Had I written an essay on the next ten years of the Afghan state in 1998, I would have proposed several scenarios. Notably lacking would have been the one that actually occurred. The events since then have made accurate prediction even more difficult. The history of Afghanistan over the last thirty-five years has been that of the end of the country’s status as an isolated buffer state. Rather than separating conflicts, Afghanistan now links them. Ten years ago Afghanistan, besides having a low-intensity conflict between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, was also the scene of India-Pakistan and Sunni-Shia conflicts and, to a certain extent U.S.-Iranian-Russian competition over pipeline routes. All of those conflicts have only become more intense. In addition, today Afghanistan is the theater for the War on Terror, the ill-defined confrontation between the United States and global Islamist movements; the conflict between NATO and Russia; the confrontation between the United States and Iran; the struggle within Pakistan over that country’s future; and a transnational insurgency spanning Afghanistan and Pakistan and linked to al-Qaeda. Finally, there is a higher level of mobilization around the ethnic, tribal, regional, and sectarian cleavages that have always marked Afghan politics.
If it seems unlikely that Afghanistan can return to its days of isolation, it is because all of the elements that enabled Afghanistan to survive in relative stability for nearly a century have disappeared: a population largely isolated in remote valleys with few links to the outside world, some small arms, and no political organization on a scale that could challenge the state; a government subsidized by great powers and accepted as legitimate by all neighbors; and an economy largely based on subsistence farming, pastoralism, limited pockets of commercial agriculture, and trade.
The territory of today’s Afghanistan has never sustained a state without international aid to the security forces, and it has repeatedly collapsed in the face of invasion or contestation. The stability of such a state would require, at a minimum, a level of income and legitimacy sufficient to recruit and maintain security forces adequate to defend from the level of threat faced by the state. In the current environment, that is a tall order indeed.
The territory of today’s Afghanistan more or less corresponds to the Eastern Iranian world (Khurasan), which remained Sunni despite the conquest of Persia by the Shia Safavids in the sixteenth century. This area (Kabul and its dependencies) became a kingdom of the Afghans (Pashtuns) only from the eighteenth century, when both the Ghilzai and Durrani Pashtun tribal confederations sought to establish empires as the Safavids collapsed. The empire founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani survived by raiding Punjab, Kashmir, and Iran, and dividing the taxes (booty) among the tribes.
The arrival of Russian and British imperialism on the Asian land mass confined Afghan rule to a demarcated territory, which came to be known as the state of “Afghanistan.” In the nineteenth century that state underwent a series of upheavals and invasions until finally becoming stable as a buffer state after the Treaty of Gandamak (1879). The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 recognized Afghanistan’s new borders and its status as a buffer state under British suzerainty enjoying full domestic autonomy. From 1879 to 1919, British India controlled Afghanistan’s foreign relations and provided a yearly subsidy in cash and weapons to enable the emir to control the territory. The amir established a centralized administration to ensure security and sharia courts for justice, while leaving local governance and dispute settlement to tribes and communities.
The key elements of stability were
• Agreement among the great powers (which were also regional powers) not to interfere inside Afghanistan or use Afghanistan’s weakness against one another, leading to a low degree of international contestation of the Afghan state and the separation of rival powers by a neutralized Afghanistan;
• A disarmed, demobilized, and isolated population without large-scale political organization and largely engaged in subsistence activities, resulting in a low degree of domestic demand on and contestation of the state; and
• An international subsidy exclusively to the state to enable it to finance security forces adequate to the low-threat environment.
The Anglo-Russian Convention expired in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919), in which Afghanistan won full independence. Nonetheless, an informal agreement on nonintervention continued until 1978. The British continued to support the army through the end of the British Empire in India; when the United States, allied with Pakistan, refused to take up where the British left, Kabul turned to Moscow. As the educational system and road network expanded, and as capital flowed into the Persian Gulf after the 1973 oil embargo, more Afghans left their villages, entered the cash economy, and became politicized. The state financed its development programs through foreign aid and hence did not need to confront the rural society over the legitimacy of revenue extraction. The rural areas remained untaxed and largely self-regulating, so long as they posed no threat.
The coups in 1973 and 1978 and then the Soviet invasion in 1979 destroyed what remained of international agreement over Afghanistan, and the country became a theater of the Cold War, which overshadowed the regional and sectarian conflicts. When the Soviet Union dissolved and the United States disengaged, they left behind an Afghanistan that had become a cockpit for regional competition, a shattered state with no functioning security forces or civilian political process, a highly mobilized and armed population increasingly dependent on international organizations and cash for livelihood (including through the drug trade), and a multiplicity of armed groups linked transnationally to both state and nonstate patrons.
In addition to these general conditions, Afghanistan’s relations with Pakistan had also led to the blurring of the lines between the two states. Since Pakistan’s independence, the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) had been a buffer between Afghanistan and the core of Pakistan. Now FATA was settled with miliions of Afghan refugees, and FATA tribes had been mobilized to fight in Afghanistan’s “civil war.” The Pakistani directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), at first with U.S. and Saudi support, had turned the border region into a militarized platform for asymmetrical power projection using jihadi groups in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and beyond. FATA and Karachi also constituted markets and transit points for goods smuggled into and out of Afghanistan. In many respects the countries came to intermingle and overlap rather than border on each other like two states.
The events of September 11, 2001, illustrated that the Afghan state was both weak and no longer integrated into the global community and that its territory now included the center for a highly organized global network of political violence. The U.S. response was to destroy the weak government of the Taliban and call on the United Nations to try to resurrect the Afghan state. But resurrecting the previous Afghan state under current conditions may be doomed to failure.
The relationship of Afghanistan to the international system has changed decisively since 1978 and cannot be restored to its former status. After September 11, it appeared that a grand coalition had formed to support the new government and that, just as in the early twentieth century, great powers might reach an agreement to support the government and to not compete in Afghanistan. But this time, virtually every major international and regional actor decided to become involved in Afghanistan with no restraining rules of the game. The result has been the importation into Afghanistan of innumerable other conflicts, making the original one harder to solve.
The following international issues and actors are now linked to the conflict in Afghanistan:
• The War on Terror: as defined by the Bush Administration, it includes as a goal not only the destruction of al-Qaeda but also the destruction of organizations and states that harbor or support “terrorists,” including both the Taliban and Iran (not Pakistan, for some reason). Although the War on Terror is not the sole policy framework for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, it constrains others.
• The India-Pakistan conflict: Pakistan seeks to exclude Indian influence from Afghanistan, which it considers part of its security perimeter; India considers a presence in Afghanistan important to gain a back window into Pakistan. Both countries’ intelligence agencies are active there.
• Sunni-Shia conflict: Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing for leadership of the Islamic world; both have proxies in Afghanistan.
• U.S. relations with its NATO allies: NATO allies who opposed the war in Iraq agreed to send troops to Afghanistan to reduce strain on their relations with Washington. Now that same commitment is further straining relations.
• Russia’s relations with the United States and NATO: Russia supports the war and sanctions against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but one of its principal security preoccupations is the expansion of NATO to the former Soviet space and its borders. Russia does not want to see a permanent NATO deployment in Afghanistan or U.S. bases in Central Asia.
• U.S.-Iran conflict: the United States and Iran worked together to overthrow the Taliban and bring the current Afghan government to power, but the Bush Administration rebuffed Iran’s overtures and has placed limits on the relations Afghanistan has with Iran. Iran has also begun providing limited support to insurgents to warn of the consequences of attacking Iran.
This is only a list of the most evident problems and stakeholders, the sheer number of which is prohibitively high to reach an agreement.
The Afghan population is no longer isolated and quiescent. Every group in the population has been mobilized militarily and politically and enjoys some patronage from foreign powers or movements. Every village has been penetrated by armed militants competing to mobilize young men. Afghans have been heavily politicized and listen incessantly to international news. One of the results of this has been the increased recruitment of Afghans into national ethnic or ideological politics.
At least half of Afghans have suffered war displacement and perhaps a third traveled abroad (largely as refugees), exposing them to life outside the extended family. The subsistence economy has been largely destroyed, and Afghanistan relies on imports of food and exports of agro-based commodities—opium and heroin. Afghans are participating in global labor, commodity, and capital markets and in global politics and warfare, all at the same time. The expansion of cash transactions has empowered ideological groups, including the ulama and islamists, who rely on cash contributions for power rather than solely on ownership of productive assets. Without a cash economy that can be taxed by an armed organization, the Taliban regime, composed of clerics who do not directly control productive assets, would not have been possible.
As community coping mechanisms have become less reliable and cash more necessary, families and communities are increasingly looking to the state for livelihood and public services, including education, the demand for which has mushroomed. Afghanistan has become the most rapidly urbanizing society in Asia, with resultant escalating demands for public services and political participation. The demands placed on the state are far greater and the task of legitimation far more demanding than at any time in the past. Hence, the type of weak state that encapsulated a quiescent Afghan society is no longer feasible or effective; yet the state is still structured and resourced to maintain control, not provide services.
Under these conditions of increasing external and transnational threat, plus mounting domestic demand, stability would require a state and security forces with substantially more resources and capabilities than at any time in the past. Currently the Afghan government extracts about 7 percent of licit GDP in revenues (or $960 million), which is not sufficient even to cover its recurrent nondefense costs. The entire defense and development budget is paid for by foreign assistance; an even greater amount is spent directly by aid donors outside of the government budget for projects of every description. As the estimated size of the security forces Afghanistan needs continues to rise, there is no realistic scenario under which the country would be able to finance even the recurrent costs of security.
The Afghan state is now well advanced along an unsustainable trajectory. Its army and, increasingly, its police depend for their salaries and equipment on supplemental appropriations of the U.S. Congress, which cannot be projected from year to year. There was no supplemental appropriation in 2006. A massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar or a prolongation of the economic crisis in the United States could eventually prevent the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) from being paid. Furthermore, the increase in expenditures by aid organizations outside the Afghan government budget and the disbursement of huge amounts of cash through the dozens of uncoordinated financial systems used by various aid agencies generates a tsunami of corruption, which both undermines the legitimacy of the system and prevents the assistance from achieving its objectives.
Of the three trends—the rise in conflict among powers involved in Afghanistan, the increasing mobilization of the population, and the proliferation of funding channels outside the government—the one that is most clearly irreversible is the increase in mobilization, politicization, and urbanization of the Afghan population. One may add to that the rapid increase in education without any comparable increase in the amount of licit employment, and all the ingredients are present for a chronic social crisis, expressed in ethnic and Islamic politics, violence, criminalized economic activity, and increased efforts to emigrate in search of work.
It is difficult but not impossible to imagine the mounting external tensions becoming less threatening. If, for instance, the coalition apprehended or killed the top leadership of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, leading to an end of the pressure of the War on Terror doctrine on operations, a political settlement with elements of the insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan might become more feasible. U.S.-Iran relations might warm slightly above their current frozen state. It is more difficult to imagine a deescalation of the India-Pakistan conflict, but if elected government does start to take hold in Pakistan, and civilians with a primarily economic program remain in power, we might see a shift in emphasis in India-Pakistan relations from confrontation to competition and even economic cooperation.
Such trends might make it possible to reduce the size and sophistication of security forces and thus move in a direction toward sustainability. The reduction of the level of threat would also favor investment and economic activity, which is strongly dependent on security in a landlocked country. Such growth might make it possible to increase the tax base as well as the government’s share of GDP to pay for public services.
These do not however, seem to be the most likely trends. Although the next administration may seek less confrontational and militaristic ways of coping with the threat from global terrorism and competition with Iran, the persistence of al-Qaeda in the Pakistan border region and, covertly, in cities could continue and create pressure for broader intervention in Pakistan, destabilizing that country and its neighbor further. The loss of legitimacy to rule by the Pakistan Army combined with the continued incapacity and corruption of civilian political parties could lead to a prolonged crisis or collapse of governance, with more space being occupied by armed extremist groups also active in Afghanistan. Any number of unpredictable events—another large attack by al-Qaeda in the United States, a riot in Kabul or another Afghan city, the collapse of a regional center (most likely Kandahar) under Taliban assault—could precipitate a rapid crisis, although all the capabilities put in place in the past several years might prove themselves able to surmount even such a crisis.
The most important lines of policy to cope with these threats include:
• Increasing regional diplomacy and economic cooperation to lower regional tensions.
• Expanding higher education and employment opportunities to absorb more of the educated youth.
• Developing a plan for stable financing of Afghan security forces by putting them on a recurrent budget (Afghan or U.S.) or creating a trust fund.
• Phasing out the most intrusive and kinetic counterterrorism parts of the international mission.
• Strengthening the foundational legitimacy of the government through elections and measures against corruption.
If Afghanistan is to meet even a fraction of the new demands placed on it, the state will have to be restructured to provide for more accountability to citizens and communities, but this cannot happen in isolation. As long as the existence of the state is under threat from a combination of domestic and international challenges, rulers will resist decentralization of authority. The state is simply too weak to manage decentralized service provision, which would require some kind of budgetary process in each province and perhaps district, even if it were based solely on grants from the central government. There is little organizational capacity to carry out the required monitoring and implementation. A few provinces (Herat, for instance) could probably do a better job of managing their own finances and service provision than the central government, but such an arrangement would appear to threaten the control of the central government and its ability to redistribute resources among provinces and regions. This redistributionary function is highly political: non-Pashtuns charge that the state has historically allocated resources from north Afghanistan to Pashtuns and southern Afghanistan. There is some, though inadequate, evidence for this claim, but certainly all members of ethnic groups have not been affected equally, and the beneficiaries of government patronage have been much smaller groups than entire ethnicities. Nonetheless, the seemingly technical issue of decentralization of service provision is closely related to the most potentially divisive issue, namely the relation of the state to different ethnic groups and in particular to Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns.
Over the past few years, the government has experimented with methods to reach communities through national programs that bypass the dysfunctional administrative structure. The best known example is the National Solidarity Program, which provides communities with block grants of up to $20,000 for development projects chosen and implemented by elected Community Development Councils (CDCs). Financial management and transparency is ensured by implementing the funding through international agencies and NGOs, while leaving actual implementation in the hands of the communities.
The program appears to work well in delivering projects to the village level, but it has not sparked any major institutional change. The CDCs exist in parallel to the historically rooted local institutions (for example, village shura, or local councils, meeting in the mosque) and have not displaced them. Afghans understand that the NSP depends on yearly aid appropriations of foreign donors and is not sustainable. Therefore, they treat it as a windfall rather than as an institution. Attempts by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) to have the CDCs recognized as representatives of communities within the administrative structure have met stiff resistance. Other national programs implemented in the same way will meet the same response as long as they are dependent on foreign aid and are not integrated into the communities’ permanent institutional structure. Nor will any central government be willing to delegate genuine authority over mobilization and use of resources to localities as long as the state remains vulnerable to subversion by much larger foreign countries.
There is no foreseeable trajectory under which the Afghan state will become a self-sustaining member of the international community at peace with its neighbors in the coming ten years. It might be possible, however, to approach rather than recede from that goal. The highest priority should be to reduce the level of threat through both regional diplomacy and domestic reconciliation with insurgents who renounce al-Qaeda. By reducing threats, the level of security forces needed will be more manageable, and it will be more practical to call on Afghanistan’s neighbors to provide the economic cooperation and integration needed to turn an isolated former buffer state into a connector state in a rapidly growing Asia. Once Afghanistan no longer fears for its own disintegration, it will become more feasible for the state to experiment with forms of local governance and decentralization of the administration in order to provide the public services that the Afghan people are now demanding.