Thomas Barfield - The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History

The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History

THOMAS BARFIELD

A PRINCETON SHORTS selection from Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

When it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the United States sought to do something previous foreign powers had never attempted: to create an Afghani state where none existed. More than a decade on, the new regime in Kabul remains plagued by illegitimacy and ineffectiveness. What happened? As Thomas Barfield shows, history of previous efforts to build governments in Afghanistan does much to explain the difficulties besetting this newest experiment.

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The War for Afghanistan: A Very Brief History comprises chapter 5 from Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, by Thomas Barfield. Copyright 2010 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barfield, Thomas J. (Thomas Jefferson), 1950

Afghanistan: a cultural and political history /

Thomas Barfield.

p. cm. (Princeton studies in Muslim politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. AfghanistanPolitics and government. 2. AfghanistanHistory. 3. AfghanistanSocial conditions. 4. Islam and politicsAfghanistan History.

I. Title.

DS357.5.B37 2010 958.1dc22 2010002082

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Princeton Shorts edition, 2012

eISBN 978-1-400-84314-5

The arrival of the United States in Afghanistan to expel the Taliban marked the fourth time in 160 years that a foreign power put troops on the ground there. But while the British in the nineteenth century invaded with plans to replace the existing regimes, and the Soviets invaded in the twentieth to preserve the one they supported, the United States invaded Afghanistan at a time when the state structure had ceased to function. It would need to create a new state to restore stability in the country. In the past this was done by supporting a client political elite in Kabul that would use foreign money and weapons to centralize power. After a quarter century of warfare, however, such a strategy was no longer as viable. There was no political elite in Kabul able to take the reins of power and get others to accept its authority. In addition, too many people had become politicized, at least to the extent of demanding a share of power in the new regime and greater control over local affairs. Yet perhaps because Afghanistan appeared so backward to outside observers, no thought was given to devising a new type of government for this changed situation. Instead, the international community hurried to restore the highly centralized government first imposed on Afghanistan by Abdur Rahman, albeit one in which the governments legitimacy was to be based on elections rather than dynastic right. The weaknesses of this model in terms of leadership, functionality, and legitimacy became apparent soon after Hamid Karzai took power.

To be successful, the leader of a centralized state needed to remove the existing power holders who were determined to undermine state power or make them subservient. Karzai, for all his admirable characteristics, was seen as passive, weak willed, and prone to compromise. Far from acting as a state builder, Karzai adopted a patrimonial model of the state in which its offices and resources were redistributed on a personal basis to buy the support of existing power holders or play them off against one another. Such tactics encouraged maladministration and corruption, failings that debilitated earlier Afghan governments, and these became worse as time passed. Holding loya jirgas and elections meant little if they could not ensure popular participation in government or make government respond to popular complaints. When the Afghan government proved unable to provide the level of security and economic development that the population expected, it was forced to rely ever more heavily on its international backers to maintain itself. This only highlighted Karzais weakness and undermined his legitimacy in Afghan eyes, particularly when these foreign efforts on his governments behalf proved, as an American idiom has it, a day late and a dollar short. Still, it was not until the Taliban insurgency flared up in 2006 that the dangers of complacency began finally to be recognized, although little was done until the Obama administration reversed U.S. foreign policy to focus on Afghanistan in 2009. That the situation was not worse owed much to the desire of the Afghan people to see normality restored to their countrya goal that the Taliban had little hope of delivering by reintroducing war into a country that had seen too much of it. Whether new policies could bring peace and stability to Afghanistan was the question that now hung in the balance.

Although nothing is more problematic than sorting through recent events, the consequences of which are unknown (or worse, misapprehended), it is revealing to set the establishment of the Karzai government and its development in the context of earlier similar efforts in Afghanistan. The focus in this chapter is therefore less on events per se than on how they illuminate the process of Afghan state rebuilding (in theory and practice), its leadership, and the role that the international community has played in Afghanistan. For the United States, all was new; for the Afghans, much was recycled. How this period would turn out depended on both of them. Keeping in mind the famous response reputedly made by Chinese prime minister Chou En-lai that it was too soon to tell when asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, the consequences of this interaction may become finally apparent only long after all the current actors have left the stage.

THE UNITED STATES IN AFGHANISTAN, 2001

In 2001, the world community sought to restore peace and stability to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. This goal was well short of being achieved as the country approached the end of its first decade in the new century. Depending on how you looked at it, Afghanistan was either once again on the verge of chaos as a failed state or was surprisingly stable given the problems it faced. There were many positives. The presence of international forces and outside aid had ended the civil war. Millions of refugees had rapidly returned from exile in Iran and Pakistan. A political process for creating and ratifying a constitution had run smoothly, allowing the popular election of a national leader, Hamid Karzai, for the first time in Afghan history. On the other hand, the military and financial resources allocated to the country were grossly inadequate to provide security and improve one of the worlds lowest standards of living. The large sums of money pledged for reconstruction at first raised the expectations of ordinary Afghans to unreasonable levels, but as the years passed people had a right to be disappointed by how little was being accomplished at such great expense. Worse, project priorities were set by the funders, not the Afghans, so they rightly questioned the wisdom of building schools and hospitals without teachers and doctors to staff them, or repairing roads with foreign labor while local people remained unemployed. The Taliban tapped into this frustration, but the return of what had been a discredited force was less a measure of their popularity than a response to the failures of the Karzai government, particularly in Pashtun areas. The Taliban could not hope to overthrow the government, yet could reduce its effectiveness through threats of violence, and raise questions about both its legitimacy and staying power. Nevertheless, given Afghan history, what was more surprising was the patience that the Afghans displayed in dealing with outsiders who had little or no understanding of Afghan culture or values. Now the concern was that these outsiders would leave before stability was restored.