AFGHANISTAN AFTER OUR WITHDRAWAL
Nation-building and pretense of knowledge about this world
By Alexander William
Salter and Abigail R. Hall
“In
establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.”
These are wise words from former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown Institutions
protecting personal freedoms are necessarily the result of slow and steady
development. The Anglosphere didn’t arrive at liberal-democratic capitalism
overnight. As we watch the Afghan government collapse and the Taliban seize
control, we’re seeing once again that nation-building didn’t work. It would
never work. You cannot impose democracy from the top down.
Blame
President Biden for the withdrawal fiasco, but not for the
failure to transform the graveyard of
empires into a modern state. The hubris of the last two decades has a deeper
source. “Experts,” both civilian and military, thought they could export
liberal democracy and free enterprise to a nation with no historical experience
with the political and cultural mores necessary for these institutions to
flourish.
Nation
building is doomed to fail. To see why, consider one of the most important
economists of the 20th century: F. A. Hayek. Although he won the Nobel Prize
for his work on business cycles, he is most famous for his work on
the “knowledge problem” as a critique of socialism.
Simply
put, the knowledge required to coordinate an extensive division of labor cannot
be harnessed by a single person or group of experts. Information is often
tacit, defying quantification and communication. We need markets to channel
this knowledge, creating a social intelligence that’s greater than the sum of
its parts. Bureaucrats and politicians thinking they can out-plan businesses
and households is nothing more than a “pretense of knowledge.”
Hayek’s
later work on political and legal theory extended this insight to the
institutions supporting
markets: property rights, the common law and constitutional democracy. These
too cannot be designed or imposed in top-down fashion. They must grow
organically. Thanks to Hayek, we know rationalism in politics is just as
dangerous as in economics, if not more.
Nowhere
is this more aptly portrayed than in the work of economist Christopher Coyne.
His book “After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy” detailed the
perils of attempting to build or otherwise reconstruct nation states. His work
should be required reading for all serious students of international relations,
as well as policymakers arrogant enough to think they can construct a country
when they can’t even balance their own budget.
Coyne
argues that successful reconstruction, as in the case of Afghanistan, requires
“building, and in some cases building from scratch, both formal and informal
institutions in order to achieve fundamental political, economic, and social
change.” The citizens of the imposed upon nation must learn to live as
comfortably within the new institutions as the old ones. But the required
social and political knowhow can’t be transferred. The result is permanent
friction between governors and governed.
To
complicate matters, an intervening government simply cannot know all the
information necessary to plan and implement radical institutional shifts from
the top down. The network of political and legal rules that constitute
successful countries are more like an ecosystem than an engineering
problem. Nation-building is just as much a fatal conceit as central planning.
So what
are we to do when confronted with oppressive regimes and immense human suffering?
There are
no panaceas, but it’s far better to live up to our ideals than forcing those
ideals on others. First, focus on free trade. When goods cross borders, so do
ideas. It is when ideas are adopted that policies, and regimes, change.
Second, look at immigration. If we truly want to alleviate human misery, allow
those who want to live under liberal democratic principles the chance to do so.
For Afghanistan, that means getting as many refugees here as want to come. [Not
sure I agree with this idea. What if 30 million Afghanis want to come to the
U.S.?]
Ought
implies can. If nation-building is impossible, it’s absurd for us
to try. Our fool’s errand in Afghanistan cost nearly a trillion
dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Long ago,
President John Quincy Adams warned against the temptation for America to
venture abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” We ignored his wisdom, with
tragic results. What we need first and foremost is to embrace humility in
foreign policy. We are not the world’s savior or guardian. Pretending
otherwise will create nothing but misery.
Alexander
William Salter is an economics professor in the Rawls College of Business at
Texas Tech University and a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute.
Abigail R .Hall is an associate professor of economics at Bellarmine University.
She is the coauthor of “Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S.
Militarism.”
Article
from San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 29 August 2021.
In this
image provided by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots
assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being
evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17Globemaster III at Hamid
Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 24, 2021.
MASTER SGT. DONALD R.
ALLEN — U.S. AIR FORCE VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
