Afghanistan Without Taliban

December 2, 2001

by John F. Schmidt

Words are flying like Clinton cruise missiles over Belgrade concerning the future government in Afghanistan once the Taliban is finally ousted. The United Nations has been attempting to assume a larger role in forming a future government, but in the chaos following the sudden collapse of the Taliban resistance in city after city, it is becoming clear that the U.N. doesn’t have a clue as to how to form a government for a people who have regularly butchered one another over mere tribal differences.

The Europeans seem to be interested in providing a skeletal framework for life after Taliban, but they are clamoring for the United States to get involved. Of course, that means U.S. military personnel committed for the foreseeable future. Once there, it seems we just can’t ever go home. The Bush Administration is very reluctant to make any new commitments of U.S. troops.

A power vacuum in Afghanistan is not something to take lightly. The Russians and the Chinese both have major strategic interests there. Being on the southern border, Pakistan had helped to set up the Taliban and supported them until recently. The Americans would like to have a hand in the area too, if it can be done without getting hands dirty. Many interests are involved in the ongoing game of power and influence played out among nations and regions.

This doesn’t bode well for the poor people of Afghanistan. They are made up of a rough agglomeration of tribal peoples of mixed backgrounds and cultures. There is no single Afghani culture or people or language. That lack of cohesiveness makes the possibility of forming a single stable nation exceedingly bleak.

To make matters worse, U.N. and U.S. efforts at nation building since World War Two have been uniformly dismal. The Clinton incursion into Haiti to “restore democracy” made things worse than they were; something that is hard to imagine.

America’s effort to export “Americanism” has failed because the implementers have no idea what it takes to form a stable representative republican form of government. They assume that if you put the economic and political infrastructure into place, freedom will just blossom by itself. But economic and political stability is not the cause of our freedom, and nicely balanced political forms with constitutional guarantees don’t create freedom and stability. Something more basic is needed.

Liberty is a fruit of the tree called Christianity.

Perhaps the traditional American maxim that God blessed our country because we trusted in Him and obeyed Him is passed over by our State Department ‘nation-builders’ with barely a snort of annoyance at the naiveté of such notions; but they pass over the truth in doing so.

Many reasons can be cited for a nation’s failure to successfully imbibe democratic traditions into their culture, but surely the most fundamental is a simple lack of trust between people.

A Somali proverb illustrates this point well:

I and Somalia against the world.
I and my clan against Somalia.
I and my family against the clan.
I and my brother against the family.
I against my brother.

It is not possible to build a stable, free and prosperous culture with a people who fundamentally distrust each another in this way. That distrust springs out of their view of reality; a view of the world and themselves which is essentially wrong. Their worldview - a thing commonly called “religion” - is wrong.

“Who are you,” some will say, “to condemn the beliefs of others you have never met?” The answer is found in the words of the scriptures: “...where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.” (2 Cor 3:17) The converse is also true: where the Spirit of the Lord is not, there is no liberty.

An Englishman, Lord Acton, explained our American political concept in 1877, when he declared: “That great political idea, [of] sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.”

We don’t cling to our own liberties while distrusting our neighbor; instead we see our own liberty as safe only as it is tied to the safekeeping of our fellow citizen’s liberties. We honor the liberty of others because they came to us from God. We can’t violate our neighbor’s liberty without undercutting our own. Such is the genius of living free under God. Without Him, there is no liberty.

The idea of protecting others’ liberty as part of protecting your own is summed up in the statement “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Only a people operating out of love based on trust can freely cooperate with one another on the grand scale required to build and sustain a democratic form of government with economic freedom.

That trust finds its highest political expression in the Declaration of Independence, and is codified in the litany of rights (freedoms) found in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution merely states how we agreed to organize the give and take of a free people’s political business.

It is instructive to note that there are no democratic Muslim regimes in the world. They are all dictatorships in one form or another. And note again that the only democratic nation in the Middle East is Israel, a state composed of people who derive their convictions about the rights of mankind from the same source as the Christians of America. The fruit of doctrines about God has profound and evident affect in the everyday life of billions of people on this planet.

How then do we help establish a stable government in Afghanistan? The most certain way to help any nation, or people, or clan or person toward freedom is to share the truth of the Gospel with them, and introduce them to the Savior, Jesus Christ. Help founded on anything else is bound to fail to achieve lasting results. Also pray earnestly for them. God truly delights to answer prayer and bless those we keep in our prayers. Finally, we should give our help in the name of our God. The Declaration of Independence gives us the words to use in addressing them: “…all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator…”

If we can no longer say those words to fellow members of the global community, then we have abandoned the wellspring of our own liberty and are in need of help ourselves.

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John F. Schmidt has written numerous articles over the last decade. Politically, he is an Alan Keyes-type Republican. Along with his wife, he has organized voter drives in Pennsylvania, and been active politically since the 1990 elections. His livelihood, until recently, was spent in automation engineering for a large global equipment manufacturing company, specializing in coal mining. WANB in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania hosted Schmidt's weekly talk radio program "Issues and Answers." His writing is intended to relate the headlines of today to the foundation of eternal truth - the Scriptures. He currently resides in Palm Beach County, Florida. Visit his website at: Inalienable-Rights.org

Send the author an E mail at Schmidt@ConservativeTruth.org.

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