Exit Strategy for a Culture War

The Western alliance’s motives for democratizing Afghanistan miss the crucial point: The conflict in Afghanistan is a culture war, with universal Western values clashing with ethnic identities and Islam’s universalist claims. But a culture war cannot be won by the West. While NATO was successful in preserving security in its own hemisphere during the Cold War, the West was a notorious failure outside its own hemisphere—be it in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Even in nearby Kosovo and Bosnia Herzegovina, the results of intervention have been ambivalent at best.

The only solution is an Afghanization and Pakistanization of the conflict, returning it to its own specific culture-bearers. This means refraining from imposing universalist Western concepts of democracy and human rights. Nor can we continue to ask ISAF soldiers to serve in the mission as long as they are unable to properly defend themselves.

In any case, the West will have to accept the consequences of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the future limit itself to defending its own hemisphere. This does not rule out air strikes on terrorist camps and punitive expeditions, but only interventions with broad political goals. Responsible security policy therefore does not prohibit selective, limited military interventions against genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, or piracy. But these would be taken with a clear view to the limits of what is possible and the limited goals at hand.

The combination of European foreign policy’s moralizing with an idealistically-based American concept of world order has proved disastrous.  Indeed, our values are universal. The West cannot abandon the claim to the universality of human rights without giving up its identity. But politics, as the "art of the possible," requires recognizing the cultural boundaries of the possible and more realistically gauging our own ability to affect change.

The claimed "universality of human rights" in fact applies only to the West. Human rights discourse ignores the fact that the Western, secular concept of the human being is almost the opposite of that in the Islamic world. Even identical words do not always mean the same thing. Everyone swears by human rights, but it makes a difference whether they are anthropocentrically or, as in the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights, theocentrically based. There is not even consensus on the concept of "human dignity." Everyone is for women’s dignity, but some interpret it as sexual self-determination, and others as virginity before marriage.

Huntington’s Legacy

The American government’s long hesitation to increase troop strength may stem from the realization that this is not about the "right war," but about a culture war that cannot be won militarily or politically. That this realization came so late has much to do with the West’s cultural relativism. Europe’s secularist elite was blind to the significance of cultural and religious soft power. Their concern for a decade was to refute the American scholar Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, though their blundering should have eventually kindled the suspicion that it cannot be refuted.

In the mid-1990s, Huntington was already maintaining that after the Cold War, peoples and nations were returning to their own identities, values, and traditions—their culture in a broader sense—with the implication that global politics had, for the first time in history, become both multipolar and multicultural. Multipolar meant that nations would consciously separate from each other in order to emphasize their identities. Multicultural meant that the world was no longer determined by two ideologies, but rather a multiplicity of varied cultures existing next to one other. In this way, power was redistributed from the long-dominant West to non-Western cultures. On the one hand, other cultures continue to depend on Western aid to achieve economic goals, in particular; on the other hand, they see the West as a culture in decline whose share in global power is decreasing.

Huntington interpreted this revival of identity and religion not least as a reaction to Western secularism and its moral relativism. Asian and Islamic cultures confronted this phenomenon by strengthening of their own values, such as order, discipline, community, religion, and family. Especially Asian and Islamic cultures, he said, were "challenging cultures," both of which, for differing reasons, emphasize their superiority to Western culture. Both are anti-universal and anti-Western, but hardly anti-modern.¹

The fact that leading intellectuals in the West disregard this new cultural paradigm has grave consequences. The reputation of Germany and "Londonistan" as havens for terrorists is connected with a naive concept of tolerance and religious freedom. Even American secret services were forbidden, before September 11, 2001, from classifying visitors to the United States by religion. Meanwhile, the Protestant zealots in the United States who gained the upper hand after September 11 were blind to the limits of their own political messianism.  

The denial of a clash of cultures has endangered our internal security and led to overextension abroad. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven fundamental errors. In non-Western cultures, universal values fall not on fertile soil, but on territory sealed by ethnic or religious identities. The clash between universalism and culturalism seems to the West to be a political conflict. Yet the Western value system is not perceived in the non-Western world as universal, but as Western, and thus imperialist.

Corruption as a Cultural System

It is in the nature of the universalist ideal to ignore cultural boundaries. Cultures define their identities through value systems.  They differ from other cultures through their intrinsic value. Moral universalism ignores the regional and particularist interests and values in which, for example, drug trafficking or the clan is more important than individual freedom or legal equality.

Extreme corruption is not a specifically Afghan symptom. It arises from the logic of a clan society. The more we intervene, the more we entangle ourselves in conditions we do not control. Identities often combine with interests and behaviors that defy our understanding. We involve ourselves with forces that, in our conception of law, deserve to be arrested.

Abstract ideas like patriotism and the common good are incomprehensible to clan cultures. Corruption is considered an ethical duty towards one’s own family and, more broadly, the ethnic clan. Part of this lack of identification with one’s own nation is the fact that more and more well-qualified Afghans are seeking political asylum in Europe. In Afghan "democracy," who wins is less important than who pays. When multiparty systems emerge in clan cultures, they only strengthen corruption. As long as this can be financed, a level of satisfaction takes hold, which explains the early successes in Afghanistan until 2006. As soon as resources waned, political pluralism generated corruption and civil war.

We play a helpless role in this nexus, but not an uninvolved one.  Corruption requires two sides. One pays, the other takes. Of the 80 million euros² of German development aid to Afghanistan, in 2006 less than 25 million euros actually went to projects; the rest disappeared in salaries and "administrative costs." After these figures were publicized, the German government did not attempt to halt the evil, but raised the amount to 140 million euros.

It is now certain that members of President Karzai’s own family play a major role in drug trafficking. For us, this creates not only a moral problem, but also a military one. The opportunities for drug cultivation ruin Afghans’ responsibility for their own security. When the harvest begins, even army officers take off their uniforms and go into the fields. Teachers work as smugglers, mayors operate heroin laboratories. Earnings from drug trafficking or drug smuggling are far higher than government salaries.

As soon as external forces intervene, they mutate from funders to troublemakers and, once culturalist hostility has been mobilized, from liberators to occupiers. The unbroken succession of colonial, communist, and Islamist conquests has taught many Afghans not only to live with war, but to live from it. There are an estimated 1,800 illegally armed groups with a total strength of as many as 130,000 fighters. Religious, national, ethnic, and economic interests are so deeply interconnected that they cannot be distinguished. This makes Islam and the struggle against "unbelievers" even more important as it is the only thing cementing them together. In the highly complex mosaic of groups, it is always possible to change political sides, and it is not at all clear which groups are responsible for which attacks and kidnappings. Convoys from the World Food Program disappear, and civilian aid workers are killed and kidnapped. Two-thirds of the ministries are hopelessly corrupt, the cabinet is split along ethnic lines, and Karzai can only govern, if at all, with the help of warlords.

Moreover, the manipulated electoral results create the impression that Karzai himself is in with the Taliban. Many of the polling stations criticized by the UN Electoral Commission are located in Taliban regions. The results could only have been falsified with their approval. Karzai will have to provide a quid pro quo, not so much in the political arena as in drug trafficking.

The West’s Unavoidable Failure

American military efforts, which accept many civilian victims, have failed because of the principle of vengeance, which stipulates that every person killed must be avenged. Thus new enemies are created. The new ISAF strategy takes account of this and thus resembles the Bundeswehr’s stabilization strategy, which has, however, also failed. The many limits and conditions imposed on the Bundeswehr by parliament have prevented effective action. Since this cannot be a war, some 4,000 soldiers must suffice to stabilize the entire north operating according to police rules that prescribe particularly cautious action.

The schools and wells built as part of the "stabilization mission" have earned little gratitude. They do not offer protection from the Taliban, which would have been crucial to establishing political loyalty. The newly built roads serve the Taliban’s military goals at least as much as civilian needs. While German soldiers work to build up the country in the "quiet north," the Taliban have been able to congregate and strengthen undisturbed. In a culture war, even roads and schools help spread Islamism. Radical Islam, totalitarian in character, does not distinguish between military and civilian missions.  

Taking the Initiative?

To both spare and protect the Afghan population, ISAF requires far more soldiers than it will ever get. To ensure a stable security situation similar to that in the Balkans, a troop strength of more than a million soldiers would be needed. The Taliban are already increasing their numerical strength, also for cultural reasons. Statistically, each woman in Afghanistan bears seven children. Of the 500,000 boys born each year, perhaps 150,000 have a chance in the opium fields or the police. In the long run, an increase in troop strength will be no help against 350,000 potential new Taliban fighters each year.³ 

Another way of taking the initiative, by expanding the conflict to Pakistan, is counterproductive to a culture war. Military intervention in only one country does not solve the problems because they are generally connected to the entire region. The Taliban are a product of opaque Pakistani politics. The majority of Pakistanis reject the Taliban, but do not want to assist the goals of their unpopular ally, America. Expansion of the war in the region through President Obama’s new "AfPak strategy" was militarily successful, but wrong politically. Involving Pakistan in the theater of war created 2.5 million refugees, intensified fighting, and further destabilized the region. The long period of ambivalence on Pakistan’s part in dealing with militant Islamism, which is incomprehensible to outsiders, can be explained only through the Pakistani perception of being surrounded by enemies they fear more than the Taliban—above all India, but also the West. The United States is suspected of trying to destabilize Pakistan and deprive it of its nuclear weapons.

Afghanization and Pakistanization of the War

It is now above all necessary to give Pakistanis the feeling that they are fighting for Pakistan and not for America. The responsibility of regional actors has become the most important element in preparing NATO for disengagement. In Afghanistan, the West should have limited itself to restoring the state’s ability to function. A realistic goal for Afghanistan was not democracy, but the establishment of a functioning polity. This would have helped Afghanistan build a better army, police, judiciary, and prisons. Instead, our money was distributed so broadly that it had no impact.

An exit strategy requires the Afghanization and Pakistanization of the war. This requires promoting and demanding Afghan and Pakistani responsibility for their own security. After eight years, a combative people like the Afghans should be able to defend themselves. Doubts about the Afghans are related less to their ability than to their will. Figures on combat-ready police fluctuate between 40,000 and 90,000. The police are permeated with corruption, and the constant exodus to warlords’ better-paid private armies is hardly an expression of patriotism. The initial goal of German police trainers of creating a "citizen-friendly" police force was naive and ignorant of the culture.

The German Foreign Office’s September 2009 plan "Ten Steps for Afghanistan" provides for withdrawal by 2013. A cabinet decision by the new German government later confirmed this. According to the plan, a road map is to be worked out with the Afghan president that will establish further cooperation and describe the duration and the end of military engagement. The Afghan army and police must assume sole responsibility for security as rapidly as possible. From the beginning, according to the plan, we must demand decisive steps from the government to protect basic rights and combat corruption, mismanagement, and organized drug crime. The international community must insist that corrupt officials be removed from office. Under the Germans, the number of police trainers and the tempo of police training will be doubled. Training of the Afghan army is a top priority.

Until now, Afghans have had priorities other than defending themselves and building roads and schools. They could afford these priorities as long as we took on this work for them. As is generally the case in development aid, good deeds become a curse when support is not sufficiently connected with expectations. NATO should have made Afghan efforts to create a self-sufficient security architecture a measure of its assistance from the beginning.

Self-Limitation as a New Strategy

The West’s interventions often seem counterproductive to peace in the long run. The assumption that only the West can prevent local players from fighting one another overlooks the fact that peace is generally based on the victory of one of the parties, and not on treaties mediated from outside. Democratic majorities instigated from outside through coalitions among former enemies do not produce stable governments.

In large parts of the Middle East, it is not ideological differences and political structures but cultural identities that are most important. The difference between believers and unbelievers is more significant then between, for example, democrats and non-democrats. Without sufficient understanding of the importance of religion and culture, the West will not be able to find its way in the new multipolar world order, which is also a multicultural world order. Huntington named, if only in passing, the West’s new roads through the multipolar world: abstinence, mediation, the search for commonalities. The West’s future tasks lie in maintaining, protecting, and renewing its own unique values of pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, but not in reshaping non-Western cultures in the West’s mold.⁴  

Criticism of Huntington always starts by arguing that he reduced people to a single collective identity. Unfortunately, this one-dimensionality is the essence of both fundamentalist religion and ethnocentrism or nationalism. If this one-dimensionality is to be broken, Western pluralism must not be imposed from outside. Nor should collective categories be reinforced in a "dialogue of cultures," which often forces others into collective identities.

What is required, rather, is a coexistence that places its hopes in the time factor and in a "dialogue of individuals," which attempts to replace collective identities with the encouragement of plural and individual identities. In regard to the Taliban and the Afghan culture of corruption, we should attempt to lure them away from their common anti-Western attitude and split them according to their own and their clan interests. But a realpolitik of cultures requires the abandonment of idealistic goals, such as the democratization of Afghanistan.

The more we withdraw from foreign cultural spheres, the more we have to assert our own cultural sphere. With a fraction of the energy we have applied to the war in Afghanistan, our security organs in Hamburg and the United States could have prevented September 11. NATO’s strategy should start with the principle of more external limitation, and more internal self-assertion. But a pragmatic strategy that gives primacy to the limits of the possible requires, first of all, a definition of our own identity and our own limits. Therefore, we need a pragmatic global policy that starts with facts, recognizes our limitations, and is oriented not toward the universalization of Western values and structures, but toward immediate security requirements.

¹ Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1998), pp.21-29.

² Reinhard Erös, "Einer nimmt—und einer zahlt," Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 16, 2009.


³ Gunnar Heinsohn, "Schumpfender Westen, aufsteigender Islam," Merkur, August/September 2007, pp. 771.

⁴ See note 1 above, pp.308-312.