Countering Lind-dinistas - if the mission is impossible, don't blame me

[TheCurmudgeon]

Curmudegeon's first post cited in part:

Now a few years ago I attended a conference on the Middle East and a number of Arab speakers stressed to them 'democracy' did not mean first and foremost 'representative democracy'. To them accountability was far more important whether by the rule of law, less corruption etc.

My "armchair" understanding of Afghanistan is that in the rural areas there was a form of direct democracy, mainly exercised by elders and in jirgas. I suspect it helped that the state had very little power or functions beyond the cities - long before Soviet or allied intervention. Carter Malkasian's book covers this well.

I wonder what are 'the requisites for democracy'. One thing for sure in either Afghanistan or Iraq they are not what we have or thought they should have.

The definition of "Democracy" causes many problems.

The original article is here. Essentially, they were income level (wealth), education, industrialization, and urbanization (from memory). Much more study had been done particularly in the 1990s to explain why democracy beat out communism. In any case, most of this was well known.

Isolated localities often use some form of "democracy" in that the heads of the local households get together to decide matters that concern all. But this is not the liberal democracy as we know it with universal human rights.

Rule of Law is problematic, because that translates into procedural legitimacy, which simply means that you are following the social norms and rules of the society . Stoning a women for being raped may represent the appropriate action. Interfering with that stoning may be seen as failing to uphold the rule of law. To often these vague terms are tossed around like they have a common meaning. They do not.