The West Doesn’t Always Know Best
US and coalition forces left Afghanistan in 2021, leaving behind a new Afghan government and constitution, carefully (and painstakingly) crafted over 20 years of conflict, negotiation, and compromise. Within weeks, it all came crumbling down as the Taliban took over, ushering in a new era of repression and discrimination that the international community had so desperately tried to mitigate. While the US withdrawal was hasty and ill-timed, this was not a failure of implementation. It revealed something deeper and perhaps more troubling: what if our “help” was actually harm? What if we spent 20 years building something that never should have been built? Externally-guided democratic reforms, such as the ones we worked so hard to implement in Afghanistan, may actually violate the very principles of consent and self-determination that they claim to champion.
A consensus has formed in the west, with the US leading the charge, that post-conflict reconstruction is engineered on a blank canvas. After all, there would be no need for intervention in the first place if governance systems remained intact and human rights were respected, right? When this is not the case, and intervention is deemed morally necessary, it would seem that political transformation is the only way to prevent future atrocities.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it has led many to believe that political transformations, specifically the imposition of democracy, are done in good faith. On paper, this makes sense – the government does bad things meaning the government is bad, so replace the bad government with a good government and no more bad things will happen. However, there are often ulterior motives. Take the Libyan intervention, for example. The US and NATO claimed to intervene on humanitarian grounds, in order to prevent alleged mass atrocities by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But thanks to evidence from Hillary Clinton’s emails (long story), we know that NATO actually acted to prevent Gaddafi from founding an African central bank with its own gold-backed currency, which would have challenged the supremacy of the US dollar.
But even assuming good intentions does not guarantee ethical practice. The first premise of this argument is that legitimate authority requires consent of the governed –a principle foundational to international law and political ethics across traditions, not just in the west. In post-conflict societies, the consent of the native population is necessary to create a functional and legitimate system by which the people are to be governed.
The second premise is that the people’s right to self-determination is the basis of sovereignty in the international system. This is much more plausible in democratic states, but this does not have to be the case: as long as the people accept the system by which they are governed, sovereignty is intact. This means that external actors cannot substitute their judgment for local political will. The imposition of an unfamiliar or undesired system, regardless of its perceived quality, constitutes a violation of sovereignty.
Therefore, liberal peacebuilding violates the inherent rights of citizens in post-conflict societies as it denies them self-determination. This is not to say that democracy is not a worthy goal or vision; in fact, this argument allows for the concession that a democratic system of governance is the most plausible way to protect human rights and allow for collective self-determination. However, democracy must grow organically. Forcing it on a nonconsenting population is both unethical, impractical, and historically ill-fated.