Back when I was studying rural development projects in places a million miles from where I lived, one of the most popular things people discussed was sustainable development—this is to say that if a project is initiated someplace it has to make sense to, be useful to, and be manageable by, the people for whom the project has been initiated after the people who initiated the project have left the area. This seems straightforward now, but it hasn't always been. The past is littered with ambitious projects carried in on the backs of egotistical development workers and the young and arrogant college age adventurers whom they had conscripted as their field mercenaries.
Try to imagine legions of Peace Corps workers in the 1960s and 1970s marching into village after village and telling people just how bad and outmoded everything they did was. The mercenaries would go home, swelled up with pride over how they had made the world a better place, and the tractors and toilets they had left behind would rust into oblivion and the high tech wells they had dug would stop pumping and turn to mosquito infested swamp areas or, worse yet, dust dry pits all because the available spare parts could only be ordered especially from Omaha and who the fuck had the money for that?
Kind of like: if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for life… but if you teach him how to fish with a high tech rod that he can't replace then he's going to starve to death once that rod gets broken.
Plus, the other question that they never talked about in development school (and I'm thinking especially of the training I got with CIDA—although things have no doubt changed by now) is: who the fuck are we to be teaching other people how to fish anyhow? It's terribly condescending to march into a village and start telling people that they ought to be getting all the fish up out of the river when they haven't been doing that. Perhaps there's a good reason why people in such and such a village and not fishing…well I'm either being too metaphorical or too literal here, but I can't decide which so I'm going to get to the point…
Doesn't it seem to you like the democratic projects in Afghanistan and Iraq are a lot of the same bunk all over again? You can't go into a country, change the whole political system from whatever it was before to democracy and then leave after five years and expect democracy to flourish. The only reason European/American countries are democratic (if you even want to lie to yourself and believer they are) is because of a centuries long process of struggle and misery; a struggle that continues to be waged every single day.
The democratic process isn’t just naturally going to take root in Afghanistan in five years and all the shit-eating supercilious "Model Villages" built by the Canadian armed forces are not going to change that fact one iota. These dreams are all going to rust like high tech tractors at the edges of farmers fields throughout Asia in places where nobody can afford the parts.
I’m trying to say this without any value judgement, because I don’t really understand the Afghani political system… but I have to think that any solution that is going to work for that country is going to come from some model based on their own system and way of doing things, rather than Western style democracy.
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p.s. this sort of thing doesn’t only happen in Asia. Remember the Toronto Blue Jays and the Montreal Expos? Someone thought that baseball would be a hit in Canada and for a while Canadians kind of got excited about it, but sooner or later we (Canadians) got bored of it—it just doesn’t suit our temperament culturally speaking, and now baseball (as a professional sport) is all but dead here in Canada.
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