Democratic Leadership in Afghanistan
A recent roundup on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan quotes the intrepid Terry Glavin on the prospects for that country's freedom:
This was the one point on which I saw real disagreement among my interviewees. Terry Glavin, much of whose work in Afghanistan has been done through a U.S. based group called Funders Network for Afghan Women, believes Afghanistan truly can build the sort of government that would make donor nations like Canada proud. “Afghanistan is a country with vast untapped democratic resources – the ‘human capital’ we’re always hearing about,” he told me. “Even though Afghans are a people almost uniquely brutalized by war, terrorism, illiteracy and barbarism, the overwhelming majority of the people want nothing to do with religious extremism or pathological misogyny or any other type of crackpotism. All the public-opinion data sets show that Afghans are asking for nothing more than to live ordinary lives as citizens of a sovereign and democratic republic. The democratic leadership in that country is braver and more visionary than Canadians will ever know.”
On the specifics of what Canadian diplomats can actually do, Glavin points to a document prepared by the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, entitled “Recommendations for a Canadian leadership role at the Bonn Summit, December, 2011″. The document sets out an ambitious agenda that would see Canada help reform the nuts and bolts of the Afghan electoral system, and also advocate strongly for a Western-style political and legal structure that enshrines women’s rights, secularism and checks-and-balances.
