Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better? War, the State, and the ‘Post–Conflict’ Challenge in Afghanistan

Abstract

This article investigates the challenges currently facing Afghanistan. It argues that 'post-conflict' peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan may depend on a dramatic expansion of institutionalized economic interdependence: this will not necessarily require obeisance to standard international policy paradigms and it will have to draw on existing patterns of interdependence, even though many of these are rooted in brutally exploitative war economy conditions. The authors argue further that neither peace nor economic development will hold without a centralized, credible and effective state, that the emergence of such a state is a political problem more than a technical problem, and that it will depend on a monopolization of force by the state. Such developments cannot be envisaged without policy being based on a close reading of the long and decidedly non-linear, conflictual experiences in state formation and failure in Afghanistan, a history whose patterns and implications are summarized in this article.

Rethinking the Peacebuilding Puzzle

“…64 One of the key aims of the broad-based coalition idea advocated by the international community was to ease fears that Pashtuns, who accounted for two-fifths of the Afghan population, making them the largest single ethnic group, would grow too strong. Pashtuns, on the other hand, believed that the concept of broad-based government 62 Goodson 2005;and Reynolds 2006. 63 Cramer andGoodhand 2002. 64 Saikal 2005. was actually "code for rule by non-Pashtun figures from the old antiTaliban coalition, the Northern Alliance," 65 and that the Interim and Transitional Administrations overly represented these other groups.…”

آينه افغان ايد : نشريه داخلي سه ماهه مؤسسه افغان ايد = Afghanaid mirror

“…Regional warlords acted with impunity and perpetrated forms of predation and extortion that disrupted trade and the national market. Increasingly, the regions became disarticulated from the national economy and integrated with neighbouring foreign markets, creating a "regionalized" war economy (Cramer and Goodhand 2002 ). This period of lawlessness was witness to some of the worst human rights abuses and crimes against women, but failed to attract interest beyond Afghanistan-a situation that would be dramatically reversed after the coming to power of the Tali ban.…”

Canada and failed states: Foreign policy under the Martin Government, 2003--2006.

“…These approaches can be directly related to the Weberian perspective and are subscribed to by such authors as Jackson (2000), Ottaway (2003), Cramer andGoodhand (2003), and Ottaway and Mair (2004). They have produced a wide range of arguments ranging from conservative defences of traditional notions of state sovereignty, and adherence to the principle of non-intervention, to 'putting security first' in cases where interventions have already occurred (Andersen, 2005;Ottaway and Mair, 2004).…”

“…can be argued that historically, "territorial sovereignty has been an ideal to which Afghan rulers aspired, but rarely, if ever, achieved in practice" (Cramer, 2003, 144). This inability to maintain sovereign control is directly related to the failure of Afghan rulers to achieve a monopoly on violence (Cramer, 2003). The result of the decentralization of the means of violence in the Afghan state, most recently to regional warlords and Mujahedin factions, has been fragmentation 99 of political authority.…”

“…Considering Afghanistan in an historical context reveals that despite its internationally recognized borders and its vague attributes of sovereignty, the legitimacy of the Afghan state has been in crisis since its emergence as a politically identifiable entity (Barakat, 2002;Cramer, 2003;Saikal, 2005). From its demarcation as a colonial buffer state between the 'Great Powers' of Great Britain and Tsarist Russia (Rubin, 1995) through its strategic Cold War importance to the Mujahedin civil war era and the site of the first intervention of the War on Terror, Afghanistan "has experienced a series of contests over the locus of power, the distributional structure of violence, sources of political legitimacy, and state-building enterprises" (Cramer, 2003, 137).…”