Is democracy exportable?
By Kåre Melhus
The Taliban victory in Afghanistan forces us to ask this question. For two decades the West, led by the United States, tried to build a democratic society there. The initial American invasion in 2001 focused on defeating Al-Qaida, which had attacked the US on 11. September that year. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) was successful in wiping out large portions of the terrorist network, with the killing of Osama bin Laden on 2. May, 2011 as the high point.
But the other military effort, The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) proved problematic and less successful. NATO troops and soldiers from a total of 37 countries provided security in Kabul and surrounding areas, in an effort to enable a transitional government, under the leadership of Hamid Karzai, to function.
In 2004 the Afghan Parliament passed a new constitution and Hamid Karzai won the presidential election. After these events the international coalition saw its mission more and more as democracy building. To provide education for Afghan girls was an essential part of this effort. Schools were built across the country, civil society was strengthened and a new Afghan army and police force, made up of some 350.000 people, received state-of-the- art equipment, training and education.
Had it worked, this massive and expensive effort should have resulted in Afghan self-reliance once ISAF left. Instead, the world witnessed a total collapse of the Afghan authorities.
A lot of people ask themselves if all the investment, all the teaching and all the lost lives was really worth it. Another question: is it even possible to export democracy to a society, so different from ours, with a culture as old as ours, or possibly older? I assume many people say no.
At the same time, I would say that we cannot give up. We can´t accept that children and young people are denied an education, and that a fanatical regime forces itself on them.
It is not only in Afghanistan that the population lives in fear of the wrath of authorities, without the ability to voice their opinion in public debate or elect delegates to national and regional legislatures. From personal experience I know that giving assistance to people in such circumstances is difficult.
Since 2004 the NLA University College, financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have taught journalism and done media research in Ethiopia, Kosovo, Uganda and Bolivia. The main purpose, in all the projects, has been to contribute to democracy building, and strengthen freedom of speech and human rights. We have done this by establishing MA degree programs in journalism.
To manage all the teaching, we recruited journalists from major Western news organizations and leading universities, while gifted, local people with scholarships from the projects, earned PhDs in the US or in South Africa. They would take over the teaching upon returning home.
The democracy builders in Afghanistan are blamed for not taking the local culture seriously enough. I´ll admit that we were guilty of similar neglect in our projects, as we experienced culture clashes, not least at Addis Ababa University (AAU). Nevertheless, today the Ethiopians run the School of Journalism by themselves and are producing journalists to Ethiopian media and journalism teachers to newly established regional universities. In addition to teachers from NLA University College, these students have been taught by journalists from the BBC, Time Magazine, and the Daily Nation in Kenya, as well as professors from the University of Nebraska, USA and the University of KwaZulu/Natal, RSA, to mention a few.
The well-known South African journalist, editor and author Allister Sparks gave the opening lecture when we launched our project at AAU. He had served as editor of the Rand Daily Mail during the apartheid years. Sparks had a theory on why the white, nationalist regime gave up. The country was a military superpower on the African continent. Many people also profited from breaking the trade blockade enforced by the international community. So the white did not feel that their privileged lifestyle was threatened, according to Sparks. But what made the regime stagger, was that young people began to doubt the sustainability of their society. “Can we keep the blacks at bay in the long run?” they asked. More and more of them concluded that this was not possible.
The people running totalitarian and corrupt regimes do not see the need to change a situation they enjoy great benefits from. But young people in many places are asking how long the powerful can keep going. To expose young people, interested in journalism and media, to international thinking on freedom of speech and democracy, is perhaps a way of showing our solidarity with them. There are many other ways of doing this. To say that it is not worth the effort, is probably not sustainable.
This article was first published in Norwegian in the daily newspaper Fædrelandsvennen on August 18th, 2021.
