Seeker Blog

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Seekerblog “reliable source”, is an ex CIA Directorate of Operations officer. This longish essay, datelined Kabul, is another valued Gerecht analysis - this time investigating the parallels between Afghanistan and Iraq:

AFGHANISTAN AND Iraq are geographically and historically in two distinct parts of the Muslim Middle East. Scholarly works on the region with an Arab slant tend to throw Afghanistan into Central Asia and the subcontinent, while books with an axis running through Iran pull Afghanistan back into the Middle East proper. Yet the two countries are now joined at the hip, and they are so joined by America. We are running simultaneous experiments in democracy in two countries that, despite their cultural and political differences, have much in common. Morally, at least for us and the natives, the two efforts are-or ought to be-indistinguishable.

If you believe that vanquishing fanaticism and establishing democracy in Afghanistan is a thing worth fighting for-and I recently ran into dozens of British, Italian, German, Lithuanian, and even Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan who seem to believe so sincerely-then it is ethically challenging to apply a different calculus in Iraq. You may not have initially favored the war in Iraq, but it seems morally awkward to argue that the Iraqis now deserve less support than the Afghans. It is heartening to hear senior Italian and British officers attached to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan affirm that they’re planning on being there for 10 years, provided the locals want them. (And odds are the Afghans will.)

. . .

SUICIDE BOMBING POSSIBLY ASIDE, a comparison of Afghanistan and Iraq ought to calm American nerves about the political evolution in Mesopotamia. What doesn’t really bother us in Afghanistan-the participation of devoutly religious Muslims in the political process-shouldn’t bother us elsewhere. We may view Afghanistan with the bigotry of low expectations: Since Afghans have been calling themselves mujahedeen, holy warriors, for nearly three decades, and political Islam has been swirling through the Afghan bloodstream for even longer, we don’t expect their political system to be all that secular. That Afghans, who have developed a certain penchant for making personal and political differences a casus belli, can sit together under one roof and scream but not shoot is an achievement for the new parliament. However imperfect, this is the birth of tolerance. For Americans and their European allies in Afghanistan, and for the Afghans themselves, watching ultraconservative turbaned men, veiled women, and opium–enriched warlords rub shoulders with expatriate suits and ties and women showing hair and a bit of a female form is a very good beginning.

We should have, mutatis mutandis, similar expectations in Iraq. Iraqis, we were told by a long list of Iraqi exiles, journalists, and scholars, are much less fervent believers. On the Shiite, Sunni, and even Kurdish side, this assumption of rather advanced secularization was misplaced and, more important, harmful to our understanding of how democracy would take root in Iraq. We should realize that in Mesopotamia, as in Afghanistan, democracy will be either made or broken by men and women of serious, not particularly reformed faith-not by secular liberals, Muslim progressives, or “moderates” (probably best defined as Muslims who act more or less like ordinary faithful Christians). All of the explicitly secular and moderate candidates did rather poorly in Iraq’s national elections on December 15, even though the United States, with the Central Intelligence Agency in the lead, probably poured a small fortune into helping their cause. One can feel considerable sympathy for the liberal Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who recently gave an analytical cri de coeur in the New York Times, dissecting all the reasons we should fear Iraq’s new constitution, with its fissiparous potential. It is, without doubt, a flawed document. One can easily wish for a little less federalist enthusiasm on the Shiite and Kurdish sides.

. . .

And there remains the huge fact of the Shiite population in Baghdad, which would be excluded from any Shiite semi–autonomous zone in the south. Baghdad is a majority Shiite city. And it simply cannot be compared to any other city in Iraq-certainly not impoverished and broken Basra, the other possible pole of Shiite urban influence. (The impoverished Shiite south of Iraq actually reminds one of Afghanistan.) For the foreseeable future, the centripetal power of Baghdad will remain. The exclusionary, defensive, federalist impulses of the Iraqi Shiite community, which Makiya rightly fears, can go only so far before they provoke real, paralyzing Shiite resistance from Baghdad. If for no other reason, the Baghdad Shiite factor will likely guarantee sufficient tolerance toward the Sunnis for democratic progress to continue.

I hope you’ll read the entire article.

My optimism index will peg if the Iraqis can negotiate an oil-trust to ensure every citizen shares in the nation’s wealth. Ahmed Chalabi is the most prominent Iraqi politician backing the concept - wish him well.