Devout Democracies

...Yet it is impossible to visit Afghanistan, as I did recently under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and not see the progress wrought by the invasion and America's and NATO's continuing efforts to safeguard and rebuild the country...

...the energetic and hospitable Italian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team in Herat got blasted a day after I left—threatens to distance Westerners, who are indispensable to civil order and good governance, from ordinary Afghans...

...The last time I visited, before 9/11, when the late Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was desperately trying to hold onto an ever-shrinking slice of territory, the country and its people were physically and spiritually deconstructing...

...Until the Shia become more self-confident as a community—and they still appear fearful of the Arab Sunnis' greater martial prowess—federalism will retain strong appeal for them...

...For Americans and their European allies in Afghanistan, and for the Afghans themselves, watching ultraconservative turbaned men, veiled women, and opium-enriched warlords rub shoulders with expatriate suits and ties and women showing hair and a bit of a female form is a very good beginning...

...Suicide bombing possibly aside, a comparison of Afghanistan and Iraq ought to calm American nerves about the political evolution in Mesopotamia...

...Also, Afghans smile now...

...In Herat and Kabul, Afghans no longer seem captive to fear...

...We will unquestionably see a federalist Iraq—at a minimum the Kurds will guarantee this...

...As in Iraq, the enormous political progress made in Afghanistan—the new parliament was sworn in on December 19—is happening so fast as to generate stress...

...An Afghan parallel again has value...

...The stress placed on it during the '70s, '80s, and '90s was greater than what the Iraqi Shia endured under Saddam...

...Furthermore, when one scans the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish communities, one isn't particularly inspired by the Iraqi founding fathers...

...In Iran, the revolution and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war engorged the Shiite side of the Persian brain, altering temporarily the complex balance that makes the Shiite-Iranian identity...

...An aesthetic sense is creeping back into new buildings, houses, and what is often the most neglected thing in the Muslim world, nonceremoni-al public space...

...The impoverished Shiite south of Iraq actually reminds one of Afghanistan...

...It would be surprising to discover that Afghan cultural traditions, so battered by war, strife, and radical Islamic experimentation, would stand firm where other Muslim national cultures—Egyptian, Algerian, Saudi, Moroccan, Iraqi, Iranian, and Pakistani—have become to varying degrees incubators of lethal Islamic fundamentalism...

...As the late, great historian Elie Kedourie once speculated, Middle Eastern countries, in their earlier democratic moments, might have done much better if they'd used America's presidential system rather than Europe's parliaments as a model...

...The still seemingly widespread popularity of President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, among the Tajiks is a sign that ethnic identities are politically flexible, transcended often by personal charisma, loyalty, ambition, financial incentives, and national ideals...

...The virus of radical Sunni extremism has been in Afghanistan a long time, from before the Soviet invasion...

...It is too soon to tell whether this psychological fragmentation has been reversed, as it is difficult to assess the political fault lines within the new legislature, although ethnic and religious groupings—the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, and the Shiite, Mongol-looking Hazara—will certainly remain a base for political affiliation and action...

...It is possible that it could be: The savage battering of the Shia by Sunni holy warriors and insurgents could make the Shia think of themselves first and always as Shiite, and therefore less willing to compromise with Sunnis, who fear being impoverished in a federalist system that would effectively deny them future oil revenue...

...All of the explicitly secular and moderate candidates did rather poorly in Iraq's national elections on December 15, even though the United States, with the Central Intelligence Agency in the lead, probably poured a small fortune into helping their cause...

...but in the context of Middle Eastern history, we should be both hopeful and proud...

...Even in the wealthiest part of the country, in the west, where the ancient and still quite Persian city of Herat again bustles as an entrepot of local manufacture and Iranian goods, one can sense fragility...

...Despite the strife and civil war that fragmented loyalties, the Afghan national identity is still alive...

...If you look at Afghanistan's new parliament and what will be the composition of Iraq's first proper legislature, it is the so-called religious parties (or religious personalities, in the case of Afghanistan's highly individualistic politics) that will conduct this experiment...

...Somebody, somewhere seems to be thinking about the garbage...

...It is striking how little pride many Americans take in what the United States has done in Afghanistan...

...Such a constitutional setup today in Iraq would probably improve the odds of surviving sectarian strife...

...as democracies in which devout Muslims wrestle through difficult questions about the proper relationship between God and man, they can have much more impact in the Middle East, where religion is like oxygen...

...It is, without doubt, a flawed document...

...For a secular, liberal Iraqi like Makiya, things are not good...

...They think most are foreign—the general consensus is that Pakistanis or Arabs predominate—but some are probably Afghans...

...Baghdad is a majority Shiite city...

...Yet the two countries are now joined at the hip, and they are so joined by America...

...In part, Iraq is responsible...

...In all probability, this scenario is too pessimistic...

...Compared with Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps at their most fervid, the young radical Iraqi cleric Moktada al-Sadr seems like a pretty prosaic nationalist...

...The United States and its NATO partners—^particularly the Dutch and Germans, who, unlike the French, have not displayed a stout resolution to fight in Afghanistan—should prepare themselves for the virus to spread among radical Sunni Afghans...

...However imperfect, this is the birth of tolerance...

...And the Shia have now understood that federalism checks centralized power, which has historically brutalized them...

...What doesn't realliy bother us in Afghanistan—the participation of devoutly religious Muslims in the political process—shouldn't bother us elsewhere...

...But what again is critical to remember—for Afghanistan and Iraq—is that the democratic compromises will happen because devout, even militant, Muslims make them happen...

...All sides, for example, will likely agree not to seriously molest poppy production and the opium trade...

...In the past, Herat province's two contending warlords and bitter rivalries imported from Kabul would have provoked strife...

...For them, December 15 was probably a turning point...

...But the language of the Shia still seems overwhelmingly Iraqi in content and tone...

...But today, to the individual Afghans and Iraqis who desperately want more repreReuel Marc Gerecht a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Marine: "Will the United States run...

...The backlash in the Iraqi Sunni community, as elsewhere in the Sunni Arab world, against the horrific slaughter of women and children has already started...

...The new specter of the suicide bomber in Afghanistan—there have been nearly 20 since June...

...Iraq and Afghanistan as liberal beacons in the region never really made much sense...

...One can feel considerable sympathy for the liberal Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who recently gave an analytical ^-ri de coeur in the New York Times, dissecting all the reasons we should fear Iraq's new constitution, with its fissiparous potential...

...In fragile societies trying to establish democracy, where communal and individual trust are integral, suicide bombings, if they come in unending waves, could, conceivably, destroy everything...

...Not a lot, of course...

...And there is this further complication: Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is a mountainous country with few decent paved roads (which merchants and effective national armies both require), such that national politics is something of an abstraction...

...and NATO forces, who are, after several suicide bombing runs, beginning to evidence a bunker mentality...

...And odds are the Afghans will...

...We should realize that in Mesopotamia, as in Afghanistan, democracy will be either made or broken by men and women of serious, not particularly reformed faith—not by secular liberals, Muslim progressives, or "moderates" (probably best defined as Muslims who act more or less like ordinary faithful Christians...

...The American embassy in Kabul is already a barricaded, barbed-wired, windowless, brown adobe fortress...

...Again, the demographic parallel with Iraq, where Arab Shiites and Sunnis have often conjugally mixed, is hopeful...

...We should have, mutatis mutandis, similar expectations in Iraq...

...After three ugly decades, all Afghans need to have safe zones—and ethnic politics, so long as it does not paralyze the government, can actually advance democracy in this country...

...the Taliban's Mullah Omar and his spiritual brother, Osama bin Laden, had reduced Afghanistan to a state that even the most retrograde and brutal of Iran's militant clerics would probably have seen as hell...

...They are not causes for despair...

...sentative, humane government—as most Afghans and Iraqis clearly do, judging by their participation in their recent elections—and to the Western soldiers on patrol or helping with public-works projects, the cause can seem compellingly just...

...But we're not quite there yet in Iraq...

...Our sojourn in Mesopotamia has been so difficult that it has diminished our attention to what is happening farther east...

...Abdul al-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI, may have many sins, but he is not a fanatic...

...Although Afghanistan remains broken, filthy, and poor, enterprise and energy are returning...

...That Afghans, who have developed a certain penchant for making personal and political differences a casus belli, can sit together under one roof and scream but not shoot is an achievement for the new parliament...

...They are the best reflection we have of the popular will, which desperately wants some kind of democratic alternative to brutal tyranny and internecine strife...

...The exclusionary, defensive, federalist impulses of the Iraqi Shiite community, which Makiya rightly fears, can go only so far before they provoke real, paralyzing Shiite resistance from Baghdad...

...Yet in Afghanistan today the national identity is unquestionably congealing and gaining strength...

...The greater violence there may overwhelm all moral deliberations...

...We may view Afghanistan with the bigotry of low expectations: Since Afghans have been calling themselves mujahedeen, holy warriors, for nearly three decades, and political Islam has been swirling through the Afghan bloodstream for even longer, we don't expect their political system to be all that secular...

...The hope, anger, and dueling ideologies and personalities openly express themselves through graffiti and posters—but in a peaceful and vibrant debate that is a very good thing...

...Even for the Arab Sunnis of Iraq, who are obviously wedded to the idea of being the ruling elite, the democratic appetite should not be casually dismissed...

...Allied and American officials don't know who these bombers are...

...homegrown communism, the Soviet invasion of 1979, civil war, and in the mid-1990s the takeover by the Taliban, which married itself to the primitive, violent side of Pashtun village culture, all accentuated local and religious identities for over 30 years at the expense of the national idea...

...It may be a spur to political compromise among the Sunni Arabs in Iraq (for fear of the holy warriors and the Shia, who may eventually let loose a pitiless, all-consuming revenge...

...But they are far from hopeless...

...Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once famously remarked that there was "no fun in Islam...

...Indeed, without them the Afghans probably could not develop sufficient comfort and confidence to reach beyond parochial and tribal concerns to national politics...

...If for no other reason, the Baghdad Shiite factor will likely guarantee sufficient tolerance toward the Sun-nis for democratic progress to continue...

...If you do, we all will...

...We are running simultaneous experiments in democracy in two countries that, despite their cultural and political differences, have much in common...

...If you believe that vanquishing fanaticism and establishing democracy in Afghanistan is a thing worth fighting for—and I recently ran into dozens of British, Italian, German, Lithuanian, and even Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan who seem to believe so sincerely—then it is ethically challenging to apply a different calculus in Iraq...

...On the Shiite, Sunni, and even Kurdish side, this assumption of rather advanced secularization was misplaced and, more important, harmful to our understanding of how democracy would take root in Iraq...

...The Islamic-Iraqi identity on the Shiite side still seems quite solid: From the most secular to the most religious, the nationalist component has not been subsumed...

...SCIRI's likely parliamentary chief, Adel Abdel Mahdi, is a thoughtful man who absolutely doesn't want to push Iraq into civil war...

...Life is still very difficult...

...Three thousand American deaths in Mesopotamia may seem a price too shocking to bear...

...Even the most culturally attuned and linguistically competent officers can become disconnected and misinformed in such an isolated environment...

...Quite contrary to the accepted wisdom, this is also likely the case in Iraq...

...Devout Democracies Self-rule in the Middle East will have a religious co'mponent, but that doesn't mean it won't work BY REUEL MARC GERECHT Kabul Afghanistan and Iraq are geographically and historically in two distinct parts of the Muslim Middle East...

...One can easily wish for a little less federalist enthusiasm on the Shiite and Kurdish sides...

...It would be hard to overstate the pulverizing of Afghan national sentiment during the dark years of war and the Taliban's rule...

...As in Iraq, this is unquestionably the most fearsome phenomenon that we now confront...

...For anyone raised in the 1980s on militant Shi-ite Islamist thought, Iraq just doesn't do it...

...The real question for us now is the one posed to me in Kabul by an Italian officer, who despite his soft manner had the martial spirit of a U.S...

...This shouldn't be all that surprising in a land where Sunni ethnic groups—Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Uzbeks—have regularly intermarried...

...Afghanistan and Iraq are at present the Muslim world's two most important democratic laboratories...

...And in Afghanistan, the cult of the suicide bomber is still in its infancy...

...Iraqis, we were told by a long list of Iraqi exiles, journalists, and scholars, are much less fervent believers...

...On the contrary, for devout Muslims who are trying to introduce concepts of popular sovereignty into political philosophy, both nations are—and the word is used correctly—progressive...

...And there remains the huge fact of the Shiite population in Baghdad, which would be excluded from any Shi-ite semi-autonomous zone in the south...

...Scholarly works on the region with an Arab slant tend to throw Afghanistan into Central Asia and the subcontinent, while books with an axis running through Iran pull Afghanistan back into the Middle East proper...

...Something like this almost happened in Lebanon, when the ideas and foot-soldiers of Iran's very Shiite Islamic revolution struck Lebanon after decades of Christian and Sunni Lebanese neglect and abuse of the Lebanese Shia, even worse Palestinian oppression of the Lebanese Shia, and the Israeli invasion in 1982...

...National compromises among the main groups—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shiite Hazara—will probably be excruciatingly difficult to achieve, but the growing nationalist impulse makes one believe these compromises, however imperfect, are achievable...

...The same cannot be said for the U.S...

...The growing, frightening specter of suicide bombers in Afghanistan may also eventually shatter our, or more quickly the Europeans', resolve to stay put...

...Such ethnic and religious sympathies are by no means lethal to a young democracy...

...Morally, at least for us and the natives, the two efforts are—or ought to be—indistinguishable...

...The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa party, the two oldest Shiite religious parties, don't seem at all ready to give up on the idea of a nation that incorporates and compromises with Arab Sunnis...

...By comparison, the Iraqi national identity for the Sunni and Shiite Arabs remains much denser...

...And it simply cannot be compared to any other city in Iraq—certainly not impoverished and broken Basra, the other possible pole of Shiite urban influence...

...Pashtun society, which is where such holy-warriorism will have to grow, would probably offer sufficient resistance to keep this kind of terrorism from becoming a plague...

...And one can wish for more vigorous checks and balances...

...You may not have initially favored the war in Iraq, but it seems morally awkward to argue that the Iraqis now deserve less support than the Afghans...

...It is heartening to hear senior Italian and British officers attached to NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan affirm that they're planning on being there for 10 years, provided the locals want them...

...A strong executive constantly checked by strong legislative and judicial authorities might have kept the Middle East's homegrown and imported authoritarian impulses from dominating...

...The Iraqi parallel here is depressing...

...For the foreseeable future, the centripetal power of Baghdad will remain...

...This may be hard for many secularized or disbelieving Westerners and Middle Easterners to swallow—"We have gone to war for this...

...among the Pashtuns in the southern half of the country, where the Taliban and al Qaeda can still find sympathizers and new recruits, it is often precarious...

...Iraq for the Europeans, if not for us, is different...