r/geopolitics • u/setting-mellow433 • 26d ago
Could monarchy have saved Afghanistan? - America’s republican prejudices stopped them from restoring a unifying king Opinion
https://thecritic.co.uk/could-monarchy-have-saved-afghanistan/216
u/Significant-Dare8566 26d ago
My Afghan interpreter back in 2004 told me this. He was a 20 something year old Afghan from Paktika province. I was with the US Army. This is what he told me.
"Democracy was not meant for the Afghan people, we need a king or warlords anything but letting the people have a say in how we are governed".
209
u/-GabeHitch- 26d ago
It's a misunderstanding and misinterpretation to think that a monarch is antithetic to democracy. Take Scandinavia, for example, as well as many other democracies, the monarch is only used as a unifying symbol. Whatever you use, a nation needs something to symbolize them as a single unit. The US uses the constitution, founding fathers, and their flag as unifying symbols. In Scandinavia, they use their kings, in Japan, they use their unique culture and their emperor. Whatever it is, it has to be something that tells the populace "this is us."
As long as you have that, then you can have any kind of government. Many of the freest and most democratic countries have a monarch. The problem with Afghanistan is that there are many different groups of people who don't feel like they belong together. They don't have anything to tell them they're a single unit.
17
u/Significant-Dare8566 26d ago
Very good point. Don’t know if it can relate to authoritarian regimes like China, Saudi, N Korea. But worth discussing.
35
u/PreppyAlaskan 26d ago
Three ethnically homogenous countries, each with wildly differing governance systems.
12
u/-GabeHitch- 25d ago
China is far from ethnically homogenous. China has a lot of different cultures, people, and languages. The "Chinese" part of China is actually really small, compared to the size of the entire country.
28
u/Victor_Baxter 25d ago
94% of Chinese citizens are Han
Mate, Australia’s an ex British colony, and Brits or brit descendants don’t even count for that high
15
1
4
u/TunnelRat1 25d ago
china is not ethnically homogenous
17
u/PreppyAlaskan 25d ago
Brutal, forced sinicization over centuries have created an all-but-Han nation. Uygurs have become a minority in Xinjiang, Tibetans in Tibet, Manchurians in Manchuria, and ethnic groups in southeastern China are homogenized.
China is ethnically homogeneous. 93% Han.
7
u/randomguy0101001 25d ago
Uyghur occupies a pretty much diverse region where they are a plurality and not majority because more than one people live in what some call Dzungaria or Northern Xinjiang. The Oriat Mongols and various other people, including some Han, live in Northern Xinjiang historically speaking, whereas the Uyghurs occupy the Southern Xinjiang or Nanjiang. While Uyghurs are a majority in Southern Xinjiang, they aren't the majority in the entire Xinjiang.
As for Manchurians, their experience with China is an entirely different one from the Uyghurs and Tibetans, it is sort of silly to talk about Manchurians in the same sentence given the only thing that associates them was they are minorities. As for ethnic groups in SE China are homogenized, that's not a true period. The Zhuang in Guanxi are distinct and live in relative rural regions relatively speaking.
9
u/-GabeHitch- 25d ago
It's my understanding that more authoritarian regimes appear when it is hard to stay in control, while freer and more democratic systems appear when the country is stable. It makes sense that a government will be more lenient if people tend to behave well, but if people tend to fight each other and destroy things, those in power will be more inclined to user force to keep the nation stable.
So you can see authoritarianism as a symbol of a nation struggling to remain stable. The US is an excellent and very palpable example of this. As the US has become more unstable, more authoritarian sentiments starts to rise to the surface.
47
u/SciFiJesseWardDnD 26d ago
While your not wrong, lets not be naïve in thinking that an Afghan King would function like a Scandinavian King. Maybe he would in a century but not today. He would function like a Saudi King. Just hopefully with a slightly less radical Islamic view.
41
15
u/setting-mellow433 25d ago
The last Afghan King was more Scandinavian than Saudi. Afghanistan had a constitutional monarchy system after 1964. A parliament also existed and people could vote for the MPs.
57
u/T3hJ3hu 26d ago
This is why the Lion of Panjshir (mentioned in the article) and his surviving son, who's heading up the Second Resistance in Panjshir alongside the former VP, endorsed the "Swiss model" for Afghanistan. There may not be a better model for them to work from, really.
Switzerland has four national languages and mountainous terrain that keeps its people separated. A strong centralized government just wasn't possible. Their solution was a weak federal government, where nothing that can be done at a lower political level is done at a higher level. Individual cantons control their own taxes, budget, and political system.
Even geopolitically, the similarities are there. Switzerland remained neutral through both world wars despite being sandwiched between Italy, Germany, and France, because everyone knew it would be too costly to take. Afghanistan is in between Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, and basically India, and also happens to have developed a reputation for being "unconquerable." How valuable at wartime are hundreds of miles of mountain ranges filled with a well-armed people whose cultural heritage is guerilla warfare?
13
u/BoringEntropist 25d ago
Swiss here and absolutely agree. I often joke that Switzerland is like Afghanistan, just richer. They both are mountainous landlocked countries with strong regional identities and a conservative population with a penchant for guns.
One major difference though is the tendency of the rulers of Afghanistan (be it foreign or domestic) seem to wish to erect a unitary state centered on Kabul or Kandahar.
6
u/mrpickles 25d ago
I'd always seen the monarchy of UK specifically as a corrupt, stupid waste.
Not sure I buy your thesis on a unifying figure, but it merits investigation, especially in light of the Afghanistan super sonic implosion.
10
u/Tidorith 25d ago
Waste of what? The personal wealth that the British royal family own that they lease at no cost to the state far outweighs the amount of money the state spends on the upkeep of the royal family. Unless you're talking about just confiscating wealth from the uber rich in the UK in general, I don't see where the waste is.
3
u/Gadvreg 25d ago
Those monarchies are relics awaiting their inevitable dissolution. If you're working from a blank state you wouldn't start with a monarchy.
11
u/-GabeHitch- 25d ago
Yeah you would. The majority of civilizations have started with a monarchy. That's the most common form of settling unrest.
3
u/Isacd210_ 24d ago
This is true also for Brazil. All of our unifying symbols are in the monarchy. The constitution, Dom Pedro I claiming independence, and Dom Pedro II as the optimal ruler, his daughter who helped free the slaves. We even have a founding fathers/mothers not only in Dom Pedro but his wife Leopoldina, Dom Pedro II daughter and José Bonifácio, the first prime minister, mentor of the empire who helped elaborate the flag, symbols and constitution also with the help of Leopoldina and the Pedros who composed the hymns and Pedro II who even composed a hymn which we use with a republican version to this day as the national anthem. All the foundation and building ground is in the monarchy and without it we are a people without identity and homogeneity, corruption and high crime reflect this, we are a nation full of parties warring for power and money.
2
41
u/IHateAnimus 26d ago
This kind of statement has quite a bit of appeal in some circles of India as well, which has had a democratically elected government for over 70 years (albeit with considerable flaws and flirtations with authoritarianism).
Saying that democratic institutions are not fit for Afghanistan or any other third world country is, in my opinion, not a very healthy idea to have. Democracies are possible and achievable in the most fractious of nations.
When citizens display an appeal for authoritarianism of some kind, it's usually a reflection of frustration with the ineffectiveness of the system and weakness of the institutional structures set up in place.
Saying democracy wasn't applicable to Afghanistan is throwing the baby out in the bathwater. It completely neglects the majority of the populations who lived in the cities and bought into this model.
The American priorities were a puppet state that was completely subservient to its ambitions and designed purely as a counterterrorism unit. It's pretty distasteful for the US president to now go an blame a citizenry who've seen nothing but conflict for 40 years to desperately accept any form of peaceful governance, no matter how dogmatic and ideologically backward it is.
The US did nothing about deep malfeasance and corruption and installed leaders by essential fiat in the name of democracy. The Afghans never got a secure state and economic situation to form a government with public appeal themselves. It was all imposition and now there's a return to the worst of orientalist talking points in a search of an excuse for the collapse.
16
u/ferrel_hadley 26d ago
The US did nothing about deep malfeasance and corruption and installed leaders by essential fiat in the name of democracy. The Afghans never got a secure state and economic situation to form a government with public appeal themselves. It was all imposition and now there's a return to the worst of orientalist talking points in a search of an excuse for the collapse.
Much of the criticism is about internal politics in the US\UK under the guise of caring about Afghan people. They are looking for a stick to beat their political opponents, not to try to understand a complex world beyond their shores.
10
u/IHateAnimus 26d ago
The decisions they went with have their origins in the very beginning of the NATO invasion. How can US intelligence estimate 75k active troops as 350k troops without some crazy corruption within the US military itself? Biden made a terrible move for domestic electoral brownie points, but the problems in afghanistan are collective and escalatory over twenty years. Now they are searching for cultural explanations to cover their own misadventures. All I'm seeing is a repeat of the nauseating 'analysis' by British journalists post the world war on how colonies won't be able to last on their own and how all these third world countries like India are about to collapse because they aren't enlightened by Greek culture.
20
u/krakalot 25d ago
I think you're being extremely idealistic.
We've seen how easy it is to undermined democracy by utilizing the less educated members of western countries and similarly so in eastern Europe. Both of these regions, the second and first world economically so to speak have shown that the best way for a democracy to function is the higher the education and awareness of its citizens.
Transparency, lack of corruption, and all sorts of other things can in my opinion only be achieved when there is a high level of critical thinking and knowledge of social and economic issues. This is absolutely not the case in Afghanistan.
The same issues have plagued south american democracies for générations, though the CIAs repeated coups also don't help the situation there to be fair.
Afghanistani democracy is not going to be a liberal nor even functional democracy. It's going to be tribalized and localized.
The only democracy i could see working in Afghanistan is one where there is a mix of non elected meritocratic bureaucracy mixed in with a super localized democracy like Switzerland. Curiously enough the son of the king and his party were advising that for the last 20 years, but the USA nor others did not listen.
Sometimes you have to take a step back and let a democracy grow over time, if it does at all.
4
u/Fuzzyphilosopher 26d ago
That's a very interesting and revealing statement he made there. I'm glad you shared it. Hope you're doing well.
I can see how the idea of letting the people decide he could see as the sort of thing that leads to bickering, disputes and animosities. And grudges. I have a feeling that those are Hatfield and McCoy's style in Afghanistan. That if someone else gets their way it's seen as a humiliation to be avenged. Hell in the US today people can't seem to agree to disagree anymore.
I don't really know anything about Afghan culture so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me likely that in a lot of the small villages if two men have a dispute it might be taken to the respected elders or a single person to resolve. Someone who like a judge in the US would decide, and that both parties and the community would respect the decision. This is a traditional way of doing things in many cultures and is especially important in those which are tribal as a dispute between two can escalate quickly to (extended) family against family. So basically a small scale war.
"I against my brother. I and my brother against my cousin. I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" is an Arab Proverb but it seems common enough around the world.
I believe in democracy as the best form of government but not that I "believe" in it. How well does it work when people don't? And especially when it's a completely foreign notion to their culture and being imposed by foreigners? We never stopped to ask the Afghans what they thought would work for their country. And we don't realize in the US that we had hundreds of years of culture experience with gradually more and more representative government from Britain and many years of the colonies self governing on local matters before the break from the UK and king.
It also seems like a king might have prevented the corruption we saw there. I get the feeling all these people in power looked around at each other and said "Wait they've given us all this money and left us to each keep a check on each other?! I won't tell if you don't!"
I hope that young man who is now much older is safe.
7
7
u/DavidlikesPeace 25d ago
This kind of statement was said all the time in 19th century Mexico or France (cultures with mass illiteracy and autocratic backgrounds).
Unpopular opinion: they were overall correct.
Monarchy or other autocratic systems can sometimes deliver stable gov't and mass education to the people. They can build the foundation stones needed for democracy. Not all and not often enough, but it can happen.
Expecting democracy to flourish overnight in areas of mass illiteracy and inexperience in self governance is asinine
66
u/nithuigimaonrud 26d ago
Might have been an option but according to this, brining back the warlords didn’t help This was a good read
48
u/jogarz 26d ago
Afghanistan’s warlords are like a rohrschach ink blot. On one hand you have people saying that the US and Kabul tried to centralize authority too much and relying on local community leaders (read: warlords) would’ve been a more realistic and sustainable approach, while others say that government tried too hard to include warlords and this made it unpopular and corrupt.
I lean towards the former argument but I’m not sure I buy either too much. When there’s two diametrically opposed arguments on the same issue, it’s either because there’s no good answer, or one side is way off base.
32
u/ColinHome 26d ago
I think the answer is probably that Americans were just incompetent leaders. I’m reminded of Graham Greene’s critique of American foreign policy in “The Quiet American,” in which Alden Pyle is a sincere, well-read, and culturally incompetent agent of the United States in 1950s-era Vietnam. Some warlords were likely entirely reliable and useful, some occasionally so, and some with whom beneficial relations were/would have been counterproductive. However, my suspiscion is that those in charge went in blind and arrogant. Both the position that “we were too centralized” and “we were too reliant on incompetent and differing local leaders” mirror the federalism debate in the United States, and make me wonder whether to some extent we are projecting our ideologies onto Afghanistan, rather than practically solving the problem of who can be trusted.
In both “The Quiet American” and Afghanistan, America seems to be more focused on what its conquest/partner can become than how to get there. Old fiction continues to predict modern reality as the US tried to turn people into things they were not, in order to affect some monumental change in a brief period. Notably, the book also has a metaphor, in which Alden Pyle falls in love with a Vietnamese woman without really knowing her. He promises to marry her and give her the world (an American middle class life), then he dies. She is sad, but not devastated. I certainly hope Afghanistan takes it as well.
12
u/dieyoufool3 Moderator 25d ago edited 25d ago
Thanks for your input; it’s thought provoking.
I’m reminded of a 2017 Carnegie Endowment conference on Pakistani aid. When asked by a sincere audience member “what can the United States do to help”, the Pakistani scholar responded “United States must stop presuming it has all the answers before it arrives on the ground.” It struck me as not what that audience member or the audience more generally wanted to hear (they clearly wanted something more prescriptive), but was a more fundamental truth about inflexible policy goals that are often made in Washington which don’t take into account local actors or the experience of deployed nationals - to the detriment of both parties. It was also sobering to be reminded that good intentions do not necessarily make for the execution of good policy.
2
u/theageofspades 25d ago
Which is a little gauling given America's idea of what was needed on the ground was almost wholly shaped by their countries leaders/ISI.
6
u/ColinHome 25d ago
I think the simultaneously charitable but incredibly ignorant and brash portrait Greene paints of American foreign policy is sadly accurate. It should be required reading for everyone trying to alter another country, since it provides a critique so honest I'm still bitter about it to this day. In some ways, however, it also rehabilitates America's image. We're not an evil empire, but rather an earnest and myopic superpower. I suppose I'd rather be seen as foolish than willfully cruel. As can be seen this past week, that doesn't necessarily make us a safer ally.
5
u/dieyoufool3 Moderator 25d ago
I actually see the last week’s events as the most glowing endorsement of US support. You could be corrupt, incompetent, and your soldiers high on hashish and America will still stick by you for 20 years.
As Modi put it in a 2018 speech, never has a power given so much and asked for so little in return.
2
u/ColinHome 25d ago
Perhaps. Time will tell, I think, how much damage this does to our reputation. However, what I think is indisputable is that American goals for 20 years to institute transformational change in Afghanistan were about as well thought through by policymakers--military and civilian--as if they were the ones high on hashish. I still believe another few decades might have been enough to create a truly prosperous state, and I resent those whose promises of a soon-but-never-quite-arriving peace made such a long stay even more unpalatable than it might have been. But who knows, perhaps my faith in the ability of the United States to alter the world is just a less extreme version of the arrogant ignorance Greene satirized.
3
u/amitym 25d ago
I don't quite agree with your interpretation. The issue was trying to include provincial warlords in a strongly centralized government.
It's not that the new government gave them lots of power and autonomy. They already had lots of power and autonomy, full stop. That was just a fact of reality. Historically, that was true under every king and emir Afghanistan has ever had, too -- just because you see "monarchy" don't assume that that was a strongly centralized government!
79
u/SlipperyWetDogNose 26d ago
Whole lot of romanticizing there with the constitution allowing women’s rights and democracy. Afghan history for the last 100 years has been one of Kabuli elites trying to reform the country and the countryside (the vast majority of people) opposing it.
This is not even to mention issues of legitimacy
23
u/circlebust 26d ago
Not sure what your point is. That same backwards countryside is also opposing the much more radical than themselves Taliban, judging by the 85% unpopularity rating. It's no moral "just deserts" no matter how you slice it, it's just the triumph of the powerful, as always.
0
u/Common_Echo_9061 26d ago edited 26d ago
20 years after the US squandered the return of Afghanistan's monarchy and the Talibans offer of surrender after they had been beaten we have to listen to some pompous ignorant tell us what every Afghan had been saying from the beginning.
Even now, in defeat, when everyone has been trying to convince Biden to do the right thing. He went with his good ol yee-haw "gut instinct" and screwed it all up. Literally every single US admin throughout this war has been a total screw up, pinning it on one is incorrect, but Biden is the icing on the cake.
13
u/ACacac52 26d ago
The larger problem with this and all hereditary based forms of leadership, isn't so much the king who would be, but whatever comes next.
To paraphrase Dan Carlin, monarchys are a roll of the dice. Sometimes you get a unifying, ambivalent moderate. Sometimes you get an idiot like Kaiser Wilhelm and sometimes you get a malevolent evil, like Commodus.
21
u/Distinct_Blueberry 26d ago
A viable solution for Afghanistan always was a strongman. Perhaps that's a monarch too.
Get the country a modern-ish dictator, let him do his thing, support him while he stabilizes and manages the country. The thing is, strongmen tend to do things that wouldn't be palatable to citizens of countries supporting such a regime.
However, as long as the strongman can keep the peace, he's the person to back.
A democratic government comes from a country's own people. Them having leaders who demand it and a massive popular support backing such leaders. Democracy in a country without such movement practically is people voting for (or being forced to vote for) their feudal lords.
4
u/Electronic_Ad5481 26d ago
The funny thing is it is possible to have it both ways! The UK and many Scandinavian countries are examples of this: constitutional monarchies. Historically they've been more stable then Republican democracies, and they are more responsive to the people's demands. Having a king as the head of state prevents the head of state from falling into a tribal affiliation, where everyone is jockeying for the strongman president because the president has so much power.
And it still allows a parliament to form with multiple parties allowing more ideas. Since head of state and chief executive are not the same person anymore, party affiliations can be more flexible than in Republican democracies where there tend to just be two parties.
9
u/Distinct_Blueberry 26d ago edited 26d ago
Perhaps, but that's beside my point. My argument is that the stabilizing power in Afghanistan would necessarily have to be a ruthless, dictatorial force.
At this moment, that would be Taliban. The aim should've been to have a "friendlier" government, i.e. a dictator/monarch/whoever willing to get the job done. Any form of democracy isn't feasible, because the local feudal lords or warlords can force votes in their favor.
Simply put, the answer is the Russian solution to Chechnya.
8
u/APIglue 26d ago
The constitutional monarchy in the UK is the product of centuries of debate and bloodshed. While it is possible that a monarch may have been a better choice for Afghanistan than a president, the timescale required is still very long and bloody.
Someone else commented that "history never ends": the book is still not finished! The Taliban might still be defeated by some other group. They have a large population of unhappy students and unemployed young men, and are the prime demographics for revolution. Wilder, but not unthinkable, futures involve Iranian peacekeepers and/or a sudden influx of Han settlers.
However, since we are arguing counterfactuals, the time to stabilize Afghanistan was immediately after the Soviet withdrawal. The defeat of an invading power combined with the continued existence of said power created a short window of demand for a strong, centralized national identity. By 2001 it was too late.
2
u/Archtanzir 25d ago
Said many Scandinavian countries are also largely homogenous with several hundred to a thousand+ years of unified history.
Meanwhile Afghan history is anything but unified with loads of areas historically belonging to neighboring countries and its main population group being sliced right in the middle between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its not comparable at all to be frank.
6
u/LtCmdrData 25d ago
party affiliations can be more flexible than in Republican democracies where there tend to just be two parties.
This has nothing to do with things you imply.
Multiple parties vs. two parties is the result from electoral system. Single member districs and plurality voting system creates two party systems. Proportional voting system creates multi-party systems.
7
u/charliesfrown 25d ago edited 25d ago
You're mistaking survivorship bias. Some countries that are stable have monarchs. But they have them because they are stable, not the other way around. There was no serious event to remove them.
For example Sweden is the remains of a country Norway left. That the split happened peacefully is a credit to the politicians at the time. But 'break up into the the smallest ethnostate possible' is not really a pro stability argument.
People always leave out that the UK has just had a 30 year civil war between 1968-1998. It was directly tied to the fact the monarchy is not a unifying presence. The Monarch is the head of the state religion of England. People not of that religion were oppressed and fought back. There were paratroopers shooting "their own" civilians.
Unsurprisingly, the author Gawain Towler is an English nationalist. So of course to him, a multiethnic state where only one ethnicity is really in power is not a contradiction.
14
u/jogarz 26d ago
The former king had no interest in being a dictator. He was friendly towards democratization to begin with and given his age in 2001, he knew he was in no state to run a country. If the monarchy was restored, it would’ve been a constitutional (democratic) monarchy.
5
u/setting-mellow433 25d ago
A few years down the line the throne would've been given to his eldest son in the Barakzai dynasty anyway.
7
u/the_new_plastic_age 26d ago
I dont see how a dictator is an improvement. Rural Afghans will still hate Kabul for how corrupt it is. The army will still be a joke.
The problem with the Taliban is that they are almost a foreign force that receives foreign support and sanctuary. Unless the US does anything meaningful with Pakistan, it is an unwinnable insurgency.
2
u/TheWizardCat_ 25d ago
So they need a dictatorial strongman? That's the Taliban.
The US was incapable of winning this war.
2
u/Distinct_Blueberry 24d ago
So they need a dictatorial strongman? That's the Taliban.
Exactly. The focus should've been to have a regime that would (at the very least) be amenable to US concerns and requirements. Someone as ruthless as the Taliban, but with a more west-leaning view.
Instead, there was the rather weirdly heavy-handed and self-contradictory approach that insisted that the Afghans were going to have a liberal democracy and self-determination, whether they liked it or not.
US approach went from 'annihilate the Taliban' - abandon the countryside to Taliban, nothing exists there anyway - consider Taliban stakeholders in Afghanistan - negotiate with Taliban - get out of the country and let the Afghans sort it out themselves with the Taliban.
Disclaimer: We're still talking of hypothetical approaches with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. But none of that excuses the fact that a cohesive US/NATO policy approach was never fully realized in all those years.
12
u/maproomzibz 26d ago
Yep, if you look at Middle East, countries that are stable are the ones with monarchies: Morocco, Jordan, Oman, UAE, Qatar, & Bahrain. (Saudi Arabia is an exception tho).
18
u/pm_me_taco_smell 26d ago
Saudi Arabia isn’t stable?
13
9
6
u/odonoghu 25d ago
It gets most of its drinking water from desalination plants on the Persian gulf in range of Iranian scuds they could be wiped off the map in an afternoon.
19
u/ChillyBearGrylls 26d ago
Are they stable because they are monarchies, or are they still monarchies because of some factor which allows that to be a stable form of government for each? Because Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen all had monarchies that were overthrown.
4
u/JimmyPD92 26d ago
Are they stable because they are monarchies, or are they still monarchies because of some factor which allows that to be a stable form of government for each? Because Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen all had monarchies that were overthrown.
A lot of those overthrown monarchies are the result of US interference. British too. Monarchy meaning absolute dictatorial power in a single individual does offer benefits in regard to maintaining control and instituting change or reform, but there are obvious risks such as corruption or weak leadership enabling rogue elements to grow.
Those countries are stable because of multiple factors but a top down power structure is definitely one of them.
6
u/odonoghu 25d ago
Iran the monarchy was imposed by the us and British after democratically elected governme challenged oil interests. collapsed when khoemeni rose up in 1979 ,Iraq leftist rebels overthrew the British backed monarch and nationalised oil industry eventually replaced by the baath, Egypt British puppet Farouk was overthrown by Nasser and free officer movement who then nationalised the Suez Canal leading to war with Britain France and israel , Libya muammar gaddafi overthrew western backed monarch initially with massive popular support, Tunisia has never had a king and Yemen’s king was placed in power by the British but once Aden was abandoned and was overthrown by nasserist and communist rebels.
Literally none of these countries monarchies were ousted by the west in fact the west supported or helped found them in most cases
8
u/ferrel_hadley 25d ago
Iran the monarchy was imposed by the us and British after democratically elected governme challenged oil interests.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi came to the throne in 1941. Not 1953. He was placed on the throne by an Anglo Soviet invasion to stop the Iranian siding with the axis. Iran had had 2500 years of continuous monarchy. Moseddegh was popular but he halted the 51 election when just enough seats had been counted for form a quorum, the early seats were urban and his supporters. The other seats were rural and would have been the opposition. He was operating with self awarded emergency powers
The 1953 coup did not "end democracy" but it did see Pahlavi become more authoritarian and the parliament diminish in freedom.
There was UK and US involvement in his removal but the silly story that Persia was some kind of stable democracy and the Shah imposed on them is simply fictional history.
3
u/odonoghu 25d ago
The Shah would not have risen to power had he not been supported by the us and uk so yes the west being the one with the most agency in situation were the deciding force on the question of Iranian monarchy.
Imposed may have been the wrong word as it implies it was universally undesired but US and UK secret services essentially forced the end of democracy in Iran.
2
u/ferrel_hadley 25d ago
The Shah would not have risen to power had he not been supported by the us and uk
His father took the throne in 1921. He was the heir. How would he have "not risen to power". He had been in power over a decade when he bumped a prime minister who had been gathering close to dictatorial powers to himself.
US and UK secret services essentially forced the end of democracy in Iran.
Moseddegh had rigged an election then awarded himself powers.
The democracy was not brought to an end at that point, Pavahli became increasingly dictatorial and slowly crushed it.
The extreme conservative religious were on the Mossedgh team. They were always a huge force in Iranian politics.
It was a murky and violent period in Iranian politics. Its cleaned up and dumbed down to make the story more black and white.
3
u/setting-mellow433 25d ago
But Afghanistan isn't Middle Eastern. Its monarchist way and its tribal history sets it very apart from the Middle East.
2
u/nachoolo 25d ago
Middle East: Morocco
1
u/maproomzibz 25d ago
North Africa does come under the cultural bloc of Middle East.
2
u/Shiirooo 25d ago
cultural bloc of Middle-East
What does that mean?
2
u/Historical-Poetry230 24d ago
A collection or bloc of nations with similar and connected histories and cultures.
1
u/Bayart 24d ago
Morocco isn't in the Middle East. It's literally West of Portugal.
3
u/maproomzibz 24d ago
Morocco is more culturally connected to Saudi Arabia than Portugal, is it not?
1
u/Bayart 24d ago
How so ? Just because it's Muslim and nominally Arabic ? Morocco interacted a lot more with The Iberian peninsula and West Africa than it ever did with Saudi of all places. If anything its relationship to other West Mediterranean powers has been its dominant feature in foreign policy for 500 years.
3
34
u/Perton_ 26d ago
The US preferred the Iranian Shah over the socialist republican government
13
u/ChillyBearGrylls 26d ago
While also not having the stomach for what maintaining an absolute Shah required.
17
u/Vahlir 26d ago
your better throw in Britain into that one ol' chap, it was their idea after THEIR oil fields (and Russia's) were nationalized by the government
9
u/ChillyBearGrylls 26d ago
No doubt Britain instigated and whispered in our ear, but they couldn't actually carry it out without the US
5
u/ColinHome 26d ago
The US has a bad habit of listening to allies with untrustworthy motivations, from Britain to Pakistan, without double-checking whether its goals align with theirs.
2
2
18
u/PreppyAlaskan 26d ago
Mossadagh was not in any sense a socialist, he was a secular, democratic capitalist in favor of welfare. Nationalizing a single resource doesn't make him a socalist.
45
u/S-S-R 26d ago
What unifying king? The one that got overthrown in the 70s?
There is nothing inherently stabilizing about monarchies, infact they are overthrown as easily has any democracy. The Arab Spring was predominately caused by monarchies and dictatorships resistant to reform.
31
u/jogarz 26d ago
What unifying king? The one that got overthrown in the 70s?
In a palace coup by his cousin, not in a popular revolution. That’s an important thing to note when you’re questioning whether he was a unifying/popular figure or not.
7
u/S-S-R 26d ago
I think something to consider is that it was nearly 50 years ago, many of the people in Afghanistan aren't going to be thinking "we should go back to something that most of us have never lived under". I think that if monarchy was actually supported there would be some faction for it to be restored.
4
u/the_lonely_creeper 25d ago
*30 years, when US involvement started. Hardly long enough for it to be forgotten, even with Afghanistan's low life expectancy.
6
u/snowylion 25d ago
50 years being "so long ago" is a pretty much a western understanding of things.
50 years is the age of parents of those whose children are currently in the 20's, and unlike the atomized west, The family units elsewhere interact daily and strongly.
0
u/S-S-R 25d ago
50 years seems like it would be more consequential in the west. You still have a fairly strong support for overruling Roe v Wade in the US and that's primarily from the older population that still has considerable sway.
In Afghanistan only 1.5% of the population is going to have any memory of the monarchy (they would have been a teenager), compare that with 13% for the US.
I think you are overstating how much influence these parents are supposed to have. People can talk about how great monarchy was all they want, it doesn't mean there children are going to buy it, especially if the parents are talking about there grandparents experience not even there own.
2
u/snowylion 25d ago
it doesn't mean there children are going to buy it
Yes, that is precisely what I am saying is different from the west.
50 years seems like it would be more consequential in the west.
Yes, precisely why it seems "so long ago". You just made my point for me.
1
u/S-S-R 25d ago
I was actually saying the opposite. The events of 50 years ago are more widely supported in the West because they have an older population. Afghanistan does not, so any greater influence you seem to think they have is going to be really reduced when you are talking about people several generations back. Nearly everyone that lived under monarchy is dead, all the arguments for it are just going to be stories. Even if parents in Afghanistan are experts at brainwashing, there is going to be a lot of skepticism about embracing something that the population has never experienced and that's only going to get harder.
-1
u/snowylion 25d ago
Even if parents in Afghanistan are experts at brainwashing
Well, that is precisely the wrong way to think about it. Taking Filial and tribal piety as "brainwashing" is such a baseless new worldy take on things.
You are taking political talking points with campaigning energy and massive economic might behind them as baseline.
And even then, less that 40% of total population as nominal support is what it gets. How many of them are the die hard supporters of it? How many other political talking points from the 70's are given this much weight?
The assumption you need to let go is that all people think in the way that is familiar to you.
Even if you meant the opposite, you succeeded in weakening your own position.
4
14
u/WilhelmsCamel 26d ago
The king ruled for 40 years and he was popular all around, the coup was betrayal by his own relative, not a revolution like what happened in Iran 6 years later
20
u/Attila_ze_fun 26d ago
Of course this is from the UK.
"Monarchy good because queen cool"
-5
9
u/JimmyPD92 26d ago
This article is discussing an absolute monarchy as I understand it, which is dramatically different to our constitutional monarchy.
3
u/setting-mellow433 25d ago
Afghanistan was also a constitutional monarchy in its final years from 1964 to 1973.
2
27
u/Spoonfeedme 26d ago
I do believe Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.
If a strongman was all that was needed the Soviets would have had no problems.
The irony here is that anyone with the skills and connections to achieve such a feat has demonstrably necessarily come from within the county itself. You can't plop a guy in with military support and have a functioning system in such a fragmented state. Where such tactics have been available and marginally successful for great powers, it has always been meeting the man on the ground with those connections and supporting their continued control, not trying to implement it.
And more to the point, when local governing conditions create conditions where that local strongman has to take policy positions both foreign and domestic counter to the exact wishes of the patronizing power, it ends in bloodshed anyways when that power tries to show who is boss because that fragmented reality always rears it head again.
There were no palatable local partners for the USA in 2001/2002 and their attempts to create ones out of whole cloth showed why the idea is dumb.
0
u/tripleint3gral 26d ago
Irrelevant, we’re not the one making the call. Would the US have been a better place under XXXXX as president? irrelevant
27
u/doormatt26 26d ago
What sober analysis of Afghanistan's collapse has concluded it was the voting that was the problem? Who was the nice friendly monarch who would respect enough rights to be palatable for the US but also be chill with the Taliban?
3
u/[deleted] 26d ago
Afghanistan should have been modelled on Canada. A constitutional hereditary monarchy with a federal government that reserves certain powers (taxation, ports, armed forces, postal service, currency issuance, measurements, broadcasting, telecom, aviation, etc.) and provinces each with a great deal of autonomy (taxation, education, health care, natural resources, transportation, etc.)
15
u/ferrel_hadley 26d ago
From Mali to Indonesia there are violent Islamist militancies under almost every conceivable form of government. America appointing a king was not going to stop those who had been brought up to believe they needed to turn Afghanistan into a Islamic Emirate. That thinking is nostalgia for a world that is gone.
The US like the Soviets failed to build state institutions that enough people were willing to die for vs those who seen a religious revolution as being the best way to bring about paradise on Earth. Given the widely reported levels of corruption at all levels of society its the least remarkable thing that tribal and religious authority was far stronger.
The sudden gushing rush for autocratic models of government in the past week has shown a real lack of depth of thinking about the world, what motivates people and what the pressures and forces are that pull people today.
The appeal of a strong man ruler is that someone has enough concentration of authority to violently crush any opposition to bring stability. But in return you surrender any real capability to grow beyond middle income as any innovation and hard work can be ceased from you. So it condemns states to stagnation. Other believe in revelation, that religious texts are the written pre-ordained instructions to produce paradise on Earth. These movements have not yet run out of steam, though in places like Iran where it has had 40 years of failure they do seem to have lost a lot of legitimacy.
States only exist where people can believe that these artificial bodies will protect them, provide for them in education and health care and produce an economic system that gives them the hope their children will live better lives. It takes time to produce the institutions that people come to believe in. For many countries the lure of tribal allegiance is strong. If you are harmed your tribe will inflict the revenge punishment while the police will side with who ever pays the better bribe. So people do not believe in the state institution. The only way for the state to function is with the strong man. Blunt coercion.
But the strong man model was failing in many places anyway. Iraq, Syria, Egypt had all seen the huge surge in Islamist violence going back to the 70s. Many people seen this as a better model to the point it over threw the monarchy of Iran.
Its not pre-ordained, Turkey went from a strong man system of government to a bit of a democracy, weak but functional. In many Muslim majority states those will to use violence to promote an Islamist government are very much the minority (Indonesia, much of central Asia, Tunisia).
A couple of decades ago the world was awash with groups trying to use violence to bring about Marxist paradises on Earth. So its not something to do with a specific religion. Ideas that violence can bring the people to a more perfect form of government can take root across large regions.
The Taliban were not going to disappear when the tribe was better protection than the police. When the idea that a violently implemented Islamic Emirate would produce a more moral and just world.
My "take" is there was too much short term thinking. Too many officers wanted to send the right reports to get the promotion on the state of the police and ANA, too many senior officers wanted to make Washington think they had solved the problem. In Washington the political class had no attention bandwidth to deal with the issue, it was a hinderance to the things they wanted to be getting on with.
The idea that a monarchy could have fixed these issues is credulous wish fulfilment.
1
u/Devin_907 26d ago
the monarchy was overthrown in a revolution for a reason.
10
u/WilhelmsCamel 26d ago
It wasn’t overthrown in a revolution. The king was deposed by his own cousin in a coup. Remember he ruled Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973 and all these years had relative stability and decent life, when he returned to Afghanistan he was still very popular as well
3
2
u/Helpful-Tradition990 26d ago
No the monarchy couldn’t have saved it. But perhaps a federal system can.
-3
3
u/Houssamattal 25d ago
I am starting to question America’s real intentions for Afghanistan. Do we really want to save the country, or keep the chaos at the borders of Russia, China, and Iran?
6
u/ferrel_hadley 25d ago
An unstable Afghanistan is a huge huge headache for everyone. No one wants it unstable though Russia seems to be running round with a smirk on its face.
If they simply wanted it unstable they could have sat back and allowed India to up its support for the Northern Alliance. India and Afghanistan are allies before the Taliban take over.
2
u/[deleted] 25d ago edited 25d ago
An unstable Afghanistan is a huge huge headache for everyone
An unstable 7th-century Afghanistan is in Pakistan's favor. Pakistan does not want a stable nation-state to deal with on both of its borders. Thus, they will always ensure that Afghanistan remains weak, divided, and backwards. That's been their policy since the 1970s, AT LEAST.
allowed India to up its support for the Northern Alliance
IMO, there is very little India can do to help Afghanistan. Just look at a map.
2
u/ferrel_hadley 25d ago
America in Afghanistan was about the only leverage they have left over them in my opinion. With Afghan now in Taliban hands and when the US has no people in country Pakistan will have zero influence in Washington that I can see. This will enormously free us the US to cut Pakistan adrift so that no more $800 million on aid and possibly start pushing Pakistan into the "supporter of terrorism" column. The US had a traditional light support of Pakistan they are now swinging behind India in a big way.
Being on the US bad books is far more of an issue than people seem to have thought about.
1
u/[deleted] 25d ago
Being on the US bad books is far more of an issue than people seem to have thought about.
Pakistan entering the US's bad books depends on public opinion in the US and/or what the US governing class knows about Pakistan..
The average person only knows that OBL was found somewhere in Pakistan and that's it. The average person doesn't know about Pakistan's policy of subconventional warfare through support for jihadist groups like the Taliban, Haqqani, JeM, LeT, even TTP to an extent, etc.
And, Pakistan is very adept and manipulating US foreign policy. Their lobbyists in DC are second to none.
IMO, they will milk the US as usual.
0
u/ferrel_hadley 25d ago
depends on public opinion in the US and/or what the US governing class knows about Pakistan..
Sorry but the average person in the US has zero interest in Pakistan. The decision will be mostly within the State Department who know a damn site more than you or me about the country.
And, Pakistan is very adept and manipulating US foreign policy. Their lobbyists in DC are second to none.
The idea that Pakistan is king of K street? This is the first time I have heard that. I am supremely comfortable that the various US intelligence services are feeding the State Department information that is a far higher calibre than either of us. I am struggling to imagine how Pakistani lobbyists could be shifting the dial so law makers would reject advice from the State Department.
Also worth noting the US has a large body of ex service personnel who have some strong views on Pakistan including on the Hill.
Good luck though.
0
u/[deleted] 25d ago
Good luck though.
LOL. I'm a former reporter who worked in DC and traveled through MENA and South Asia.
Not a Pakistan supporter.
Just saying what I have observed before.
It will take some serious groundswell support to turn against Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Pakistan will keep pushing this lie of a narrative and win bags of money from DC: https://www.reddit.com/r/pakistan/comments/p8xjgh/fm_shah_mahmood_qureshi_goes_off_on_the_first/
3
u/ClassyKebabKing64 25d ago
I Am more fan of a Republic. But if it's a monarchy what they need give them a monarchy. "Westernisation" has made a monarchy a bad term. For no reason at all. In school we only learn about the bad monarchs. This has made many ignorant to the fact that a head of state is more than figure or symbol and can have higher function.
5
u/furiousmouth 25d ago edited 25d ago
America's primary problem is the inability to understand pre-industrial societies and tribal affiliations. When nations industrialize, tribal and location ties get loosened as a result of the country urbanizing and mingling of cultures at the workplace. This creates new ties to the nation and hence national unity. Afghanistan is a pre-industrial society which has still gotten ties to tribe more than nation. That's why these "nation building" exercises like developing an ANA are futile because the fundamental feature (tribal affiliations) of the society has not been changed.
A recent example is Oman, which had a similar society in 1960s. When they broke out of this tribal mindset through industrialization and urbanization, they managed to create a more cohesive country. The monarchy helps in building ties into the various major tribes by marriage alliances. All different ways of nation building
4
u/amitym 25d ago edited 25d ago
King, schming. The first Afghan general assembly picked Hamid Karzai and didn't want a king. That was (more or less) their choice.
Where they didn't have as much of a choice was the concentration of power. That was de facto up [to] the Americans. And that's where there was a problem.
The thing that the US clung to was this idea that politics in Afghanistan should revolve around a single center of power. This is ironic because the US itself is one of the more decentralized and anarchic democracies in the world. Local power in the US political system is quite strong, compared to most other democracies. But Washington DC seems to have a funny effect on people in the national government. They start to have fantasies of massively centralized power or something... whatever is going on there, the outcome is pretty divergent from the way the US itself operates.
And there are of course a few even more decentralized democracies -- Switzerland for example. The Swiss cantons are a mixture of highly progressive societies in some places right alongside incredibly backward and reactionary societies the next canton over. Like, women-not-allowed-to-vote backward.
Modern and forward-thinking right next to insane sexist religious fundamentalism? Sound familiar?
Yet we don't call Switzlerand a failed state. Switzerland isn't some base of global terrorism. Other countries may not agree with their system or its outcomes in every detail, but we accept it as something they have to deal with their own way. It might have been possible for Afghanistan to operate in the same way.
Would that have made a difference? I don't know. We might in 2021 be looking at an Afghanistan in the grip of emerging inter-provincial civil war, just like we are anyway. But at the very least it would have represented an understanding that Afghanistan is going to look like Afghanistan, not Washington's imaginary fantasy of power.
1
u/Medical-Secret 25d ago
I feel like monarchies in that part of the world would be doomed to become puppet states of foreign powers.
-1
u/sheytanelkebir 25d ago
PDA would have saved it had the medieval islamist boors not been pumped with cash and weapons to fight a civil war after the attempts at deep fundamental reform in 1978.
If that had succeeded, Afghanistan today would be like Tajikistan or Uzbekistan.
All the discussions however are whether to support the medieval islamist boors (of bacha bazi fame) or the stone age islamist boors (of enslaved women fame).
I bet rambo is so happy he defeated the dreaded reds now.
1
u/[deleted] 25d ago
Think of it this way: America thought it was getting a high rate of return by needing relatively paltry funds to support a semi-jihadist insurgency against the Soviet army.
Well, little did it know that this was a fake rate of return. The bill was just being delayed.
And, things are only going to get worse.
1
u/Timo-the-hippo 25d ago
Democracy only works with widespread reliable information exchange. Afghanistan is too spread out and the Afghan people lack the tech culture to enable such a thing, thus democracy was always doomed.
3
u/Sillysolomon 24d ago
I'm Afghan and there are deep ethnic group tensions here in California. I don't think non-pashtuns would want another pashtun ruler. It would take a very special kind of king to unify the whole country. I know pashtuns who hate other pashtun tribes. Could a monarchy saved it? Idk maybe, but kinda hard to tell after years of war. Would have had to been someone Afghans knew.
172
u/setting-mellow433 26d ago
Submission Statement:
This is an opinion article about whether a monarchy system could've saved Afghanistan. Of course, this comes a week after the Taliban overran Kabul and have taken control of this Central Asian country.
The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, and after defeating the Taliban forces assisted Afghans in forming a new government and system altogether. The former King of Afghanistan had been in exile for 29 years, but he continued to be popular and was widely seen as a unifying figure.
Because of his popularity amongst Afghans, he was tipped to return as the King of a new kingdom. However, the US, as well as Pakistan, were not entirely comfortable with this. Eventually the US decided to back Hamid Karzai as a President in a republic instead. Ever since then, Afghanistan has been a republic but has faced continuous war and a takeover by the Taliban insurgents in August 2021.
This article talks about that time in 2001-2002, about America's decision and Pakistan's influence in denying the formation of a kingdom in favor of a republic. It questions whether the return of the monarchy in 2002 may have "saved" Afghanistan - in other words, unite the country and possibly prevent the 20 year war that happened, a highly significant conflict that was costly for the US and NATO and has resulted in many Afghan military and civilian deaths.