of addressing a situation. In this way, the study of myths allows the shedding of light on other aspects than classic International Relations would have envisioned—well beyond Afghanistan.

Acknowledgements My most sincere gratitude for support and helpful discussions on this chapter goes to Berit Bliesemann de Guevara. Also, I am grateful to the Norman Paterson School of International Relations, namely Steve Saideman, for the invitation to present parts of this research at Carleton University in Ottawa in March 2014, where Jean Daudelin and David Mendeloff provided useful insights. This trip was kindly supported by a networking grant from the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD. Michael Daxner’s ideas are, as usual, a great inspiration. Rhea Holzer, Tina Rosner, Christoph Meyn, and Jesper Nielsen supported the research at various stages. Valuable points for thinking through myth emanated from discussions at a panel jointly organised with Berit Bliesemann de Guevara at the ISA’s Annual Convention 2013 in San Francisco. All error and flaws in the argument remain, of course, my own.

Notes

1. The ‘absolutism of actuality’ is remarkably present in development policy papers. They often acknowledge the failures of the past while being unable to put forward convincing concepts departing from the ‘old ways’; thus, the hidden dynamics that turn the most benevolent of actions into their contrary remain at work (Pospisil and Kühn 2016). The absolutism of the actual case, or project, leaves no space for conceptual divergence.

2. For the foundational contradiction of Christian philosophy, which is fundamentally opposed to the episodic character of metamorphoses prominently employed in (Greek) mythology, see Blumenberg (2006, 196-203).

3. See, however, Bliesemann de Guevara’s (2012, 2016) work on politicians visiting intervention theatres to ‘see for themselves’ and the subsequent claims to credibility in political discourse; Bliesemann de Guevara’s notion of such visits being staged resounds military parlance for a mission environment as ‘theatre’.

4. This is a result of Christian dogma being claimed as divine truths; the Christian God, revealing truth for the purpose of guidance, takes a different position than the mythical gods, which are particularistic, deficient, and unreliable. Dogma in its genealogical sense is a canon for the exclusion of heresy (Blumenberg 2006, 249).

5. Transl. and emphasis F.K. (“Die Grenzlinie zwischen Mythos und Logos ist imaginär und macht es nicht zur erledigten Sache, nach dem Logos des Mythos im Abarbeiten des Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit zu fragen. Der Mythos selbst ist ein Stück hochkarätiger Arbeit des Logos.”).

6. Theodor Fontane’s (2002 [1858]) ballad ‘Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan’ [The Tragedy of Afghanistan] certainly did that for German-speaking Europe. It is disputable if his political impetus was to undermine the British Empire’s claim to power by showing that it can actually be defeated. It seems more plausible that, as correspondent in London for some years and writing 15 years after the fact, Fontane intended to demonstrate the national trauma the defeat still meant to the British public and, especially, its military elite.

7. Personal conversation, former ISAF Intelligence Officer, Kabul, March 2014.

8. Both are titles derived from leader or ‘king’, but do not have specific meaning beyond denominating someone with a particularly influential role in (local) society.

9. Mullahs are members of the rural clergy, often illiterate but able to recite parts of the scriptures; their traditional roles of mediation and social pasto- ralism did not ascribe them particularly influential positions in society. Deliberate targeting in Soviet times, but also by the grown influence of military strongmen in the course of the wars, even diminished their social position. Conversely, where men were away to fight, or when radicalized Islamism took root, their teachings became more influential.

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Source: Bliesemann de Guevara Berit. Myth and Narrative in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan,2016. — 329 p.. 2016

Myth About a ‘Democratic Afghanistan State’

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