Last week Barak posted a link to Prof. Brumberg’s article about the misleading analogy comparing the surge in Iraq to Pres. Obama’s 30 000 more troops to Afghanistan. A few days before, I came across a Washington Post article suggesting Kosovo as a model for nation-building, including in, you guessed it, Afghanistan. It’s been a long week, so it took me a while to put together why I disagree with the Post writer, Craig Whitlock, but essentially, it’s that once again, the analogy is incorrect.

I don’t want to argue that Afghanistan is an exceptional case in terms of governance and stability, but I don’t think an occupying force will be able to impose democracy and governance in Afghanistan as was done in Kosovo, mostly because I think Whitlock gets the reason for Kosovo’s progress wrong. Whitlock seems to argue that the reason for Kosovo’s tentative success – free and fair elections that drew ethnic Serbs, less than expected levels of violence against the Serb minority, slow economic development – is due to the presence of international forces, including 14 000 NATO troops and a separate 3000 member security force sent by the EU. Peace and stability are important for building a democracy, but democracy does not make a nation. I believe it is the presence of a national identity, not the armies of peacekeepers and diplomats, that makes Kosovo’s state-building possible.

Charles Tilly, in Coercion, Capital and European States, argues that it is the process of fighting wars, creating enemies and allies, of defining who and what one is by who and what one is not that builds the bonds of nationhood. This common mythic past of victories and defeats provides touchstones for a people – to be celebrated, to be manipulated, to be understood and identified with, all of which are useful to the governing process. The literature can’t tell us why countries with greater ethnic fractionalization – a lesser sense of nationhood – have greater difficulties forming a democracy, but the correlation exists. Democracy as a last resort can be possible, perhaps (I think the literature is a little fuzzy on that point as well) but it is easier, as is development, within a nation. The Kosovars are a nation – they are predominantly ethnic Albanian, they interpret their history and culture differently from the ethnic Serbs, and they fought together for independence. My sense about Afghanistan is that it is not, that it might have been at one time, but today it exists as a loose collection of cities and territories claimed by one clan or another, with a common ancestery, but little to bind them.

Perhaps, given another 50 or 100 years of war, a nation might start to emerge, or not, since there is not simply the outsider as common enemy, but civil war as well (of course, other literature argues that peace after civil war isn’t possible unless one side wins definitively. That the US is backing minority factions does not fill me with great confidence that consolidated rule can be established after we withdraw).

I’m not trying to argue that an Afghan state is impossible, but rather that Whitlock draws the wrong conclusions from Kosovo, and therefore Afghanistan. There are lessons to be learned from Kosovo, but they are not so optimistic as he thinks.