Comparative reconstruction

It’s good these days – and rare for me – to have one’s opinions confirmed in the Pentagon. Setting: one day last week in the spacious, testimonial-lined office of a top Defense Department official. Topic: Afghan reconstruction … except that the phone kept ringing on Iraq. Beleaguered remark from the Pentagon big-wig: “Afghanistan’s hard, but Iraq’s going to be even harder.”

We agreed to agree – and I give the Bush war team credit on two counts. First, despite messy inconclusiveness, they haven’t forgotten, less still abandoned Afghanistan. Second, at least one of them, a key undersecretary, recognizes that Iraq amounts to a kettle of even more slippery fish.

(Truth: I like this fellow. Sharp, hard-working, ready to listen to so-called specialists [in this case, me] even when they preface their remarks with “I didn’t vote for you guys.” We hear much about “ideologues” in the Bush Pentagon; all too true, but this man doesn’t seem the sort who puts ideas before evidence. Given today’s landscape, we’re lucky to have him in place.)

Time constraints – his, not mine – precluded elaboration. We touched briefly on comparative Iraqi-Afghan history, then got back (with three minutes to go before his next meeting) to Afghanistan itself. Had we half an hour more, here’s what I would have added.

Yes, Mr. Undersecretary, you’re quite correct when you note that Iraq will be harder than Afghanistan to “reconstruct” – precisely, as you say, because it was less “constructed” in the first place. The key phrase is “nation-state identity.” Consider Afghanistan, often cited as a classic example of “failed state” but with two centuries more history than what is (currently) called “Iraq.”

A sort of Afghan state has existed since 1747 when Ahmad Shah Baba – “baba” means grandfather or forefather – established an independent power base between Saffavid Persia (Iran) and Moghul (Mongol-descended) India. Subsequent expansion was riddled by dynastic rivalry and ethnic conflict, but by the late 1890s Afghanistan was well and truly consolidated in people’s minds as well as on the map.

Is war good for anything? It depends on what you think is good. War had much to do with Afghan nation-state consolidation: three wars against the British finally earned complete independence in 1919. Wars are memorable. The late, great dean of Afghanistan scholarship Louis Dupree once showed me an elephant-hide shield used by some native ghazi (Muslim combatant) in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1841-42). This conflict ended in the worst disaster of British military history (see “December of ’41” in this column, Dec. 21, 2001). A 16,000-plus British column evacuated Kabul; one man made it to the nearest safe haven. Dupree’s Afghan shield bore a British regimental cap badge – looted, no doubt, from one of the interlopers in a Central Asian version of our Boston Tea Party or Valley Forge. I cannot think of a more evocative symbol of hard-won nationhood.

Then, lest we forget, there was the Afghan holy war against the USSR from 1979 to 1989. Against all odds and with enormous courage, the Afghans won. Of such singular accomplishment is nation-state identity generated. Want more symbols? Take a close squint at modern Afghan weaponry: overwhelmingly captured from the (used-to-be) Soviet Union.

Now Iraq. Two weeks ago in Bar Harbor, I mused with an audience on the issue of real vs. phony nation-states. Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Russia, India – all of these, it seemed to us, were real: each rooted in distinct culture and ancestral territory, One College of the Atlantic professor, hip to art history, ventured Iraq as real. “Mesopotamia,” she said, had the world’s oldest civilizations.

Absolutely correct, as the now-plundered National Museum of Archaeology in Baghdad used to testify. The fact that U.S. troops stood idly by

last month and ignored prolonged, tragic pillage does not diminish Mesopotamia’s legacy to humankind.

But art is seldom co-terminous with politics, and ancient Mesopotamia – a magnificent gaggle of self-aggrandizing city-states – never equaled what is now called “Iraq.” The latter is, utterly, a post-World War One British concoction, cobbled together from three distinct vilayats (provinces) of the vanquished and defunct Ottoman empire.

Remember those old names from ninth grade Ancient History? Grand names like Assyria, and Babylonia? Surely, most Bush people tell themselves, such heritage will generate nation-state identity.

Don’t count on it. Oddly, it was an American Christian missionary who – unlike today’s Bush Bible-thumpers – phrased the situation with greatest clarity after World War One. In his definitive history “A Peace to End All Peace,” David Fromkin recalls these cautionary words addressed to the British: “You are flying in the face of four millennia of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unit. You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet.”

Iraq had waged no wars of independence, repulsed no superpower invaders, experienced no auto-genesis. Instead, it was configured by the British, named by the British, controlled by the British in a League of Nations mandate, and supplied by the British with a monarch (King Feisal I) who’d been chased from Syria and whose roots, in any case, lay far to the South in what would become Saudi Arabia. Such is not the stuff of Bunker Hill or the Founding Fathers.

Four other factors will make reconstruction in Iraq harder than in Afghanistan. First, Iraqi expectations of governance are greater and, for America, less forgiving. Whereas Afghanistan’s government has never been strong, central authority under Saddam Hussein confronted Iraqis at every step. Iraqis, unlike Afghans, expect direction; its absence leads to a level of civil chaos not present in post-conflict Afghanistan. Two U.S. structures (first a tripartite approach, then the proconsulship of General Jay Garner) have already failed to fill that vacuum. Good luck to diplomat Paul Bremer, latest Bush-appointed solution.

Second, Iraqis are more worldly than Afghans … and thus less ready to accept outside advice. Saddam was a modernizer as well as a murderer. Even in Afghanistan, there’s much resistance to the notion that Western-trained exiles should assume leadership positions. Look for that sentiment to be more pronounced in Iraq.

Third, Iraq’s economy is more industrial than Afghanistan. Two months ago I observed Afghans – on their own – clearing irrigation canals and plowing fields. Crops are now in the ground. They’ll be harvested this fall, as in centuries past, no matter what happens in Kabul. Iraq’s economic revival – dependent on electric grids and oil pipe lines – will prove more complicated, less autonomous, and thus more prone to glitches.

Fourth, Iraq has more Shias: 55 to 60 percent compared with 20 to 25 percent in Afghanistan. Shia Islam is somewhat analogous to Protestant Christianity: historically rooted in protest and contention. As demonstrated in Iran, it’s a culture of sacred grievance. Should we be worried? “No,” says my Pentagon friend, “because the Iraqi Shias are different. They’re not like those Iranian ayatollahs. They’re secular Shias.”

We’ll see.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.