The ever-expanding international intervention and humanitarian mission to protect civilians and depose Moammar Gadhafi’s regime reveals a striking resemblance to the process that unfolded following the US-led coalition’s ousting of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime nearly a decade ago.
Then, as now, a group of disparate, competing, and largely unknown local power-holders were chosen as an incipient government-in-waiting for a new democratic order.
Then, as now, it was envisioned that a country with vastly different cultural and social norms could be transformed into a modern liberal polity with robust human rights protections — particularly new rights for women.
And then, as now, it was assumed that these goals could be achieved without paying too high a price tag — set up the right political institutions, provide the right technical advice, throw in a little development aid, and voila, a self-sustaining democracy that no longer menaces its own people or threatens international security.
The problem, of course, is that building up brand new institutions of democracy where none existed before is not easily accomplished, especially when the resources driving the political transition are coming from international patrons rather than domestic stakeholders.
With disturbing similarity to the intervention in Afghanistan 10 years ago, nations like Canada have entered Libya with scant knowledge of its domestic politics, history, or culture.
As a result, Canada and its allies are likely to face a number of the very same problems that plagued Afghanistan’s post-Taliban transition.
First, there will be tension between centralizing power in the capital, Tripoli, in order to establish a base for modernizing reforms and building new national institutions, and the need to accommodate existing decentralized power structures, which run largely along tribal and patron-client lines.
In Afghanistan, it soon became apparent that the warlords favoured by the international community were most interested in consolidating their own power in the provinces, and had little incentive to help establish a strong central government that might encroach on their territory.
The result was a largely powerless government in Kabul that commanded little respect or authority beyond the capital city, which has survived for a decade only because of western financial and military assistance.
Second, if Libya’s rebel opposition indeed turns out to be the democratic partners we are hoping they are, there will be a turbulent road ahead actually implementing what democracy requires — political parties, elections, effective legislatures, checks on executive authority, and a free media. In Afghanistan, a country recovering from decades of destructive civil war, which had no experience with this kind of politics, the electoral process ended up producing a dysfunctional governing system which jeopardized the popular legitimacy of the entire democratic experiment.
Without sufficient time for the formation of political parties based on genuine policy platforms, or the establishment of an independent media, the first round of parliamentary elections in 2005 — while a historical achievement that brought to office many female legislators — also brought in a plethora of warlords, criminal bosses, and other regional strongmen who bribed and intimidated their way to power.
That said, no analogy is perfect — Libya is not Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, important decisions about the nature of the international intervention will soon have to be made, and, as in Afghanistan, it will be difficult to justify the costs of a military engagement to domestic audiences without leaving behind something that seems to validate the entire episode.
As Jeffrey Simpson recently wrote in The Globe and Mail, “In Canada’s case . . . we knew next-to-nothing about the complexities of Libya, and so, as with our entry into Afghanistan almost a decade ago, began military action with lofty ideals but scant actual knowledge . . . our representative in uniform were observing Libya from the air without knowing much about the peoples and societies down below.”
Philip Martin
M.A. (candidate), Norman Paterson School of International Affairs