The Power of Poetry -- Culture and the Rule of Law

Discovering the beautiful legal documents at the National Archives of Afghanistan

The Power of Poetry -- Culture and the Rule of Law: When I was in Afghanistan as the rule of law adviser to the NATO police development mission, I had the opportunity to embed in Afghan police units as their senior commanders crisscrossed the country, inspecting checkpoints and police stations, and meeting with governors and community leaders. These trips were fraught with danger and discomfort. Being an American civilian woman embedded in an Afghan formation was not exactly normal, even for Afghanistan, but it was revealing.

I did it because in order to connect policing to governance, we had to understand what that relationship looked like: not to us, but to the Afghans.

What was surprising to me was how important history and culture were to the Afghan vision of the role of a modern police force. Hardened veterans of brutal wars and semi-literate in most cases, these were not men I thought would be concerned with the fine arts. But I was wrong. Their generals took great risks in order to introduce young police officers to historic sites, illuminated manuscripts, music, and the lore of the Silk Road. The Minister of Interior spent almost an hour inspecting rose gardens with me at a training center near Herat, asking my opinion of the landscaping and personally directing the planting of a particular flowering vine. The generals told me that it was important for their future leaders to understand the land and its people – they could not fairly enforce the law if they did not understand its cultural context and the values that lay behind it.  These were especially reflected, they explained, in their poetry, and in private conversations amongst themselves, they quoted both modern and ancient Persian poets, a lot.

Three years later, while in Kabul this past January, I had the privilege of visiting the National Archives of Afghanistan. The beauty of the miniature paintings depicting Persian fairy tales, illuminated texts, and gorgeous legal documents left me amazed and mystified. I had always been told by my rule of law development colleagues that the Afghans had no national legal tradition – that their law was all derived from the Holy Koran, and there was little else to build upon. But there in the archives and open to visitors, was evidence not only of 200 years of written law, but treasured, valued, embellished, poetic law. It was law as art and culture, just as the culture was embedded in the meaning behind it. The Afghans valued it. That was clear. But I and most of my colleagues had apparently missed that point.

So it was with great interest that I read about “I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan.” This recently-published book contains the poetry of approximately 20 Afghan Pashtun women and promises to be a revelation. We in the international community have spent a lot of time talking about the legal status of women in Afghanistan and we've certainly spent a lot of time and resources talking TO them. But as a rule, we haven’t been reading their poems. We haven’t been looking at the way they perceive their own experience, as expressed in their art and culture. Now we can. We probably should have been doing so all along. http://www.amazon.com/Am-Beggar-World-Contemporary-Afghanistan/dp/0374191875?tag=vglnkc4576-20

The Afghan National Police – Finding Their Way in 2015 and Beyond

The Afghan National Police – Finding Their Way in 2015 and Beyond: In honor of the publication of my Report for the US Institute for Peace on the Future of the Afghan National Police, (http://www.usip.org/publications/the-afghan-national-police-in-2015-and-beyond) I’m digressing a bit from Boko Haram and lessons not learned in Nigerian Security Sector Reform.

Anyone who’s ever heard me speak or worked with me on Afghanistan knows that I am somewhat bullish on the Afghans. Once, after traveling for several days through Taliban-controlled territory with a senior Afghan police commander, I reported that I thought he was as good a leader as any of our own NATO coalition generals. I recall the reaction from some in my organization was something along the lines of: “what would she know; she’s just some female civilian.” Well, as a former senior Army officer who has also worked as a civilian special advisor to more than 100 US and NATO flag and general officers, I think I know what strong leadership under great stress looks like. This particular Afghan police commander had all the right stuff and was doing all the right things. And he wasn’t the only one.

So I read with great interest this week that the Kabul Chief of Police announced a crackdown on tinted windows. http://www.tolonews.com/en/afghanistan/14872-kabul-police-push-ahead-with-tinted-window-ban. (We need to do this in my own city, btw – as a former prosecutor, I unfortunately know where all the open air drug markets are, and it’s amazing how the prevalence of dark tinted windows increases as you’re passing some of these areas.) Anyway, the Afghan Ministry of Interior has ordered the crackdown for security reasons, so of course, the politicians, whose vehicles tend to be deeply tinted, are the ones complaining. The Kabul police tried to enforce the ban once before without success. Now, however, the Afghan National Police have an Interior Minister who has shown considerable resolve; an order from the President himself to make it happen; and a growing confidence and pride among the police that I hadn’t seen in the past but observed during my latest trip to Kabul in January.  Because of these factors and others, the Kabul police may actually be able to pull this one off with minimal abuse of authority and some degree of effectiveness. If they do, it will be another small victory for the Afghan National Police and another step in the march toward Afghan-style rule of law. I’m pulling for them.