From Real Estate to Nation-State: Who Will Lead Afghanistan?

Khans, kings, and conquerors—these are the leaders Afghans have mostly known. The legacies of Alexander the Macedonian, Genghis Khan, the Soviet Army, the Mujahadin, and finally the Taliban and Osama bin Laden share one feature: leadership based on power and divorced from authority—or with only the Qur’an as the authorizing symbol of governance. Invariably, the outcomes have been cumulative human rights abuses and what I call disvelopment, that is, the unraveling of the little development that existed. A common denominator in the repetitive failures of governance, human rights, and economic development in Afghanistan has been bad leadership.

As a journalist in Peshawar, Pakistan, on the rim of the Afghan war of the 1980s, I was fortunate to spend time with the late anthropologist Louis Dupree, whose book Afghanistan had become required cold war reading. “This place has always been more real estate than nation-state,” he said. “They are wonderful people, with a rich history and culture, and often below the surface, some fine leaders—the glue that holds the thing together.” The fine leaders could not operate above the surface because this land was on everyone’s way to someplace else; it was a pawn in the games of external powers that imposed leaders. Afghan leaders were nurtured and empowered by a Kalashnikov culture.

Crossing the Khyber Pass, the young commander Abdul Haq, who had left Kabul University to oppose the Soviet occupation, said, “Afghanistan can be a democracy when the occupiers are gone, and when we have a new generation of leaders who can lead without the gun alone, and without the Qur’an alone.” In October 2001, even as an American air strike attempted to rescue him, Abdul Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban while on an ill-advised secret mission—killed by the Kalashnikov culture that he could not escape.

Through the 1980s, for many in the West, Afghanistan held a romantic image of a land of Kipling and Kim, where turbaned freedom fighters crossed deserts, mountains, and Central Asian steppes to fight the foreign occupiers. So long as the Soviets were in Afghanistan, it was the good jihad. It was on the battlefields of Afghanistan that our cold war was won. But a price was paid in human dignity—by the poor and marginalized who became refugees, the many victims of torture, the innocent villagers who were massacred, and by every Afghan who has since stepped on a land mine.

During that period, Commander Ahmad Shah Massood, who became known as the Lion of the Pansjhir Valley, was an enlightened statesman as much as a military leader. He built schools and clinics, implemented a tax system in the region under his control, and occasionally negotiated truces with the Soviets. When the Soviets withdrew, all pretenses to leadership in the common interest evaporated as Massood joined the greedy Mujahadin fight for power that ope...