Democratization as instant coffee?

The NYT has a lovely profile today of someone I have lots of admiration for: the veteran Algerian diplomat (and former Foreign Minister) Lakhdar Brahimi, who has also for the past two years been the UN’s top official in Afghanistan.
The profile is by Carlotta Gall. She gives one tiny vignette that indicates the importance Brahimi has had in the attempt to rebuild Afghanistan almost from scratch. It came from one of last week’s sessions of the country’s just-completed 502-person loya jirga (“big council”):

[H]e proved his usefulness to the last. He had delayed his departure several times as the loya jirga faltered, and then almost fell apart. Nearly half the delegates boycotted a vote on amendments on Thursday, and tensions were rising as the assembly split along ethnic lines.
That put the rest of the transition in jeopardy, from the United Nations-run disarmament and demobilization program to elections that, under the Bonn accords, would take place in six months.
Mr. Brahimi spoke to the delegates boycotting a vote, entering the tent from the side door, slightly hunched in his overcoat. They had shouted down every other official, including their own faction leaders, but had asked for him to mediate. After a day of meetings Friday, delegates were saying that Mr. Brahimi had succeeded in breaking the logjam.

For me, the most significant part of the piece was where Gall was describing a memo that Brahimi recently gave to the still-precarious Afghan government and foreign diplomats in Kabul:

He addressed security issues, saying that parliamentary elections, scheduled for next year, would be “well nigh impossible” as the threat from Taliban insurgents made large parts of the Pashtun areas inaccessible. But he remains unhurried about the general pace of progress. With a chuckle he recalled a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at the United Nations Security Council. “Colin Powell said to me, `The message is speed, speed, speed,’ and I said, `It has to be slow, slow, slow.’
“There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee,” he said. “It doesn’t happen that way.”
Mr. Brahimi said his short-term objectives were to “give the country a state that is fairly well organized, and give the people a sense that they can have justice, and you have done a lot for all the other things you talk about, in particular democracy.” Elections, he said, should come at the end of the process, not the beginning.

Brahimi, by the way, knows whereof he speaks when he speaks about challenges regarding the democratization of previously authoritarian Arab countries. His own country, Algeria, has gone through a terrible decade of internecine conflict because of poor planning for its earlier attempt to democratize. (And some Algerians have reportedly mentioned him as a possible candidate for the next elections there… )
Well, you can agree or disagree with what he said to Gall about whether elections should come at the end of a process of democrayization or the beginning. I suspect that Ayatollah Sistani would probably disagree with him. But in general, Brahimi’s point about the need for democratization to be an organic, well-grounded process in any country– and one that is very much broader than merely the hurried holding of elections–is a very good one…
In Afghanistan, the current administration, which has the clear imprimatur of the United Nations, may or may not end up being able to “stay the course” until the installation of a stable (and preferably democratic) indigenous successor government.
One thing seems clear to me, though. The probability that the UN will be able to do this–i.e. both stay the course and achieve a stable successor government–in Afghanistan is 1,000 times greater than the probability that the US-led coalition will be able to do the same thing in Iraq.
For starters, no-one in the entourage of Baghdad fashion maven Jerry Bremer seems to have one-thousandth of the accumulated wisdom on how Arab/Islamic societies work that Brahimi has. Jackson Diehl had an interesting piece in Sunday’s WaPo in which he revealed just how terrifying little Bremer knew about Iraq when he went there to take up the job of heading the CPA… It’s not clear that any of the working for him know or knew much more than he did.
Secondly, Bremer clearly has his marching orders right now (since Nov. 15, in fact) to the effect that there has to be some kind of highly photogenic “withdrawal-oid event” concerning US forces in Iraq as of, or shortly after, the June 30 deadline.
“Stay the course”? You gotta be kidding! That might hurt W’s re-election chances, don’t you see?
By the way, over at Juan Cole’s blog, “Informed Comment”, he speculates today about the possibility that the US might succeed in persuading NATO to pick up some of the slack in Iraq. He writes that, ” NATO would have far more legitimacy with Iraqis” [than the present US-led force.]
I wonder where he gets that idea?? Iraqis might, it is true, have some gripes against the UN after 12 years of punishing UN-enforced sanctions against them. The ORI poll of mid-November (check out earlier posts on that topic, like this one) measured Iraqis’ distaste for a UN role at 53.9 percent not wanting it vs. 46.1 percent applauding the idea–therefore not, at that point, overwhelmingly strong. But their distaste for the UN would, I think, be very small compared with their distaste for a NATO role.
I am really not sure at all that giving a US presence in Iraq a “NATO coating or flavor” would change its acceptability very much at all… Unless, of course, that NATO coating came with a strong French component, which I don’t see Bush/Cheney as allowing for a moment…
So the US is there in Iraq, and virtually stuck there. Unless, that is, it is willing to give allow the Security Council to pass a resolution that would allow the UN a real role there. In which case perhaps Lakhdar Brahimi could be prepared to take over from the late, ill-fated Sergio De Mello– but this time, with a clear and compelling UN mandate?
Will it happen? I’m not holding my breath. I don’t see Bush, Cheney and their friends as willing for one moment to cede any real decisionmaking power in Iraq to the UN. I think they’d rather hang on to the bitter end, waving their Stars and Stripes as frantically as ever as it sinks down into the quicksands of Mesopotamia.
Maybe I’m wrong. In this case, as in a few others over the past year, I’d dearly love to be. I’d love for them to wake up one morning–perhaps Thursday, the day my next column is coming out in the CSM–and say, “Goodness, Helena, you were right after all!”
They don’t even have to say that. All they have to do is do the right thing. I.e., cede real decisionmaking power in Iraq to the UN. But like I said, I ain’t holding my breath.
Instant coffee, anyone?