From Clans to Countrymen

An interim Afghan government takes control of a shattered land Saturday with good intentions and the best wishes of most of the world. That’s the good news.

Clans and ethnic groups that have feuded for centuries still need persuading that they constitute one nation. The government has no revenues from taxes or customs collections. Members of the defeated fanatical Taliban movement are still on the loose, potential enemies. Millions of land mines dot the mountains, valleys and desert floor, threatening death or disfigurement to any who stumble upon them. Years of drought have destroyed whatever farmland remained. The new Afghanistan has become the poster child for massive, sustained, international aid, dependent for now on the kindness of outsiders.

In its favor are pledges of support from the international community and a desire among its people to end the fighting, feed their families and educate their children. The 30 temporary Cabinet members are old enough to remember an Afghanistan at peace in the 1960s and ‘70s and young enough not to be frozen in the hatreds of the past. The better the government does, the deeper will grow the support.

So far the rhetoric from other nations is good. Some peacekeepers have taken up positions, and more will follow. Money, food and equipment, everything from hammers to bulldozers, are pledged. No one disputes that Afghanistan has to be rebuilt into a functioning nation, as it was before Soviet troops invaded in 1979. The invasion unleashed 22 years of war that created a haven for Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorists. If warlordism takes hold again, with rape, plunder and murder the coin of the realm, the door will reopen for terrorists.

The new government was laboriously assembled in Germany, where effective U.N. mediators and foreign donors waving checkbooks pushed representatives of different Afghan factions together three weeks ago. The interim government is to rule for six months, at which time a traditional grand assembly known as a loya jirga will appoint a transitional regime to rule for 18 more months. Then, if all goes well, a constitution will be approved and elections held. The ultimate goal is a government of all ethnic groups and, significantly, both men and women. The Taliban punished women who tried to educate their daughters or work or walk in public with so much as an eye uncovered; such decrees stained those who promulgated them.

Some Pushtuns, the dominant ethnic group, have complained they are underrepresented in the new government. Some Uzbeks and Tajiks are unhappy as well. A few Pushtuns have sniped at the interim prime minister, Hamid Karzai, who is Pushtun but from the Popolzai clan rather than the clan of the deposed king, Mohammad Zaher Shah. Karzai effectively wooed defectors away from the Taliban during the military campaign and mediated subsequent turf battles among factions, but the inter-ethnic squabbles of men loaded with all manner of weapons pose a major threat to him and to nation-building.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson has defined nations as “imagined communities,” cultural creations in which people know few of their fellow citizens personally but maintain the image of comradeship. It will be the job of Karzai and other Cabinet ministers to encourage a wide imagination, one focused on nation rather than tribe. It will be the task of foreign countries to help sow fertile ground for that imagination to flourish.