The Best We Can Hope For?

Thinking back to the Viet Nam war, that I followed much like any teenager of the time, I can't recall anything approaching the domestic turmoil, violence and insecurity that mark today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Part of that must be due to the ethnic disparities that beset Iraq and Afghanistan. In Viet Nam, most of the fighting was between ethnic Vietnamese from the North and South. Sure there were hill tribes like the Montagnards but they weren't the major players. The Vietnamese also shared a common language, nation and culture more than a thousand years old.

Iraq and Afghanistan are hobbled together political packages. They represent a mix of races, religions and cultures that have not always been able to co-exist harmoniously. The very fact of this diversity leaves both countries vulnerable to outside interests from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. These outside influences add strains that further destabilize Iraq's and Afghanistan's fledgling governments as they struggle to establish their very legitimacy and control.

We want to build secular democracies in these nations but, as time passes, this begins to look naive and increasingly unrealistic. A story by David Ignatius in this morning's Washington Post
discussed talk in Baghdad about a "government of national salvation" to wrest power from the ineffectual Maliki administration.

We're talking here about a coup to install strongman rule in Iraq as the only means of holding the country together. This is not about electing a new government or, for that matter, anything to do with elections. Democracy may be just too ambitious a goal for Iraq in the immediate, post-Saddam era. The conditions aren't right for it to take hold and, for all its wonders and blessings, democracy really can't be imposed where it can't be supported.

Strongman rule is blunt and brutal and that's why it works. It functions on a level of coercion that potential challengers resign themselves to accept at least for a while. The more unruly the individual component groups may be, the higher the levels of coercion.

What other hope is there for the other country, Afghanistan? Baloch, Pashtun, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik. Foreign domination by Britain and most recently the Soviet Union. Now NATO forces have moved in, trying not to be taken as occupiers.

The Karzai government is on life support, dependent entirely on western aid. It neither controls nor benefits from the nation's principal economy, opium. He stands as a hopelessly weak democratic leader of what is, in reality, a feudal society. What are the chances? Actual authority is largely held by his nobles, the warlords and drug lords. Karzai pretends to be president and they pretend that somehow matters.

Afghanistan surely needs its own "government of national salvation." It needs a strongman who will reclaim central authority from the warlords and drug lords and retake control of the security and military services. That sort of guy isn't coming from any ballot box. Time for a coup? Quite possibly. It all depends on finding the right person for the job. The only thing that is certain is that Afghanistan cannot go on much longer the way it is.