Afghanistan: A Possibly Unimaginable Community
By: J. Wesley Bush
Tags: Afghanistan War, Foreign Policy, Afghanistan, Nation Building, Culture

Photo: Unsplash

Benedict Anderson provided us with the standard post-structuralist definition of a nation as an “imagined community.” While most nations are more substantive than this, it’s a useful concept when we consider the West’s “nation building” project in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.

Most of the discussion on nation building focuses on assistance programs, which makes sense as they’re tangible, measurable, and channel untold billions to international organizations, development agencies, and the like. These programs fall into two broad buckets — concrete infrastructure and procurement (roads, military equipment, sanitation, schools) and capacity building (cultural exchanges, legislative assistance, training for security forces and government officials, etc.)

Ideally, a second kind of nation building is happening behind the scenes, a coalescence of diverse groups into a single national identity outweighing local or tribal loyalties. In other words, people see themselves (and others) as primarily members of the nation, and only secondarily as members of ethnic or religious subgroups.

National identity formation is not a linear process — sometimes it’s quick and other times fails entirely. And it is very subject to historical vagaries. A few quick examples:

The United States began as a loose confederation of states, with strong local and state loyalties. The Civil War was absolutely about slavery, but conflicting Northern and Southern views on nationalism were also a key driver — Yankees supporting a strong Union, Confederates giving individual states their first loyalty. Four years of war oriented the country firmly on a centralized national identity.

began as a loose confederation of states, with strong local and state loyalties. The Civil War was absolutely about slavery, but conflicting Northern and Southern views on nationalism were also a key driver — Yankees supporting a strong Union, Confederates giving individual states their first loyalty. Four years of war oriented the country firmly on a centralized national identity. Ukraine had distinct cultural and linguistic roots going back a millennium, but Russian (and other) colonialism delayed formation of a modern national identity into the 19th century. It grew quickly in the late 1800s as linguists and historians discovered their past, but waxed and waned under the Soviets. When independence came in 1991, Ukraine was a gradient, ranging from the strongly nationalist West to an East that either saw itself as Russian, or viewed Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Great Russian as ethnic subsets of a unified “Russian” nation.

had distinct cultural and linguistic roots going back a millennium, but Russian (and other) colonialism delayed formation of a modern national identity into the 19th century. It grew quickly in the late 1800s as linguists and historians discovered their past, but waxed and waned under the Soviets. When independence came in 1991, Ukraine was a gradient, ranging from the strongly nationalist West to an East that either saw itself as Russian, or viewed Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Great Russian as ethnic subsets of a unified “Russian” nation. This led to years of oscillation between pro-West and pro-Russia parties, but behind the scenes, Ukrainian national identity (and Western orientation) was strengthening, helping spark the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution that overthrew a pro-Russian authoritarian president. Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas finalized the divorce, moving public opinion decisively toward Ukraine as a distinct, multiethnic nation.

In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere transformed the country from loosely tribal to strongly national in just 24 years (1961–1985), an example of how an autocrat can fast-forward the process. (Juxtapose this with neighboring Kenya, which is still riven with tribalism in 2021.) Nyerere used a wide variety of tools: forced, disastrous socialized farming; Swahili as a unifying language; repression of tribalistic speech and expression; and nationalization of services and industry. The process “worked,” though at a terrible human cost.

Nationalism is a slippery, unpredictable beast. Wars can advance the process or hinder it. A leader may unify a people or shatter them. Imperial repression can alternately stoke or stamp out the nationalist flame.

The map below illustrates just how fragmented Afghanistan was in the early days of our nation-building endeavors. It was never going to be simple.

Photo: Central Intelligence Agency, 2005

The process becomes even more daunting when you consider that 74% of the population is rural, and deeply traditional. That’s a huge obstacle. Urbanization brings plenty of social pathologies, but you need a lot of cosmopolitan, atomized city-dwellers if you want to hyper-speed a country from premodern to postmodern in two decades.

Next, most of Afghanistan’s people groups have co-ethnics across the various borders: Pashtuns and Balochs in Pakistan; Turkmen, Tajiks, and Uzbeks in the various Central Asian “Stans”; and so on. Porous borders and transnational loyalties are powerful centrifugal forces.

Now add in chronic warfare, with its inevitable ethnic and religious enmities, and constant disruption of movement and communications.

Lastly, have Pakistan use its intelligence service and military to destabilize the fledgling nation and provide limitless support to the Taliban.

We could list a dozen more factors, but the upshot is that Afghanistan never cohered into a unified, durable nation-state, as evidenced by its Jenga-like collapse. And part of the reason was that too few people imagined themselves first as Afghans and secondarily by tribal or local affiliations.

Was nation building doomed from the start? I can’t say. But it was always going to be an uncertain and maddeningly difficult endeavor.

When we debate future commitments, our experience in Afghanistan could serve as a cautionary example.