Sure. As we saw with our study in Taiwan, I think the local level is where democracy really takes root. It took a long time to build up democratic values through local elections and the elections were really what drove the democratic transition. People came to rely on the elections as an outlet for political expression and over time different opposition factions learned how to use the elections to their favour and eventually that trickled up to open presidential elections.
On your point, which is why can't Afghanistan develop their own indigenous democratic form of government, I called my paper “Afghanistan: Democratization in Context” specifically because I wanted to reference the fact that Afghanistan does have experience with liberalization and certain democratic aspects. Before 9/11 and everything, they had their own process of developing loya jirgas, and parliaments, and this sort of thing.
What I mean when I say they are building from scratch is that they've gone through two or three decades of sustained conflict where all of those reforms that they had developed on their own had been basically washed away. I don't know the exact figure off the top of my head, but I think there are four million or so Afghan refugees who have left the country since the 1960s and 1970s. So when I say starting from scratch, I don't mean there's no tradition of liberal values or human rights or democratic values. It's just that today, at this point, all those gains have been washed away, so we have to start building again.