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Yglesias links to an interesting article by Sheri Berman on the relevance of early modern state-building to policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it would be fantastic if some school of diplomacy and/or international commerce offered a course bringing together the statebuilding literature and the Afghanistan/Iraq policy literature…
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Yeah, count me as one that isn’t getting this connection. Comparing the court of Louis XIV to Afghanistan is a bit ridiculous, especially from the US perspective. If you were to actually teach this course you’d do much better to study something like the East India Company, and even then the British adventures into Afghanistan came, shall we say, a bit short of success.
The Sun King’s real gift to the state of France was all those wonderful fortresses Vauban designed for him that kept the pesky royalists out as their comrades were having their heads “liberated” from the rest of them.
If anything the amount of money being poured into Afghanistan is leading to a state of affairs which clearly divides the country instead of trying to build a centralized state, which for some unforseen reason seems to be our central goal. I really don’t like being a broken record, but of the planning, training, money and execution of the 2001 attacks, very little of it came out of Afghanistan. We are stuck there because our own leaders are addicted to corruption and war is the best way to cover that up. So rather than dreaming up centralized, hierarchical systems of managing people(nothing more free than having a boot stomping on your face), maybe we could dream up a better plan on how to help people from becoming zombie bombers.
Disagree; key to understanding the state of the state in Afghanistan is understanding what a modern nation state is and does. Having some conception of the relationship between state and society also helps. In this context, knowledge of early modern European statebuilding is helpful, even if you want to argue that invading Afghanistan was pointless and that building an Afghan state is too expensive/useless/whatever.
So, from my perspective, it’s been extremely useful to think about Afghan statebuidling in the context of the early modern European experience.
I really don’t see the value of this comparison though. As DocAmazing references below, even in the European experience France would not be a good example for the geopolitical considerations alone. A mountainous, landlocked state like Switzerland perhaps is more congruous but the historical relevance of the relationships of the people, the warlords, and the state are all very different in the Afghan context.
If you are looking to build structures of a “modern” state, don’t look to some sort of early modern absolutism, but rather look at some of the more successful countries of western Africa. Success is a subjective term and may depend on if you are a resource extractor or someone that actually has to live there, but many of the same problems of ethnic communities straddling borders and Westerners supporting a corrupt elite exist there.
The value of the comparison is in investigating the architecture of the modern state; the particular differences in geography between France, Switzerland, or some other country aren’t really all that relevant in terms of a comparison of the administrative bones of the nation-state.
If what you’re interested in is building a modern state in Afghanistan, then the French experience a) indicates to you what is necessary in terms of creating administrative capacity, among other things, and b) gives you some indication of the difficulty of creating that administrative capacity in whatever locale you’re looking at.
The point is that modern nation states tend to be a lot more like each other (geography notwithstanding) than like other political communities; they tend to have a common architecture without which they cannot function. Looking at West African states in this context is, indeed, useful, but so is looking at the bare bones states that developed in early modern Europe.
the British adventures into Afghanistan came, shall we say, a bit short of success.
They won the second time around.
An author whose name escapes me (and one whom I haven’t time to look up right now) wrote of Afhanistan’s hopeful future possibly being a parallel Swtizerland: a land of differing languages and culture, that began amidst endless fighting, that might transcend those differences and use them to advantage.
It’s a lovely thought. On the other hand, we might just wipe ‘em all out & pacify the place Indian Wars-style.