Running Out of Time for Afghan Governance Reform

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Snapshot

Leaving Afghan Development in the Wrong Hands

Matiullah Amin

The international community has hung virtually all its hopes for development in postwar Afghanistan on the National Solidarity Program, which tasks citizens with carrying out rural projects. But by depending on unskilled populations, the program dooms itself to inefficiency. And its short project timelines mean that there is hardly any time to transfer know-how to locals.

Mullah Naqibullah, a commander and politician from Kandahar, circa 2002. (Courtesy Reuters)

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.

The range of achievable outcomes in Afghanistan is narrowing as Western effort wanes. The ambitious goals of the Bush administration were probably never attainable and are certainly not now. But even minimally democratic accountability may soon be beyond reach. If so, some form of delimited warlord rule will be the outer bound of the achievable. If a new set of bargains between Kabul and provincial powerbrokers can be reached and enforced, such a system could still be tolerable in the limited sense that it could preserve the United States' essential security interests in Afghanistan. But it would be far from ideal. And even this option could slip away if some critical reforms are not instituted soon.

Many Americans see Afghanistan as hopeless and ungovernable -- a chronically violent "graveyard of empires." It is not. For most of the twentieth century, Afghanistan was internally stable and at peace with its neighbors -- in fact, it was a tourist destination for backpacking Westerners in the 1960s. And the Taliban of today are hardly the invincible warriors or authentic vox populi some Westerners assume. A series of coalition offensives since 2009 has driven the Taliban from most of their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar. Taliban counterattacks this summer failed to retake any of the districts they lost. And recent polls show declining Afghan public support for an already unpopular insurgency, as the Taliban have responded to military setbacks by striking civilian targets instead. Afghans know what Taliban government looks like, and in multiple polls over years of war, they have consistently rejected it. While the current government's corruption is unpopular, too, the coalition enjoys the great advantage of an enemy whose ideology is unwelcome. Of course, retaking Taliban-controlled areas is time consuming and costly; the Taliban remain a significant force in the east, and their assassination campaign continues. But in areas where coalition forces have deployed enough strength to protect Afghans from Taliban violence and stayed long enough to build public confidence, it is now clear that government control can be restored and maintained.

So Afghanistan is not hopeless. But neither will it reach nirvana anytime soon. In practical terms, there are now five plausible midterm futures for Afghanistan.

One involves a still democratic but weaker and less centralized Afghan government. The original blueprint for a post-2001 Afghanistan envisioned a strong, modern, centralized, bureaucratic state built around a powerful presidency. Such a system would have had important advantages, including limiting the danger of warlordism and renewed civil war, facilitating decisive action against terrorists, and empowering a modernizing center over a more conservative rural periphery with less interest in Western human rights agendas.

But that system was a poor fit for Afghanistan, where legitimacy is mostly local and personal, rather than national and institutional, and illiberal values remain influential. The mismatch promoted official corruption, weakened popular support for the state, and enabled a still unpopular Taliban to make headway.

The most attractive practical alternative available today would be a weaker, less centralized state with power shared across a wider range of stakeholders and with a larger role for local and tribal authorities. This decentralized system would probably be less decisive, less technocratic, more open to conservative rural influences, and probably more beholden to the country's neighbors. But it would also offer a closer match to the real distribution of political power in Afghanistan, so could be realized with less heroic exertions. And it would retain a fundamentally democratic system of government.

A less attractive possibility would be a modified version of warlord rule. In this scenario, real authority would reside chiefly with subnational powerbrokers and their associated patronage networks in a form of predatory rentier governance. As they increasingly do today, these networks would exert control by extracting cash from the governed and using it to buy off courts, police, officials, and prominent businesses. If allowed to expand unchecked, this system is unsustainable. It would eventually corrupt the army and build broader tolerance for an insurgency that, although unpopular, is nevertheless seen as honest.