Afghanistan

Afghanistan

The always-helpful Assistant Village Idiot directed me today to the new Weekly Standard's cover article on Afghanistan by P.J. O'Rourke. Sometimes O'Rourke relies a little too much on snarky one-liners, but not in this article, which is amusing but thoughtful. He interviews Aghans in an attempt to understand the real property system:

Land titles are a mess in Afghanistan, or, as the Turkmen put it with a nice Ph.D. turn of phrase, “Definition of ownership is originally ambiguous.” . . . The situation is so confused that the Soviets, of all people, attempted to impose private property in Afghanistan. “They tried to change the law, but the period was too short. Afghanistan,” the Turkmen said and laughed, “did not use the benefits of colonialism.”

He also tries to understand the legal system more broadly:

The Taliban offers bad law—chopping off hands, stoning desperate housewives, the usual things. Perhaps you have to live in a place that has had no law for a long time—since the Soviets invaded 31 years ago—before you welcome bad law as an improvement. . . . An Afghan civil society activist, whose work has put him under threat from the Taliban, admitted, “People picked Taliban as the lesser of evils.” He explained that lesser of evils with one word, “stability.” . . . A woman member of the Afghan parliament said that it was simply a fact that the Taliban insurgency was strongest “where the government is not providing services.” Rule of law being the first service a government must provide.

He muses about the understandable antipathy to foreign do-gooders:

What if some friendly, well-meaning, but very foreign power, with incomprehensible lingo and outrageous clothes, were to arrive on our shores to set things right? What if it were Highland Scots? There they go marching around wearing skirts and purses and ugly plaids, playing their hideous bagpipe music, handing out haggis to our kiddies and offending our sensibilities with a lack of BVDs under their kilts. Maybe they do cut taxes, lower the federal deficit, eliminate the Department of Health and Human Services, and the EPA, give people jobs at their tartan factories and launch a manhunt for Harry Reid and the UC Berkeley faculty. We still wouldn’t like them.

I don't know. I'd probably like them.