Building a New Afghanistan

255 Pages·2007·2.13 MB·English

by  Robert I. Rotberg

buIldIng a new
afghanIstan
RobeRt I. RotbeRg Editor
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building a new
afghanistan
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Other Brookings/World Peace Foundation Books
by Robert I. Rotberg
Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa
(2005)
State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror
(2003)
Ending Autocracy, Enabling Democracy:
The Tribulations of Southern Africa 1960–2000
(2002)
Peacekeeping and Peace Enforcement in Africa:
Methods of Conflict Prevention
(2000)
Creating Peace in Sri Lanka:Civil War and Reconciliation
(1999)
Burma:Prospects for a Democratic Future
(1998)
War and Peace in Southern Africa:Crimes, Drugs, Armies, Trade
(1998)
Haiti Renewed:Political and Economic Prospects
(1997)
Vigilance and Vengeance:
NGOs Preventing Ethnic Conflict in Divided Societies
(1996)
From Massacres to Genocide:
The Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises
(1996)
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building a new
afghanistan
robert i. rotberg
Editor
world peace foundation
Cambridge, Massachusetts
brookings institution press
Washington, D.C.
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Copyright © 2007
world peace foundation
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.
Building a New Afghanistanmay be ordered from:
Brookings Institution Press, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036
Telephone: [phone] or 410/516-6956
E-mail: [email protected]; www.brookings.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Building a new Afghanistan / Robert I. Rotberg, editor.
p. cm.
Summary: “Discusses what Afghanistan and the international community should do to
resolve dangerous issues and bolster a still fragile state. Offers a blueprint for moving toward
greater democracy and prosperity while arguing that the future success of state building in
Afghanistan depends on diversifying the economy and enhancing its economic status”—
Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8157-7568-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8157-7568-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8157-7569-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8157-7569-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Nation-building—Afghanistan. 2. Postwar reconstruction—Afghanistan. 3.
Democratization—Afghanistan. 4. National security—Afganistan. 5. Afghanistan—
Politics and government—2001– I. Rotberg, Robert I.
DS371.4.B83 2007
958.104'7—dc22 2006038563
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials: ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Typeset in Adobe Garamond
Composition by R. Lynn Rivenbark
Macon, Georgia
Printed by R. R. Donnelley
Harrisonburg, Virginia
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Contents
Preface vii
Map of Afghanistan xii
1 Renewing the Afghan State 1
Robert I. Rotberg
2 The Legacy of War and the Challenge
of Peace Building 22
Ali A. Jalali
3 Strengthening Security in Contemporary Afghanistan:
Coping with the Taliban 56
Hekmat Karzai
4 Neither Stable nor Stationary:
The Politics of Transition and Recovery 82
Paula R. Newberg
5 Rebuilding a Robust Afghan Economy 98
Alastair J. McKechnie
6 Revitalizing Afghanistan’s Economy:
The Government’s Plan 134
Hedayat Amin Arsala
v
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vi Contents
7 Regional Development in Greater Central Asia:
The Afghan Pivot 155
S. Frederick Starr
8 Responding to the Opium Dilemma 178
Cindy Fazey
9 The Place of the Province in Afghanistan’s
Subnational Governance 205
Sarah Lister and Hamish Nixon
Contributors 227
Index 231
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Preface
A
fghanistan has made a remarkable recovery in five years
from a war-convulsed, rubble-strewn, and shell-shocked
postconflict trauma case to an economically active emerging
democracy. Afghans have voted for president, elected a parlia-
ment, and embraced a new constitution. Parliament has flexed
its muscles, too, refusing to be intimidated by executive pre-
rogatives. Young women are in school, and older women hold
national office. Millions of refugees have come home and been
resettled. In 2005 double-digit economic growth occurred, and
2006 should show similar results. Roads have been restored and
new ones reconstructed. Cell phones are in almost every urban
dweller’s hand. Kabul, the capital, displays unavoidable sym-
bols of progress: skyscrapers, housing shortages, soaring rentals,
and traffic jams. Overall, Afghanistan is no longer battered, fet-
tered, and regimented.
Nevertheless, as the argument throughout this book demon-
strates, the Afghan state is not yet fully rebuilt. The necessary in-
stitutional scaffolding is in place, but the institutions themselves
are still very embryonic. The struggle between the new state,
with its democratic ethos and its participatory framework of
vii
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viii Preface
governing, and the authority structure of the old Afghanistan, with its fiefs
and regional and local sources of strength, persists and may not be resolved
for a decade or more. The opium trade, narcotrafficking, and rampant cor-
ruption are pervasive. That unholy triad motivates and fuels traditional
Afghan bases of power and undermines the writ of the central government.
Similarly, it undercuts the moral and fiscal foundations of the new state at
a decisive time when the central government struggles to deliver improved
services—political goods—to the nation for which and to which it is
responsible.
These concerns would be sufficient to overwhelm any new state. But the
undoubted progress in so many Afghan spheres in 2006 was dramatically
threatened by worsened security. No state can build well when it is under
siege from within, and in 2006 that was the Afghan condition. State build-
ing, much less the larger, long-term project of nation building, can hardly
succeed if assaults on the very architecture of the developing state grow
more frequent and more destabilizing. Throughout 2006 several thousand
regrouped and rearmed Taliban forces were battling NATO legions in
southern Afghanistan, and provinces in the eastern part of the country also
harbored militant insurgents being hunted by American detachments. If
the Taliban cannot be contained and the zones of instability reduced
severely by 2007, building the Afghan state could lose momentum and the
project to introduce democracy fail. Those and other overriding dilemmas,
and their fundamental perils, are examined in detail in this book. Security,
institution building, growth and prosperity, and the realities of the drug
economy are all analyzed critically by experienced and expert Afghan,
American, and British contributors.
This book is the latest in a series of collective studies of developing
world nations under severe stress prepared by the Program on Intrastate
Conflict and Conflict Resolution of the Kennedy School of Government’s
Belfer Center, Harvard University, and the World Peace Foundation. Pre-
vious books in this series focused on Burma, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, the Sudan,
and Zimbabwe, and paralleled the joint efforts of the Program and the
Foundation to understand such phenomena as nation-state weakness, fail-
ure, and collapse; the functioning of repressive nation-states; combating
terrorism in the Horn of Africa; and the nature of good and bad gover-
nance in nation-states.1Each book and report attempted, as this book does,
to offer policy diagnoses founded on a clear and realistic appraisal of the
key internal and international obstacles to peace and peaceful development
within the nation being dispassionately examined.
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Preface ix
This book emerged from discussions that began, for nearly all of its con-
tributors, at a three-day meeting held at the Kennedy School of Govern-
ment in late 2005. Many senior Afghan officials, in addition to those who
have written chapters for this book, participated in those deliberations, as
did officials from European and American governments, representatives of
nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and scholars. Sham Bathija’s
initiative inspired the meeting and persuaded many of his Afghan col-
leagues to attend. Elisa Pepe, then program manager of the Program on
Intrastate Conflict, brought them from near and far with unusual skill.
The organizers are also grateful to everyone who took part so vigorously in
those discussions, and to Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center of
Science and International Affairs, Kennedy School, and Philip Khoury,
chair, and to the Trustees of the World Peace Foundation, for their support
of the meeting and of the subsequent writing of this volume, the editing of
which was skillfully accomplished by Deborah L. West.
Robert I. Rotberg
January 2007
Note
1. Burma: Prospects for a Democratic Future(1998), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil
War and Reconciliation(1999), Zimbabwe Before and After the Elections: A Concerned Assess-
ment (2001), State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror(2003), Crafting the New
Nigeria: Confronting the Challenges (2004), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences
(2004), The Good Governance Problem: Doing Something About It(2004), Battling Terror-
ism in the Horn of Africa (2005), Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue
Nations(forthcoming, 2007).