The Rand Corporation recently published a study called The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building. It covers the basics with clarity and objectivity, defining the roles of the military, the police and the judiciary; distinguishing humanitarian relief from economic stabilisation and development, explaining the complexities of governance and democratisation. But the book has almost nothing about what is clearly the Achilles’ heel of recent nation-building adventures: culture. No single chapter is devoted to it - nothing on the role of culture in countries being rebuilt and nothing on the culture of the nation-builders themselves. Though we are reminded that six of the seven cases of nation-building initiated in the last decade by the US were in Islamic countries, we do not learn much of the lessons of this extraordinary experience. How, for example, did it inform the dispatch of some 1,20,000 mostly Christian soldiers to Iraq — a Muslim country and one of the most ancient civilisations on earth? Neither do we learn much about what kind of cultural preparations, if any, were undertaken in advance of travelling to Afghanistan, also an ancient and proud land, with subtle values and vulnerabilities not readily accessible to the Western mind.
The fault, however, may not lie as much with the Rand book as with nation-building operations themselves. In most, culture has been at best an afterthought and at worst a shallow and cynical exercise in public relations. This was not always so. The US occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952, so often cited as a model for Iraq, was quite different. American planners then appeared to have asked themselves some hard questions about dealing with a country they barely knew or understood, with which they had fought for almost four years, and which lay in ruins. Shoichi Koseki, a professor of constitutional law, has described some of the American preparations for the occupation of Japan, which started while the United States was still at war.
Ruth Benedict’s “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”was mandatory reading. The US Department of War closely studied Japan’s pre-war cinema. Weeks after the occupation began, American officials were consulting with local filmmakers and writers about the use of film in the country’s post-war reconstruction. Certainly those were different times, and Japan was a different country. But the Japanese were probably just as alien to the Americans as Iraqis and Afghans are to Western nation-builders today. It is naïve to believe that it was easy for the proud and sophisticated Japanese —physically starving and spiritually exhausted as they were by the end of the war — to see the youthful, well-fed and self-confident GIs taking over their cities and streets. By any post-conflict reconstruction standard of today, the US occupation of Japan was an outstanding achievement.
Some weeks ago at a gathering in Hiroshima of managers of cultural heritage from Asia, the soft-spoken and thoughtful Afghan participant read the sign that stands at the entrance of Kabul Museum: “A nation is alive if its culture is alive.” The far-reaching implications of these simple words should become the mantra of all aspiring nation-builders.
At least part of that success can be ascribed to the fact that in the midst of the chaos, confusion and sacrifices of a war, the Americans had the wisdom to operate on the fundamental assumption that knowledge and culture matter.
Last year, on a trip to Kabul, my colleagues and I found that our small guesthouse received satellite TV, with endless channels. Many were dedicated to pornography. What a gift to the Taliban! This is not a pious point. In nation-building as in life, perceptions matter, and missing the subtlety of the symbols and values of others is an unforgivable strategic error.
Some weeks ago at a gathering in Hiroshima of managers of cultural heritage from Asia, the soft-spoken and thoughtful Afghan participant read to us the sign that stands at the entrance of Kabul Museum: “A nation is alive if its culture is alive.” The far-reaching implications of these simple words should become the mantra of all aspiring nation-builders.
(Nassrine Azimi is director of the Hiroshima office for Asia and the Pacific region of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research.)