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Back to Afghanistan. As you may recall, I
recommended in October that the US
should invade Afghanistan and occupy the country for several decades in
order to firmly plant the seeds of democracy in that troubled country. From
the information available at the time, it looked like the U.S. was going to
have to do the hard work of toppling the Taliban and rooting out al-Qaida in
the Afghan caves. In fact, almost all the ground troops involved in those
activities have been Afghans of the Northern Alliance or of the various
Pashtun tribes. This had the effect of keeping Americans out of harm’s way,
but at the cost of forfeiting much of our legitimacy in keeping troops in
Afghanistan to ensure a satisfactory future for the country over the
long-term. Instead, a U.N. mediation team has put together an agreement
among the various Afghan factions for a temporary coalition government.

(By the way, can anyone give me an example of one of these U.N.-backed
interim governments that have successfully made the transition to a stable
democracy, or even to a stable government? I can’t recall any of these
United Nations nation-building experiments that has worked at all.)

Admittedly, my vision of a slow U.S.-guided transition to a free,
democratic Afghanistan was and is optimistic.  The Afghan people tend
to rally together to throw off foreign occupation (the Soviets failed there,
as did the British a hundred years earlier). But, ultimately, the U.S.
toppled the semi-stable Taliban regime, so we have a responsibility to help
put into place a new stable government for the country.

I’ll admit to a certain bias in favor of America’s representative
democracy as the best form of government yet devised. I also believe that
the establishment of a single world government which ends all war is a good
and noble goal. My route to this goal is not, however, the furtherance of
the United Nations. Rather, I believe that we should extend (peacefully if
possible) the United States to include as much of the world as can be
persuaded to join. The first nation I want to invite to join the U.S. is
Mexico. More on this another time.

I bring this up because I believe that the objective for our
occupation of Afghanistan is to create an Afghan state that eventually votes
itself into our Union. Given my conclusion that the United
States should occupy Afghanistan for a half-century or more, how should
we bring about such a situation?

One of the great problems facing the Afghan people for at least the last
28 years (since the coup in which Muhammad Daud removed his uncle King
Muhammad Zahir Shah from power) is the use of force instead of reason to
resolve issues. Ayn Rand, in her essay “The Nature of Government,” declares
that in civilized societies

“government holds a monopoly on the legal use of
physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of
restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason,
its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no
touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance…”

This is the immediate objective which the occupation forces must bring
about in Afghanistan. Warlords must be brought under control. Violence based
on ethnic identity must be eliminated, as must violence based on religion of
the kind perpetrated by Osama bin Laden (against the West) and the Taliban
(against the Afghan people).

However, American forces in Afghanistan must be held to the
strictest possible Standards of Conduct, especially with regard to treatment
of Afghans. Our soldiers’ behavior must be impeccable, not only with respect
to avoiding violence perpetrated against the Afghan people, but in
respecting a very different code of proper public behavior. As with the
Saudi Arabians, the Afghans have differing social mores which we must
respect as guests (albeit uninvited) of Afghanistan. Failure to do this will
chip away at the legitimacy of our efforts. Should any American soldier
violate these Standards, their punishment should be widely known, so that
the Afghans know we are fair.

Once the nation is pacified, a Constitution should be put forth that
guarantees to Afghans the same rights that Americans enjoy. In fact, the
American Constitution should be exactly the text used, removing only the
sections addressing the unique circumstances of 18th century America (i.e.,
the shameful 3/5 counting of Negro slaves) and adding in only sections
dealing with the benchmarks for transferring control of the various branches
of government to Afghan control. (As in the Philippines, transfer of the
lower house of the legislature should be done as soon as effectively
possible.) As in the Philippines, this may take several decades.

The American Occupation Forces should serve as guarantors of the
Constitution. We should retain this role long after all of the other power
has been transferred to the Afghans. In this role, we would intervene in
Afghan affairs whenever necessary to protect the rule of law in Afghanistan.
If this standard had been applied in the Philippines, we might have
intervened on behalf of the Filipino government when the
Huk rebels
threatened the legitimate government in the late 1940s and 1950s. We would
definitely have intervened to restore democracy after
Marcos declared
martial law in 1972.

Eventually, a peaceful and democratic Afghanistan should hold referenda
on the status of their nation in the same way that Puerto Rico does from
time to time. And if the Afghans choose statehood, we should welcome them
with open arms.

Max Boot, in the current issue of the Weekly Standard,
argues that,
rather than a response to American imperialism, “The September 11 attack was
a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is
to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation.” He goes on to argue that the U.S., perhaps under U.N.
auspices, should take on a “short-term” goal of “state building,” that is,
of building a working state administration.

I, too, have wondered about the Bush Administration’s seeming reluctance
to take over the administration of the Afghan government. However, I
think Boot’s analysis falls a bit short. He cites, as examples of
American state building success, the occupations of Haiti, the Dominican
Republic, Cuba, and the Philippines, as well as post-WWII Japan and Germany.
Some of these examples don’t seem to fit the situation, and the rest argue
for a longer-term commitment than Boot suggests. Let’s look at these
situations.

Germany and Japan (each occupied 1945-1952) were well-ordered states prior to
WWII, with long experience in self-government. Japan had within the previous
century moved to a parliamentary form of government, complete with a
popularly-elected lower house (though suffrage was quite limited). German
history included democratically elected governments as recently as 1933. The
new constitutions developed in these countries needed to rearrange existing
governmental institutions to fit with the Allies vision for the post-war
world. The German Basic Law was actually created by the Germans themselves
at the invitation of the Western Occupying Powers.  The Japanese
Constitution was created by the Allied Powers, but was implemented with the
aid of a Japanese government sympathetic with the Allies objectives.

Neither is a good analog with Afghanistan, whose utter absence of
experience with democracy, and long-standing civil disorder do not provide a
base on which an American occupation could build.

The cases of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic
(1916-1924) are similar to each other. In both cases, the country fell into disorder
and the U.S. intervened in part to prevent an intervention by European
powers (in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine). The Marines landed and
restored order. The occupations were generally peaceful and orderly.
Americans built infrastructure (Haiti’s current road system was largely
constructed by the U.S. Marines) and attempted to train leaders to resume
civil government. And, shortly after the U.S. left each country, they
succumbed to dictatorships.

Cuba and the Philippines were brought under American
control because of the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War, but the
similarity ends there. Cuba (occupied 1898-1902, and again in
1906-1908) was quickly returned to self-rule, but received repeated U.S.
intervention (both direct and indirect) in succeeding decades until finally
Fidel Castro came to power.

In the Philippines, however, even limited self-rule came only after
several years of occupation. The Philippine Assembly’s freely-elected lower
house did not hold its first session until 1907 and the membership of the
Philippine Senate was appointed rather than elected until 1916. There wasn’t a Philippine
President until 1935. Full independence was achieved in the Philippines in
1946. Despite guerilla warfare that plagued the country until the late
1950s, elections were held regularly without claims of corruption. It wasn’t
until the second term of Ferdinand Marcos and the pressure of two separate
rebel groups attacking the government that martial law was declared.

So we have several examples of American occupation. Germany and
Japan are not a good match for the Afghanistan situation. Haiti and
the Dominican Republic are reasonable matches, but the Americans left
quickly and the countries became dictatorships shortly there after.  In
Cuba, the U.S. gave control back to the Cubans quickly, but were forced to
intervene periodically for decades. In the Philippines, the Americans
stayed and taught the Filipinos how to rule themselves. It’s
reasonable to assume that the rebel factions spawned by WWII and the Cold
War, the Philippines would be held up as a shining example of American
influence today.

Obviously, then, I’m arguing for an extended occupation of Afghanistan…
perhaps as long as fifty or a hundred years.

Next: How the Occupation Should Be Run