Real Democracy

I went out to a local restaurant for lunch today with a few of my co-workers, and at one point one of them said to me, "Now we have real democracy in Afghanistan." Surprised by this comment, I asked him what he meant. He told me that he was referring to the very open and public display of Muharram/Ashura paraphernalia by Afghanistan's Shia minority. All around Kabul, large gate-like structures are being erected at major intersections and covered in black cloth, and buildings and cars owned by Shias are festooned with huge, garish flags and banners bearing the name of the martyred Imam Hussain. During the Taliban regime, my co-worker told me, such displays would have been punishable by death--the Taliban, being radical Sunnis, didn't take too kindly to Shiite exuberance.

I've been thinking about my co-worker's comment all afternoon. On the one hand, as someone steeped in the Western political tradition, part of me wanted to tell him that while freedom of religion is indeed an important part of a democratic polity, "real" democracy goes far beyond that. And nobody who lives in, studies, or reads about Afghanistan for more than 30 seconds can possibly conclude that Afghan elections are actual examples of a meaningfully democratic process. Demos kratos--people power--requires that your votes actually count when you cast them, something that is too often absent from Afghan voting booths.

And yet I don't think it would be right of me to lecture my Afghan colleagues and friends about how they are wrong to believe that the freedom to display Imam Hussain's name openly constitutes real democracy, or at least an important step on the road thereto. Because the most meaningful types of power, and the most meaningful ways to exercise power, are not always political. The Taliban's religious beliefs are very different from those of the large majority of Afghans, so between the Communist coup in 1978 and the creation of the Karzai government in 2002, Afghans had to endure 24 years without real religious freedom. That must have been a significant hardship for most Afghans, none more so than the Shia population that was so heavily persecuted by the Taliban. The fact that taqiyya, or concealment of one's religious beliefs in order to avoid being persecuted, is explicitly endorsed within Shia Islam does not make it a desirable way to live one's life.

There is a moral to this story, although I'm not entirely sure what it is. Maybe it is simply that even though we have done a lot of things wrong in Afghanistan, and even though there are a lot of problems with the Karzai government in the short and long terms, there are also ways in which life in Afghanistan is simply and undeniably better than it was ten years ago. And some of those ways are very important to the Afghan people.