POLITICAL STABILITY: AFGHANISTAN AND THE ARAB SPRING

Last week I was watching Morning Joe, an early morning talk show on MSNBC, hosted by Joe Scarborough; the show covers a range of subjects each day. On this particular day a portion of the program focused on Afghanistan, the problems there now and what lies ahead. A history professor on the show offered the view that we need to maintain a military presence there beyond 2014, the date for the withdrawal of the last U.S. and NATO combat forces. The professor said that a continued U.S. involvement there was needed to assure stability, with the expectation that given time the Afghan government will develop, with U.S. and NATO assistance, its own security force to replace foreign military support.

The use of the word "stability" troubled me because it is truly a misleading term. We tend to use the western democratic model as the measure of stability. That is, to oversimplify, a political structure that provides representative government through periodic elections. It can be a so-called presidential system with separation of powers such as we have in the U.S. or a parliamentary government based on legislative supremacy such as found in Great Britain and Germany. Regardless of the specific constitutional, written or unwritten, architecture, the western model is underpinned by a strong sense of national identity which, however noisy the clash and clang, is the ultimate medium for conflict resolution and the peaceful transference of political power through elections.

The crucial point here is the belief that this model is the necessary form for providing stability. That is certainly not true. Political philosophers from the time of Plato have been seeking the answer to what is necessary for political stability. Plato had his all-wise Philosopher King with its implied authoritarianism. Aristotle, his pupil, saw it very differently. His foundation for stability, while not defined in such terms, was the existence of a large, moderating middle class. Thomas Hobbes, a political thinker troubled by the unsettled times of civil conflict in England in the 17th century, said that what was needed for political stability was an absolute monarch. A century later in England, John Locke was making the case for legislative supremacy as the structural basis of civil order.

In short, there is no single political architecture for providing stability. It should also be understood that stability does not mean the absence of political, social, or economic conflict but only that such conflicts are dealt with, although not necessarily resolved, without systemic violence and collapse. While the U.S. and Britain were providing such stability through democratic processes in the last century, Stalin was providing Russia with stability anchored in that country's history of absolutism from the Czars through the fall of communism in l991. Even Hitler, in his demonic way, exploited the German sense of national identy and brought a short period of internal stability-through-obedience following the tumultuous post World War I years in Germany. That period was a time of severe economic shocks including continuing high unemployment and an off-the-chart inflation in the early 1920s, an inflation which economically wiped out the middle class and to this day is embedded in German fears of inflation more than recession.

So when one talks of "stability" and how it is achieved, beware. In Afghanistan it might even be argued that for a period about equal to Hitler's stability, the Taliban provided a form of very repressive stability. The case might also be made that stability was, more or less, provided in Egypt by decades of rule by President Mubarak and by the Assads in Syria, although in the case of Syria that stability is currently being challenged as it was successfully challenged in Tunisia and Egypt. Likewise autocratic rule in Libya and Yemen, and continuing authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia.

Now the so-called Arab Spring, in unseating these sources of stability, however repressive, has set in motion new forces of potential political instability. As said above, the binding force of stability is some sense of national identity. But the evidence so far seems to indicate an unleashing of some basic forms of instability -- the re-emergence of tribal-based loyalty and a new wave of religious conflict that had been suppressed, not extinguished, by the autocratic rule of one Muslim sect or another. Historic tribal divisions seem to be resurfacing in Libya and Yemen. Violent and growing religious conflict is found in the historic Sunni-Shia split in Iraq and Bahrain. Whether these deep, historical fault lines can be diminished in a way that a national identity or a similar basis of loyalty can emerge, however slowly, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the search for stability in some of these countries may emerge as new autocratic rule such as majority Shia domination at the expense of the Sunni in Iraq, or the reverse in Bahrain. Or a kind of factionalized stability such as found historically in Afghanistan with a thin veil of mutual accommodation among war lords obscuring a basic instability. Alternatively for Afghanistan and some other countries of the Arab world, a very fragile, temporary coalition of basically antagonistic tribal/ethnic/religious participants may emerge with each maneuvering for its own advantage in anticipation of the coalition falling apart.

So scratch below the surface and you will find that the search for stability can produce a Jefferson or a Stalin.