A DEMOCRATIC WORLD.(United States foreign policy)

In December, 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, President Bush asked Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who was then the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to draft a legislative proposal for winning the minds of young people around the Muslim world. The following month, Biden went to Kabul, where he toured a new school--one that was bitterly cold, with plastic sheeting over the windows and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. When the visit was over and Biden started to leave, a young girl stood ramrod straight at her desk and said, "You cannot leave. You cannot leave."

"I promise I'll come back," Biden told her.

"You cannot leave," the girl insisted. "They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay."

As Biden put it in a recent interview, the Afghan girl was telling him, "Don't fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now."

Biden described the encounter as "a catalytic event for me." Its lesson was one that he had already begun to absorb in the Balkans, where he had travelled extensively during the nineteen-nineties. There is a worldwide struggle, he explained, between the values of liberal democracy and the destructive ideologies that fester with dictatorship, misery, and humiliation; in this struggle, America needs to expand the conditions for democracy in the most concrete ways, with serious commitments of energy and resources, or risk greater instability. After September 11th, this insight became a matter of urgent national security. When Biden returned from Kabul, he followed up on the President's request and wrote a proposal to build, staff, and supply a thousand schools in Afghanistan, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars each. By thinking small, Biden believed, he had a better chance of success: "You could shove twenty million dollars anywhere in a two-trillion budget, and this was something specific." The schools would employ teachers, many of them women, who had been jobless and desperate under the Taliban, and they would teach a modern curriculum to children who, if they had any schooling at all, knew only the Islamist education of the madrassa. "It was something concrete we could show the Afghanis we're doing," Biden said. "It was something other than the butt of a gun."

The idea went nowhere. Biden's Democratic colleagues didn't get behind it, and very soon the Administration moved on. The most important front in the worldwide struggle largely dropped from Washington's view, and the Senator stopped receiving invitations to the White House.

By the fall of 2002, the Bush Administration had begun mobilizing for the invasion of Iraq. Biden's view was that Saddam Hussein, who had violated every international agreement he had signed but was not an immediate threat, would have to be confronted sooner or later. But he also worried that a unilateral war with Iraq would distract America from the tasks it had only just begun--stabilizing Afghanistan and defeating Al Qaeda--and seriously damage the alliances necessary to eliminate terrorism and other problems that freely cross borders: weapons proliferation, disease, environmental damage, ethnic conflict, impoverishment. "The burden was on Saddam," Biden said. "But I would not have prematurely forced the world's hand on whether or not to go to war, because I'd get the wrong answer."