Authors: David Isby
“The National Solidarity Program initially was hated, now Afghans and the international community love it,” is the assessment of Minister of the Interior Mohammed Hanif Atmar.
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In the areas where the insurgency has been most intense or where local politics have been especially unresponsive, such as Kandahar, the CDCs have not functioned. This has led to the “suspension of the program in Helmand and Kandahar due to military operations,” said Eshan Zia.
In some areas, post-2001 councils or the NSP’s CDCs are indistinguishable from their traditional predecessors. Many CDCs are basically reconstituted shuras. In others, the changes—most visibly in the requirement to ensure women’s participation—are considerable, and they will deal with issues such as oversight of reconstruction contract awards in a way that was never previously given to local Afghan authority
Afghanistan has had a state justice system since the nineteenth century, but its legitimacy and function were casualties of the 1978–2001 conflicts. The constitution establishes a nine-member Stera Mahkama (Supreme Court), with justices appointed for 10-year terms by the president with approval of the Wolesi Jirga. A system of High Courts, Appeals Courts and separate Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission was also established.
The supreme court, once established, attempted to act as a bastion as Afghan conservatism. But the appointment of an effective attorney general and several new supreme court justices by 2007 limited this political impact. Other courts were, by and large, either not established or were so corrupt that they have had a negative impact. The insurgents and narcotics traffickers targeted those elements of the judicial system that were effective. Alim Hanif, the chief judge of the Central Narcotics Tribunal, was assassinated in September 2008, among others. Law and order suffered as a result; there was no way to try suspects once they were arrested. Many have simply been detained indefinitely in overcrowded prisons, such as Kabul’s Pul-e-Charki, site of many executions by the Afghan Communists and the Soviets in 1978–92. In June 2008, a National Justice Program to address these problems was approved by
the Afghan government, but implementation has fallen short due to lack of resources or, in the opinion of many Afghans, because change would disrupt profitable corruption.
The failure of the Afghan judicial system has been a blessing to local strongmen and warlords. These non-judicial leadership figures, sometimes holding government positions, have access to patronage networks and armed force to back up decisions and have filled the vacuum in many areas. They often resolve disputes to their own enrichment. This was particularly the case in the south post-2001, where those nominally pro-Kabul Pushtuns that replaced Taliban authority often used this opportunity to impoverish tribal rivals. This is greatly resented by many Afghans who have instead looked to traditional institutions of tribal and local justice such as local shuras. One of the appeals of the post-2001 resurgent Taliban is that they claim to offer Afghans a route to traditional Afghan dispute resolution, rather than relying on a largely non-functional state system or rapacious strongmen and warlords.
State Power
The institutions of power—whether at the state, subnational, tribal, or local level—in Afghanistan are the playing pieces in the game of state power in Afghanistan. The nature of state power in Afghanistan has changed over the years. Who controls the state remains the focus of many of Afghanistan’s conflicts, with each group wanting participants in the political process. Yet the concepts and requirements of state power in Afghanistan are, like much else, unique.
In the Golden Age, the generation before 1973, Afghanistan’s national government was limited in its reach and impact and worked with local elites, limiting their power (provincial governors were appointed by Kabul and were usually from outside the province) while offering access to resources and prestige to ensure their cooperation. While the Afghan state was centralized, authority in rural Afghanistan was decentralized. Tribe and qawm were more important in adjudicating disputes than the provincial or district governor or the police, there to protect the government rather than the people. The local Afghans were primarily responsible for their own governance and were only involved with Kabul’s
authority when things went out of control. There were no state-supported ulema to displace the local mullah from his mosque. Conscription for the army was not enforced among the tribes of Paktia and Paktika, and the burden of taxation fell more lightly on Pushtuns, who tended to resent it more. The varied and heterogeneous people of Afghanistan precluded any unitary solution.
Occupying Afghanistan by force had hitherto been impossible. Since the Golden Age was ended by former prime minister Prince Mohammed Daoud’s bloodless coup in 1973 that deposed the former king, seizing state power in Afghanistan has proven to be all too feasible. This seizure may be exerted by putsch, war, or internal penetration.
A military putsch following decades of internal penetration was how the Communist Khalqi military officers seized power in April 1978, killing Daoud and many thousands of Afghanistan’s secular and religious elites. In December 1979, the Soviet invasion took over state power which was placed in the hands of Soviet clients from Afghanistan’s Parcham Communist Party, rivals of the Khalqis. The Pakistan-supported Taliban occupied southern and eastern Afghanistan in 1994–96; in 1996, they were militarily able to oust the Islamic State of Afghanistan government from Kabul. While the Taliban occupied most of Afghanistan, they were never able to militarily prevail in the civil war. Al Qaeda effectively took control of the Taliban through internal penetration—exerting power inside Afghanistan through them—in the years preceding 2001.
The most recent seizure of state power in Afghanistan was with US and coalition support after 9/11 made it possible for the Northern Alliance (based on the Islamic State of Afghanistan that the Taliban had ousted from Kabul in 1996) to defeat the Taliban in 2001. The power of US intervention—made earnest by coalition airpower and the presence of a few hundred special operations troops and intelligence operatives on the ground—was more than sufficient to transform the Northern Alliance into a force capable of offensive action, just as the previous foreign interventions had allowed other Afghan clients to seize power (or, in the case of Al Qaeda, quietly take control of it from them).
Afghanistan’s history of the importance foreign money—and how foreign support can seize state power—suggests a fundamental limitation of
Kabul governments dating back to the nineteenth century.
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Formed as a buffer state rather than to be economically viable, Kabul and its adversaries in the form of the pre-1978 Communists and Islamists, 1978–92 resistance, 1994–2001 Taliban, and 2001 Northern Alliance have normally been dependent on foreign aid. Such aid is not always effective. Pakistan and supporters in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf provided the Taliban with extensive aid in its 1994–2001 civil war, but were unable to achieve battlefield victory or consolidate political success among Afghanistan’s non-Pushtuns. In those years, the Northern Alliance received a much smaller amount of aid from donors such as Iran and India, but was able to hang on militarily, even if its political development remained weak. It was only when the US intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 that the Northern Alliance had access to the resources and patronage that enabled a rapid defeat of the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies. Afghanistan is a country where patron-client relationships are key to power. Ironically, this applies to Afghanistan itself in the international field.
This fundamental limitation of Afghan state power—the reliance on foreign aid and the difficulty of collecting revenues—has applied to the post-2001 Kabul government. Al Qaeda demonstrated in 1996–2001 that in an extremely poor country, those having access to suitcases full of cash have a great deal of power. This power is magnified when there appear to be no other sources for income.
It would have been difficult in the best of conditions to re-assert state power over the Afghan grassroots post-2001. Nothing but grief had come from Kabul since 1978 or—in the case of groups such as the Hazaras—forever. Eshan Zia, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, saw the problems Afghanistan faced in 2009 as reflecting “top-down governance, the absence of a social contract, the gap between the government and people and an absence of civil society. Good development depends on good governance. Development and governance are two sides of the same coin. The challenge is how to connect the people with the government.”
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Nowhere in Afghanistan was there a passive population waiting for the imposition of top-down governance. Rather, the decades of conflict had led to a divided—largely but not exclusively on ethnolinguistic
lines—radicalized and mobilized population, with both secular and religious non-governmental leaders seeking to thieve or at least survive in the post-Taliban Afghanistan. But the failure to reassert authority, when coupled by moves to de-legitimize the local strongmen and warlords who did have this authority, created a vacuum in Afghanistan that was filled (in parts of Pushtun areas in the east and especially the south), on the ground, by the insurgents; in the rural economic sectors, by narcotics cultivation and trafficking; and in Afghan culture, by the idea that the foreign presence is anti-Islamic and putting the future of Afghanistan at risk.
Patron-Client Relations
No single concept is more important to Afghanistan’s internal conflicts than that of patron-client relationships and the patronage networks that these create. Afghanistan’s conflicts are often those of competing patronage-client networks. Foreigners often fail to understand this, and their inability to use patronage relationships leads them to stress centralized organizations on their own models (whether Soviets post-1979 or the US and its partners post-2001). These outside powers tended to neither understand nor distrust their patronage model. The Soviets found that it was unlikely to put and maintain committed pro-Moscow Communists in power. The US and international organizations found that those best able to use patronage often had attitudes, human rights records, or governing practices that were seen as unacceptable and undercutting the goal of creating an effective centralized government. By doing so, both the Soviets and the US found their ability to use Afghan policy tools limited. Afghanistan is a country of strong patronage networks and weak or incapable governmental institutions. Neither the heritage of the small but respected government that the Afghans created during the Golden Age nor the Soviet and US and international organizations’ commitment to a centralized state had effectively altered this by 2008–10.
Patronage has been a traditional organizing principle of life and governance in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The patron-client relationship is not open to everyone. The relationship needs to be legitimate in Islamic and Afghan terms to work (which is why the Soviets proved poor patrons).
Membership in patronage networks is often hereditary and usually patrilineal.
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Patronage is a way to link with others consistent with Afghanistan’s patrilineal, collective, yet hierarchical society. Patronage provides security, jobs, and welfare. In the absence of government acting at the grass-roots level or in the rural communities where most Afghans live, patronage remains important. Leadership figures function as a patron, dispensing jobs and favors on the basis of relationships and political loyalty to create and maintain patronage networks rather than hiring on the basis of competence, ethnic balance, or other considerations.
After 1973, Kabul regimes were unable to effectively use the patronage networks in ways to support and extend the power of the state, as the former king had done. All of the actions the former king had taken to extend Kabul’s control and capability did not last. In 1978–92, the Soviets and their Kabul-based clients were unable to make patronage work in most of Afghanistan. The Communists ended up creating their own patronage networks in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan they controlled. The Pakistan-backed Afghan resistance parties’ internal dynamics also reflected patronage. Pakistan-controlled creation of alternative patronage networks (based in Pakistan and dependent on resources provided by Pakistan) empowered those Afghans acceptable to Pakistan and helped marginalize others. These wartime patronage networks tended to focus on elite rather than mass followers. It was commonplace to see resistance political leaders as well as major resistance field commanders living well while their followers inside Afghanistan, fighting the war, often had nothing; this was consistent with obligations inherent in the patron-client relationship.
Afghan patronage networks are resilient. In some cases, multiple patronage networks can pull in reinforcing or competing ways. A provincial or district governor can be a fearless anti-drug campaigner while benefiting from narcotics traffic elsewhere in Afghanistan. Loyal Afghan police or soldiers can also supply ammunition to the insurgents.
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Patronage networks hedged their bets throughout 1978–2001, often having members on both sides of each conflict just as resilient Afghans, elites and grassroots alike, that have not gone into exile have adapted to each change in government, wearing Western suits in the Golden Age,
growing beards under the Taliban, working hard post-2001 but keeping in touch with the insurgents. In the eyes of many Afghans, this is less a contradiction than a survival strategy.
But not all patronage networks have remained effective over time. The Taliban effectively used patronage networks in their 1992–96 rise to power. Such networks proved more effective than the nominal institutions and links of state power that were in the hands of the Islamic republic of Afghanistan in Kabul. Yet the Taliban leadership’s legitimacy was undercut when Mullah Omar stopped holding darbars and they effectively limited Afghans’ former direct access for petitions and dispute settlement that they had practiced before their 1996 move to Kabul.