...what is the Afghani way?

Neither the US nor any other Western nation can realistically expect to transplant our way of life into a culture so different from our own. It seems to be dawning on us also that to support one autocracy to defeat another is less than effective: autocracies who have no philosophy in common nonetheless have a common approach, which is unfriendly to democracy in the extreme. To treat with one in order to dispose of another is to trade strichnine for arsenic.

The only representative government the Afghanis could accept is one whose structure and philosophy is grounded in their culture. There must be a tradition of independent thought and collective governance in Afghani history. Federations of mountain tribes, something. What would it be, and what would it take to model a modern state on such a tradition?

Mary Anne