Good article.
TR
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/print/5950
The Realist Prism: Changing Our Nation-Building Role Models
Nikolas Gvosdev | 02 Jul 2010
Invariably, when Americans engage in nation-building exercises around the world, it is hoped that the indigenous leaders that emerge will be cast in the mold of our Founding Fathers. We are looking for the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons, and James Madisons to take the helm in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Inevitably, we are disappointed when the Hamid Karzais, the Nouri al-Malikis and others fail to live up to these often-idealized expectations.
Maybe it would help if we substituted a different set of historical names and role models. If we can't get a Washington in Afghanistan, we'd certainly do well to settle for a local version of Plutarco Elias Calles, crossed with a bit of Anton Cermak.
Cermak -- the Cook County Board president from 1922-1931, and then the mayor of Chicago from 1931-1933 -- was a Czech-American politician who realized the importance of building cross-ethnic coalitions as a key to successful and sustainable governance. He successfully welded together a number of Chicago's ethnic communities -- Jews, Italians, African-Americans, Irish and different Eastern European nationalities -- into a cohesive political bloc. He did so as one of the proponents of the "balanced ticket" approach, running a slate of candidates to appeal to a broad cross-section of ethnic groups and economic interests. Cermak is often considered to be the father of Chicago's formidable Democratic machine. In a fractious society like Afghanistan or Iraq, where there are deep ethnic, linguistic and sectarian divides, and where recent elections have demonstrated the weakness -- or near-absence -- of overarching, national political identities, old-time Chicago politics, for all the corruption they engendered, would still be an important and crucial step forward.
Calles, president of Mexico from 1924-1928, may be an even more important figure to emulate. With the country emerging from years of civil war and still caught up in the throes of insurrection and insurgency, Calles realized that generals, warlords and regional bosses would not buy into the new constitutional order unless they became stakeholders in the system. In 1929, Calles created the Party of the National Revolution (PNR) as an overarching association of regional strongmen, generals, labor unions and peasant collectives. For those willing to play ball, the new party guaranteed that they would receive at least a half-a-loaf: They might not get their entire agenda, but some of their interests would be secured. The alternative was to go up against this new powerhouse -- and risk complete elimination.
We tend to view Calles' party -- which eventually became the PRI, the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party -- through the lens of its late 20th century dysfunction and corruption. But at the time of its founding, Calles' party was significant for persuading former warlords and peasant rebels to seek compromise and consensus at the political bargaining table, rather than resorting to a resumption of the fighting that had so devastated Mexico for a decade. In his 1997 tome on Mexican politics, "Mexico: A Biography of Power," Enrique Krauze observed:
Clearly it was not democracy, but it was closer to it than all the previous revolutionary regimes except for the government of Madero. Thanks to the PNR, Mexico avoided the militarist destiny of almost all Latin America. Right up to its revamping in 1938, the PNR was a civilized conclave of generals who resolved their differences without drawing their revolvers. It softened and contained violence -- until violence could fall out of fashion.
Is that not an acceptable fallback plan for Afghanistan today?
Warlords faded away in Mexico not because they were wished away but because they ended up being "neutralized" by the PNR -- by essentially being comfortably bought off until they ultimately gave up their power to re-initiate hostilities. In Afghanistan today, warlords and regional armed groups retain their disruptive capacities as a hedge against both the expected failure of the U.S. effort to contain the insurgency and as a way to protect against a central government they distrust. Our state-building efforts there, culminating in the "government in a box" approach that was so lacking during the Marjah offensive earlier this spring, can only succeed if there is an Afghan equivalent of Calles to serve as the political glue holding together the country's rival factions. Of course, an intriguing "what if" question is whether the late Ahmad Shah Massoud was beginning to move in this direction prior to his assassination by al-Qaida on Sept. 10, 2001.
Afghanistan also needs a Calles-style party if it has any hope of harnessing the immense mineral bounty that lies underneath its soil. For these resources to be effectively developed, there must be a social compact in place that commits those who control the land where the minerals are to be mined to share the profits with those who control the land by which these riches will be exported to overseas markets -- and through which the necessary foreign specialists and engineers must travel. At present, there is no incentive structure in place that commits regional stakeholders to support this type of economic development.
Critics will point out many valid objections to the apparent "lionizing" of politicians like Cermak and Calles, and argue that for much of the 20th century, neither Chicago nor Mexico were good examples of functioning, responsive democratic polities. Both had a good deal of social and economic problems to boot. While that is true, the likelihood of places like Afghanistan or Iraq quickly leapfrogging such formative periods of political construction to suddenly become advanced industrial democracies in the next several years is practically nil.
A Cermak-Calles approach is an acceptable "halfway house" for the near and mid-term future. If successfully implemented, perhaps future Library of Congress country studies on Afghanistan or Iraq will draw similar conclusions to the one already published about Mexico, which noted that the creation of the ruling PNR party "engineered an unprecedented political peace." That's something both countries could use.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, The Realist Prism, appears every Friday.
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