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