Mozidur Rahman Biswas :
It is observed that no country in recent times is more in need of a common identity than Afghanistan, which has 14 officially recognised ethnic groups that, broadly speaking, live in four separate geographic regions, and between 40 and 59 mother-tongue languages. The country was divided by civil conflict for decades, if not centuries, when the US-led coalition invaded it in 2001, and this history had made trust and cooperation even more difficult to establish. Under the changed situation, an element of shared identity failed to materialise by the time the West withdrew. The endless civil war and recent events in the country have shown that it’s ethnically and linguistically driven political divisions are just as deep today as they were when the US began its occupation 20 years ago.
Twenty years is far too long for a war, but far too short to build a stable national identity. It is thus not surprising that the West failed the Afghan people, because it was never willing to foster national unity in a meaningful way. Whenever the withdrawal occurred, it would have left Afghans just as fragmented as before, and with the same unhappy choice between a repressive government and civil war.
To talk about the most fundamental problem: the absence of a common Afghan national identity and the US-led coalition’s diffidence about nurturing one, might have created some degree of common national identity, often delineated along religious, linguistic, or ethnic lines, which are sometimes created explicitly for the purpose of nation-building.
Though, historically we find, during the 19th century, the Prussians created the Germanic ethnic identity and promoted it throughout their expanding territory. The new German language was related to Old High German, but did not really exist before the Prussians tried to build a new German nation. Nation-building in France and Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively, proceeded along similar lines. National identities evolve organically but are usually also fostered by proactive government measures, centred mainly on basic public education. Because, schools can influence young and impressionable people by instructing them in a common language, teaching a common history and encouraging a common culture.
According to analysts, establishing a national identity is a long process where public schools take time to build, curricula take time to develop, and teachers take time to train. Again, then takes many years to educate children, and more before they assume leadership roles in society. Although the US invested huge amounts of money and effort to increase overall education levels, it left Afghan schools without a common curriculum. And while the country has two official languages, Dari and Pashto, and media publish and broadcast in both, many Afghans still speak only one or neither of them.
Instead of promoting a common national identity, the US and its Western allies shied away from any action or language that might leave them open to accusations of cultural insensitivity. Their fear was not unreasonable in view of the terrible cultural assimilation and eradication policies that Western countries have historically carried out domestically and overseas.
But national identities need not be discriminatory or built coercively. European countries such as Switzerland have shown that forging a common national identity with multiple languages is possible. The key is to teach all children several of them so that language is not a divisive factor. Similarly, a country’s common history can include all the peoples that have lived there.
Moreover, despite educational incentives, the horrific past mistakes by forcing children from ethnic-minority groups to attend boarding schools, as the US, Canada, and Australia did in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, even if, a first generation teaches a second, more nationally unified generation that subsequently participates in a country’s political and economic life once it reaches adulthood, one cannot expect to see the effects on national identity for at least 40 years or so. Though, the US and its allies never wanted to be in Afghanistan that long.
With that end in view, global analysts believe that it will be very difficult tasks to establishing a common identity among multifarious groups in Afghanistan help the country marching ahead for building a nation within undergoing complex geopolitical situation.
(Mr. Biswas is a senior journalist).
