Afghanistan Part 2: Does Afghanistan Want Democracy?
Why one of the biggest questions about the War in Afghanistan has no answer.
BY THE TIME THE EVACUATION WAS OVER and the nation had moved on to commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11, America had found its explanation for why our war in Afghanistan had come to an inglorious end: The people of Afghanistan don’t want democracy. Tuning in to a Mariners’ game on that September 11, 2021, I dialed past dozens of radio stations and three times fragments of that exact same statement interrupted the static. This struck me. Three different people, broadcasting on different stations, all spontaneously saying the same thing, at the same time, unaware of each other but in total agreement. What are the chances of that? Was it a coincidence? Was I just in the right place at the right time to witness this rhetorical syzygy?1 Or was it that the sentiment was so overwhelmingly pervasive that it was impossible to turn the radio dial without hearing it, again, and again, and again?
Checking Twitter answered that question. A quick search found thousands of posts, all variations on the same theme. There are countless examples to choose from, so I’ll pick one by the guy who played Luke Skywalker.2
Korea (Born during this one)
Viet Nam (came of age during this one)
Iraq (married with children during this one)
Afghanistan (became a senior citizen during this one)
We never learn. You can’t force democracy on those who don’t want it.
At its core, Mark Hamill’s tweet isn’t about Afghanistan. It is about America. Rather than describing the opinions of the people of Afghanistan, it is a response to the rhetoric of George W. Bush, who asserted that creating democracy in countries like Afghanistan “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.”3 Bush said that the US invasion brought democracy to Afghanistan, and as a result, many people presumed that Afghans who opposed the invasion didn’t want democracy. Hamill is far from alone.
Statements like “Afghanistan doesn’t want democracy” are popular because they can mean different things to different people. If you opposed the war, it can be a condemnation of militarism. If you supported the war, it can express disappointment at the collapse of Afghan democracy, or frustration with the American leaders who made building democracy in Afghanistan a central goal of the war. Former Navy SEAL Robert J. O’Neill may not share Hamill’s politics, but drew the same conclusion: “So, it turns out Afghanistan doesn’t want democracy. Who knew?” he tweeted.4 But while this sentiment is popular, is it true?
To find out if the people of Afghanistan want democracy, I did what many Americans do, and googled it. It took me less than a minute to find an Afghan saying they did not want democracy. “We will not discuss what type of political system should we apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is sharia law and that is it,” proclaimed Taliban leader Waheedullah Hashimi in an interview with Reuters journalists.5 He is a leader of the Taliban, and his words seem to carry the weight of victory. It is easy to presume that the Taliban’s surprising resurgence is a sign that they have the support of the Afghan people, though things may not be so simple.
In the same search I found other people from Afghanistan insisting they did want democracy. Shukria Dellawar, a human rights advocate born in Afghanistan, insisted that we should not confuse frustration with the government with rejection of democracy. “Afghans have expressed a desire to have a functional democracy,” she explained, “However, with massive fraud, insecurity and a lack of transparency in the process of elections, it cannot be considered a successful practice of democracy.”6 Of course, Dellawar is an activist, so she has an agenda in promoting democracy. But Hashimi is also an activist, and he has an agenda in rejecting democracy. And they’re both from Afghanistan, so if we are talking about all the people of Afghanistan, how do we deal with such a stark disagreement?
Perhaps we really should ask how the majority of the people of Afghanistan feel about democracy. But that’s not easy to ascertain either. There isn’t nation-wide opinion polling in Afghanistan, and even if there were, can we exclude outliers on the political extremes when those outliers are the ones currently driving the struggle to control the country? Indeed, people often make inferences about what the majority of Afghans think based on how military events unfold. They presume that the rapid progress of the Taliban reflects widespread public support for the Taliban. But if we look at the actual events, the people appear to be divided.
There are women marching in the streets of Herat demanding freedom, rights, and democracy. “For two weeks, I was home and weeping. It was enough. We had to break our silence,” said Sabira Taheri, an organizer of the protest.7 But Afghanistan’s state-owned media chose to highlight a different protest, in the city of Zaranj, where women marched in support of the Taliban chanting “We no longer want democracy, we want an Islamic system and faith.”8 How is it possible to make a statement about “what the Afghan people want” that can account for both these protests at the same time?
When your research yields contradictory results like this, it is a sign that you are asking the wrong question. The solution is to figure out what kind of question the evidence does answer, and think about how that is different from what you were originally asking. In this case, we were asking “What do Afghans want?” and the examples we were finding answer the question “What do some Afghans want?” Our problem was simple: we were generalizing.
When we talk about Afghanistan we are actually talking about thirty million different people. And as you might expect, those people have thirty million different opinions. Some Afghans want democracy, some don’t. And democracy means different things to different people. Even the term “Afghan” does not have universal support among the people of Afghanistan.9 This isn’t a problem unique to Afghanistan. Americans are seriously divided over politics, culture, and whether or not to put pineapple on pizza, but we are still a coherent nation, and so is Afghanistan. We are simply encountering a limit of human knowledge: it is often impossible to describe every member of a large group of people with a single statement.
But if there is no general consensus, then how could anyone ever govern a country? Writing in The Diplomat, Yaqub Ibrahimi lays out a stark choice between multi-party democracy and an Islamic Emirate. “Without an agreement on regime type between the two parties, reaching a political settlement to end the conflict seems out of reach. Therefore, it is important to ask which party and regime type the people of Afghanistan support,” he reasons.10 This is entirely logical, however, he inadvertently highlights a critical problem that results in interminable war. If it is not possible to ever adequately answer the question “what type of government do the people of Afghanistan support?” then as long as that question is the basis for negotiations, it will be impossible to achieve true peace.
Afghan activist Ejaz Ahmad Malikzada insists there is a more fundamental task we must undertake instead of debating forms of government. “Listen to the Afghan youth,” he asks the world, “to Afghan women, to the victims of the conflict who are the true representatives of what we stand to gain or lose at this juncture. Do not just listen to the foreign experts, many of whom have only visited our country for a few months at best. They are not the ones who have lived through the violence and lost family and friends to this war, nor are they the ones who have put their lives on the line to achieve the progress we have seen over the past twenty years.”11 In his essay, Malikzada shifts the focus from “deciding” to “negotiating.” It gives us something powerful to think about. In times where we seem so divided, what if democracy was not simply about forcing everyone to agree on something, and instead a process of people coming together as a community and listening to each other? If a dictatorship is a government of dictates and commands, what would it mean to have a government built on listening instead?
Listening is an intuitive solution for me; it is how I am trained to work. But will it help us answer questions? Or will it just reveal more contradictions? The difficulty of speaking collectively about groups made up of individuals is a problem we face often in anthropology. Anthropologists study groups of people, but we study those groups by talking to individuals. How do we connect the two? The answer is to look at what people do, not guess what they think. You never know what another person is thinking, but you can know what they are doing.
People in a group will talk and fight and work things out or break apart, and all of this is all part of a social process. When I talk to people, I’m learning about their role in this process, and the process is the real subject of my research. It’s not possible to say what kind of government the people of Afghanistan want, because there is not a single answer to that question. But what if we asked “How has Afghanistan been governed?” or “How have Afghans participated in their governance?” Those are questions that have answers, and we can find them by studying history. Unfortunately, while there are many history books about Afghanistan, most don’t have the answers we are looking for.
AFGHANISTAN IS A COUNTRY WITH A LONG HISTORY that is often boiled down to one phrase with four words and no specifics: The Graveyard of Empires. This actually tells you nothing about Afghanistan itself, only about what happened to the European armies that invaded it. The people of Afghanistan are often strangers in the history books written about them.
History books are created by people, and they have many of the same limitations that people do. You can read all the books in the library on Afghan history, but that’s not everything there is to learn. And if those books are all written by the same kind of people with the same kind of background and the same kind of interests, the picture they present of history will be narrow. Europeans and Americans have written the majority of English books on Afghanistan, and so, these books often focus on the things that matter to Europeans and Americans.
French mercenary J.P. Ferrier traveled to Afghanistan in the 19th century after serving in the Persian army, and his memoir bore the cumbersome title: Caravan Journeys and Wanderings in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkistan, and Beloochistan; with Historical Notices of the Countries Lying Between Russia and India.12 True to his word, Ferrier’s primary interest in Afghanistan is the role it plays as a buffer between the British and Russian empires, writing extensively on military skirmishes, fortifications, and the relationship that Afghanistan had with the Russians. Indeed, throughout the 19th century, many British travelers made their way to Kabul simply to find out if there were any Russians there, and upon answering that question, promptly departed.
The first English language accounts of Afghanistan are written by adventurers Ferrier, travelers and military officers looking for strategic intelligence, easily portable wealth, and exotic tales that could be recounted in a best selling memoir. They were strangers in Afghanistan so they described the people of Afghanistan as strangers. To them Afghanistan was a mysterious, undescribed land, and so their books are filled with astonished descriptions of architecture, hair styles, and clothing fill pages upon pages. I think of these as “Culture Shock Memoirs.” After all, everyone who travels has the experience of those disorienting early days in a new place, where everything is fascinating and foreign, and nothing is familiar or forgettable. This, however, is not the world of the Afghan people. It is the world of a foreigner in Afghanistan, and there are many things that foreigners are slow to learn as they travel.
Unfortunately for us, if you want to understand the government of Afghanistan you learn nothing from these books other than what a tourist would encounter: There’s a King, represented by lower level bureaucrats and functionaries encountered by our authors often in moments when their paperwork isn’t in order. They offer no account of the cultural history or political philosophy of Afghanistan. Indeed, so far as they knew, Afghanistan had always been just as they found it, never thinking or changing. However, while 20th century travelers repeat the same mistakes, they offer tantalizing views of Afghanistan that hints that we are not getting the whole story.
A.C. Jewett was an American engineer who was sent to Afghanistan in 1910, and while his notes and letters13 describe an adventure in an exotic land, if we read between the lines we see something unexpected. After all, Jewett is in Afghanistan to build electrical plants and power grids, and notes other building projects nearly everywhere he goes. Jewett is frustrated with the challenges of building his power plant, but he does build it, and the Afghanistan that Jewett was building is nothing like the medieval stereotype of Afghanistan many people hold to this day.
The Swiss travel writer Ella Maillart’s book The Cruel Way14 provides another complication. Anti-war and anti-fascist, Maillart and her friend, Annemarie Schwartzenbach, decide to leave Switzerland on a road trip to Kabul in 1939. The two women, traveling alone, driving a rugged Ford convertible, did encounter sexism and harassment at nearly every stage of her journey, but the Afghanistan she travels is not the Afghanistan that most Americans imagine. Women aren’t cloaked in faceless niqab. Even remote villagers are curious and friendly, rather than violently xenophobic. She haggles deftly with bureaucrats wearing sharp British-made suits. The Afghanistan she travels is a vibrant and cosmopolitan society of great cities with a proud history. Her journey is cut short not by the barbaric violence of the Afghans, but by the barbaric violence of Europeans, when Hitler invades Poland, and WWII makes it impossible for them to return to Switzerland.
What was this Afghanistan? Who were these Afghan people? Maillart’s narrative is largely preoccupied with her friend’s growing drug addiction, and this deeply personal focus often displaces more studied observations of Afghan society, but it tells us: if we think of Afghanistan as a nation of warring tribes and religious extremists stubbornly resisting modernity, we are mistaken.
More recently, a number of histories have been written about Afghanistan focusing on the Anglo-Afghan Wars. The cover of Jules Stewart’s On Afghanistan’s Plains15 sets the tone. Its title alludes to Kipling’s ode to Afghan brutality, and the background depicts a tattered Union Jack that fades into a romantic oil painting of British soldiers, bandaged and bloodied, crouching among cold rocks, bayonets fixed, mounting a grim last stand. No Afghans are pictured. This is a book about the British Army. The first chapter is titled “The Cradle of Political Insanity” and begins with several pages describing the life and exploits of The Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone, who is the tragic hero of the story. Afghans in this book only pop into the narrative when they do something to confound the British forces. Although you might read this book out of curiosity about Afghanistan, this is a book of British history, and in it, you will only learn about the British.
William Dalrymple’s book Return of a King16 tells a more balanced history, in which the Afghan people are indeed central characters in their own history. And this book was so influential that Dalrymple was not only consulted by the American President Barack Obama, but also by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, both seeking his insights on what exactly made Afghanistan the Graveyard of Empires. But Dalrymple’s book doesn’t tell us the answer we want. It ends when the war ends, in 1842, with the return of the titular King, Dost Mohammad. Dalrymple refutes the stereotype of Afghanistan as a savage and incoherent country, and makes a powerful argument for the stability of the Afghan kingdom. But he doesn’t tell us what became of it, or what it became in the 20th century. Ultimately, though he is a better historian, Dalrymple is still writing about the Graveyard of Empires, and not about Afghan civil society.
We write about Afghanistan as a Graveyard of Empires because those empires are our own. These perspectives are important. Corinne Fowler has persuasively argued that popular British travel writing and journalism had a formative impact on how the British understood and conducted their part of Operation Enduring freedom.17 However, the question of “Does Afghanistan want democracy?” is not about the perspectives of the British or Americans. It is instead a question about the perspective of the Afghan people, and that perspective is totally absent from these histories of Afghanistan. To find the answers we are looking for, we need to find new sources for Afghan history.
As an anthropologist, I talk to people. When you are talking to people about history, you have to remember that what you are really getting is their perspective on history. People are pretty bad at recalling facts, and they often get them mixed up with opinions. But that’s just as true for academics as it is for anybody else. Nobody has complete knowledge of history. Everyone is dealing with bits and pieces. So there is unique value in using anthropological methods to study history. When I talk to different people, I always hear something new. I’m looking for what information they may have that I don’t. Because often something that is a total mystery to one person is common knowledge to another. People with different perspectives on history will point you in different directions, and sometimes, this can completely change how you look at history. And that is what happened to me one day several years ago in an Afghan restaurant in Chicago.
I had eaten a rich lunch of lamb and pulao and was killing time drinking tea, talking with an old man who had been a Mujahedeen and fled to America when the Taliban took power. I mentioned that some people felt America was forcing democracy on Afghanistan and he laughed: That’s impossible. He said. Why? Because Afghanistan was a democracy long before the Taliban. The story he told me about Afghan history, from an Afghan perspective, was totally different from anything in the books I had read in school, and it gave me a new question to research: When was Afghanistan’s first election?
That is going to be the next question I research. For now, my plan is to publish a cycle of three newsletters on each to topic:
Monday: The Main Essay.
Thursday: How I researched it.
Monday: Recommended Reading.
As always, the newsletter is free and always will be. If you are moved by my research, share it with someone else who likes asking questions, or better still, let this be a springboard for your own research!
If you ever win a game of Scrabble because you learned the word syzygy from this newsletter, please buy me a beer some day. Unless we meet in a rocky cwm in Afghanistan, in which case, tea will be fine.
Mark Hamill. (@HamillHimself) 2021. Twitter Post. August 31, 2021.
Maura Reynolds. 2003. “Bush says U.S. must spread democracy.” The Baltimore Sun. November 7, 2003.
Robert J. O’Neill. (@mchooyah) 2021. Twitter Post. August 15, 2021.
Poulomi Ghosh. 2021. “‘Afghanistan won’t be a democracy because…’: Taliban leader on how the country will be governed.” The Hindustan Times. August 19, 2021.
Kourosh Ziabari & Shukria Dellawar. 2019. “Afghans Want a Functioning Democracy.” Fair Observer. January 2, 2019.
Ezzatullah Mehrdad. 2021. “In rare public display, dozens of women in Afghanistan protest Taliban rule and gender-based violence.” The Washington Post. September 2, 2021
Bakhtar News Agency. 2021. “صدها زن در نیمروز از ا.ا.ا. اعلام حمایت کردند” September 3, 2021. My goal is to generally rely on sources that are accessible to all my readers, meaning, ones that are available publicly, online, in English, and for free. However, this article was only available on the Dari version of Bakhtar News’ website. I find this ironic given that the Islamists on social media have been attacking the western media for not covering these pro-Taliban protests, but the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s own state-owned media has also chosen not to make those stories available in English. This speaks to an important publicity game that the Taliban is playing, presenting itself one way to Dari speakers, and another way to English speakers.
Nivi Manchanda. 2020. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.12-13. Like Manchanda, I will follow standard English-language conventions and use the term “Afghan” to refer specifically to people who are the political constituents of the nation of Afghanistan, and that should not be confused with referring to a race, ethnicity, or culture. In the case of diaspora, when individuals identify themselves as “Afghan” I will respect that identification and follow suit, but otherwise, it is my practice to avoid imposing a label on people. Contrary to our instincts, it is not always necessary to categorize people.
Yaqub Ibrahimi. 2020. “What Kind of Government Do Afghans Want?” The Diplomat. February 5, 2020.
Ejaz Ahmad Malikzada. 2021. “Dignity and fair negotiations is what we Afghans want.” SouthAsiaSource. The Atlantic Council. April 16, 2021.
J.P. Ferrier. 1856. Caravan Journeys and Wanderings in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkistan, and Beloochistan; with Historical Notices of the Countries Lying Between Russia and India. London: John Murray.
A.C. Jewett. 1948. An American Engineer in Afghanistan, from the letters and notes of A.C. Jewett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ella Maillart. 2013. The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maillart is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century. She was an author, ethnologist, photographer, journalist, sailor, hitchhiker, and Swiss Olympic athlete, whose wild career as a writer involved sailing the Mediterranean, exploring Central Asia in the midst of the Russian revolution, interviewing warlords in the Chinese Civil War as she traveled overland from Beijing to Srinagar, and then hitting the road with her friend annemarie Schwartzenbach to drive from Geneva to Kabul in 1939. She spent WWII studying Advaita Vedanata in southern India, and continued skiing and exploring into her old age. Her last expedition to Tibet was in 1986 when she was 83. If you learn nothing else from this essay, I hope you learned about Ella Maillart and read some of her books.
Jules Stewart. 2011. On Afghanistan’s Plains: The Story of Britain’s Afghan Wars. London: I.B. Tauris & Co.
William Dalrymple. 2012. The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan. London: Bloomsbury.
Corinne Fowler. 2007. Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan. Amsterdam: Rodopi.