I I know nothing about Afghanistan, so I can’t claim to be writing about that great country and its people. But I am trained in the study of comparative politics and international relations. It’s my professional specialisation, what I teach, research and write.
From whatever we know has gone wrong with Afghanistan, and indeed many countries around the world, including Somalia, over the last decades, we can provide some reflections on the complicated business of building durable states and having viable nations.
Human beings as individuals are difficult enough to deal with, matters can only get worse as they multiply into bands and groups, which then grow into bigger communities and expand to constitute a social composition we know as a country or a nation-state.
For people to live in harmony and go about their business with some measure of peace and prosperity, there has to be a sense of shared identity and common heritage – they have to be a nation, a political community.
Historically, it has been easy to cobble together bodies of people and groups of communities, but very difficult to build a nation out of disparate people and imbue them with a deep feeling of solidarity and collective belonging.
Nation-building has been one of the most demanding and elusive undertakings in human history. Even when nations are created through one process or the other, whether forceful subjugation or peaceful compromises, it’s possible for fairly well-established nations to suddenly disintegrate and collapse.
The challenge of nation-building and forging a political community, one that coheres and endures, has persisted and in some cases even worsened around the world in our times. This is integral to the crisis in Afghanistan.
But even more biting and intractable than contestations or crises over nation-ness is the problem of establishing a durable and functional institutional apparatus for managing public affairs – the state.
It is possible to sustain social and political order even when there are disagreements, tensions and contestations over culture, heritage, values, customs and traditions (the issues that inform a nation).
By contrast, to have order and peace, despite social disharmony and cultural contestations, you need to have a capable and functional state, one able to supply critical public goods and services: law and order, security of person and property, undertaking basic bureaucratic tasks like issuing an ID card and ensuring that activities in the market place adhere to established standards and rules.
Attaining both a viable nation and a capable state is arguably the assured route to establishing and maintaining political order. At a minimum, you need to have one if not both but societies that today are peaceful and prosperous have a fair balance between being nations and having states.
By contrast, almost all countries around the world that are beset by lawlessness, disorder, violence, extreme material deprivation of majority of citizens, etc. face a deep crisis of either one or both the nation and the state.
Dear reader, if the above excurse is somewhat abstruse but you have patiently kept up, thank you! Let me exit by bringing matters home to Uganda. We may well have an Afghanistan around the corner.
We still have an unresolved question of the ‘nation’ called Uganda, which to be sure remains little more than the contraption that the British produced at the beginning of the last century.
Apologists of the current rulers, and members of the ruling class, often point to implosions and sheer disorder in countries like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, etc to blackmail critics and the public into acquiescing Museveni’s misrule. But the blackmail is not without merit.
Given the social fragility around us, the latent ethnic animosities and enormous socioeconomic pain majority of Ugandans live with every day, it is very possible to wake up to a Uganda in flames if there is no modestly capable and strong central state able to limit the extent individuals and groups of people can engage in violent activities or prey on other citizens.
The current state under Mr Museveni is deficient in many respects and incapable of performing very basic bureaucratic tasks, but it has succeeded in assuring a degree of social and political order.
Who benefits from this order is another matter. But to not appreciate the fact that order is necessary before debating who benefits, and other critical issues, is to fail to understand what it means to have disorder!
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