Pulling Afghanistan from Poverty

If we can treat ghetto culture in the U.S., we can do it elsewhere, too.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/27/afghanistan-culture-poverty-oped-cx_am_1229marlowe.html?partner=email

Afghanistan is a ghetto.

If you can see beyond the exotic clothes, the mountains and the overwhelmingly rural aspect of the country, it’s obvious. No, Afghanistan doesn’t look like an inner-city slum. But over the course of 11 visits of a month or so each, I’ve come to believe that Afghans in many respects act like people trapped in “the culture of poverty.” Yes, they are a warm, hospitable, vastly social people, but they are crippled by a dysfunctional culture.

By and large, Afghans are relentlessly present-oriented, unable to delay gratification, macho, authoritarian, fatalistic, passive, disorganized and feckless when it comes to responsibilities. They spend time almost exclusively with relatives, have few affiliations with civil society and mistrust others outside their family groups. There is little to no privacy in an Afghan family, and little individuation.

The majority of Afghans are illiterate, but even most of those who are educated are oriented to oral rather than written culture. Learning in schools is by rote memorization; class sizes are huge, dropout rates high. Religion is practically the only activity that unites Afghans who aren’t blood relatives. Independent thinking and critical reasoning are not much in evidence, and very few Afghans seem to have internalized moral codes, even based on religion. Fewer still are able to stand up to peer pressure and do the right thing when called for.

While Afghans aren’t nearly as violent as Americans on an individual basis, as a group, they have had trouble figuring out ways of working out their differences through discussion rather than warfare. Very few of their rulers in the last hundred years have peacefully relinquished power to a successor. Tribes operate more or less like gangs, albeit white-bearded gangs.

And so we Westerners (and Indians and Japanese)–and more particularly, we Americans–are engaged in the business of what is euphemistically called “reconstruction,” though there was nearly nothing in the way of human or physical capital in Afghanistan when we arrived. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of why a country that had world-class architecture, poetry and art from the ninth to the 15th centuries was reduced to a basket case by the 20th.)

What the U.S. and its allies are really trying to do in Afghanistan is social engineering on a grand scale, scarcely seen in the whole history of the world, and the most wonderful good luck for the Afghans. We are bringing to the ghettos of the Islamic world the same conviction that we brought to our own slums: that the cycle of poverty is breakable.

We in the West are so lacking in cultural confidence these days that we are not willing to come out and say what we ought to: The culture of Afghanistan is dysfunctional, and that’s why it became a failed state and a haven for terrorists. That’s why Americans are teaching the Afghans how to trellis grapes and deliver babies and bottle water, and not the other way around.

In the U.S., all but the furthest-left zealots have no trouble believing that the “underclass” needs to be taught how to organize their lives in an effective manner–staying in school, deferring childbearing until they can support kids, getting and keeping a job, opening a bank account, saving, voting. This is how they will escape poverty and make sure their children don’t experience it.

Applying these common sense beliefs to underdeveloped countries overseas is controversial, but it shouldn’t be. It’s interpreted as condescension but it is actually high idealism, the same high idealism that says that everyone has human rights, everyone ought to be able to realize his or her potential, everyone is born free and ought not to be in chains.

There is an ancient Arab saying, “Allah made the Arabs great,” which means Islam galvanized the energies of a previously unremarkable people to conquer half the world. Afghanistan too was touched by this greatness, as its many, too-little-known Islamic monuments tell. Then something unraveled, here and in the rest of the Islamic world.

I write as an enormous admirer of classic Islamic culture and as someone who has studied Farsi and Arabic for years in an effort to understand the glories locked within their literatures. If greatness is to come again to the Muslim lands–and I see no reason why it should not–it will have a different source, perhaps one we can’t imagine now. But whatever it is, it will require education, a vibrant civil society, organized intellectual habits and the ability to find and follow one’s convictions.

This belief that the people of Basra and Mazar and Kandahar have the same potential as we Americans underlies the much-maligned neo-con project. It was not for oil, and not for power and not for George W. And no, it was not for Israel. If neoconservatism appealed to Jews, among whom I count myself, it was because we of all groups know a sense of urgency in trying to do right:” If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”

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