A Comparative Study on Iraq and Afghanistan: Two Nations, Similar Journeys, Different Destinations

Abstract

For the last twenty years, US and its allies have struggled with their mega-project of nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both countries, with the support of the US entered to a new era that neither Afghani nor Iraqi jihadi revisionists could tolerate. The resistance of extremist elements escalated when they realized that the nation-building process involves all actors, including those ethnic-religious groups who were considered “others” by Saddam and the Taliban’s regimes. Thus, as political inclusion increased, the attacks against the ex-others grew, especially against Shia communities in both nations. Although, when it came to ethnolinguistic minorities, Afghanistan and Iraq experienced different scenarios. In Iraq, non-Arab speaking Kurds maintained a relatively safe environment and successfully defended themselves from ISIS aggression, and later turned to be a reliable ally for US and international actors in the fight against ISIS, but in Afghanistan, non-Pashtun speaking minorities fell to the hand of Taliban to suffer from its tyranny, once again. This outcome is not the only difference between Afghanistan and Iraq; the other difference is the prelude. In Iraq, ethnic-minority Kurds have been given the right of autonomy, and hence, for more than a decade, they had the privilege of building up a local system for themselves. Thus, when ISIS raided Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) had a pre-established system and infrastructure to counter ISIS. However, the Afghani nan-Pashtun minorities were denied such a privilege; thus, in the absence of foreign power and central government, they failed to defend themselves. As Iraqi Kurds had no intention of leaving their destiny in the hands of Saddam’s regime and chose to fight, today’s Afghani non-Pashtuns are slowly but gradually choosing the same path, fighting for the right of “self-determination,” which warns us that in the near future, Afghanistan might experience what Iraq went through in the mid-1990s, the Iraqi-Kurdish Civil War. Eventually, decades of bloodshed between the Iraqi central government and Kurds declined in 2005, when Baghdad recognized the autonomy of KRG. The historical experiences across the world show us that Afghanistan has two choices either choosing the “Iraqi remedy” and implementing a federal system in which “All are Afghans but separate,” or reliving the “Yugoslavian experience” and witnessing the birth of a new “-Stans” from falling Afghanistan.