Daily Times

There are three categories of states: fragile states, crisis states and failed states. Fragile states are susceptible to crises in one or more of their systems. Crisis states are under acute stress where institutions are unable to manage conflicts and economic crisis, and failed states are considered to be collapsed states at all levels — states that cannot perform their basic duties with no control on their territory. Failed states, like Afghanistan, are tense, deeply conflicted and contested by warring factions. Afghanistan can be fixed into the third category of states.

History tells us that Afghanistan has never been a strong and organised state. Throughout its history, state building efforts were doomed to failure. The state also has no history of self-sustained development; it never depended on revenues generated by its own ownership class and remained a rentier and a tribal state having conflicting legal, cultural and political systems.

Revenues retrieved from criminal trade and a ‘container-ised’ market economy fostered several ethnic and sectarian non-state actors. Later on, these groups challenged the authority of the state, defeated the state authority and established their own states within the state. The present government comprises a wide range of formal bodies at the presidential, municipal, community, provincial, district and parliamentary level, but all these bodies have been ineffective due to their conflicting roles and duties. One of the key compulsions to strengthen the present administrative system is the absence of a professional policy network regarding the institutional structure. Moreover, weaknesses in the human resource system, an absence of functioning systems and a reliable national critical infrastructure caused stagnation.

Administratively speaking, the present Afghan government has divided the country into 34 provinces, 364 districts and 40,000 villages, but the administrators of most of the provinces and districts have their own designed administration that does not accept instructions from the central government. In districts and municipalities, no election has yet been held for formal government offices at village level. Many of these villages are instead self-governed by a combination of village elders and local councils who act as intermediaries between the communities and governors.

The present way of state building at sub-national level has been characterised by the lack of a sub-national governance policy. Some experts understand state building as an effort to increase the value of state actors in governance systems and to shift governance towards government. This will give the government strength to reform institutions, but the case is different here; government has lost control of most parts of the country. A majority of the administrators are illiterate and have no basic knowledge of governance. The low level of Afghan bureaucratic capacity is being addressed in different ways but those are mostly misguided. There are more than 500,000 government employees in Afghanistan, but a majority of them have no basic or formal education. As there is no civil services academy in the country, key appointments are being made on political bases. In 2011, the government decided to implement a merit-based policy for senior posts, but internal and external power players sternly opposed it. The state is now ultimately shrunken, defeated and in retreat due to a tenacious resistance from non-state actors.

The continuing insecurity, ethnic and sectarian violence and regionalism created more challenges for the state building process. Despite 11 years of foreign military involvement, the state building efforts remained misguided. Pashtuns have been forcefully evicted from their houses; killed, tortured and expelled from northern Afghanistan, and Hazaras have been recently forcefully evicted from their houses and land in the south. The US and NATO missions fuelled more insurgencies, alienation, sectarian and communal conflicts.

The security arena has partly been dominated by warlords, war criminals and the former so-called mujahideen leaders. From president to defence minister and from the mujahideen to Taliban leaders, all maintain private criminal militias and challenge the authority of the state. They created states within the state, challenged the existence of the Afghan National Army and police, and promoted the narco-trade across the country. Every leader controls a province where he is the sole owner of revenue and his power cannot be challenged. Some provinces remain largely autonomous of the central government and efforts to disarm private criminal militias have become impossible. Last month, Governor of Paktika, Juma Khan complained against the discriminatory policies of the central government. A lack of loyalties to the central government by some provincial governors and ethno-sectarian non-state actors has left a significant impact on all state institutions. The above-mentioned alleged war criminals and the present state-sponsored mafia groups have mostly been loyal to regional power brokers, the drug mafia, terrorist bands and sectarian forces since 1992.

Afghan society had to collect its shattered pieces during the last three decades without the presence of a legitimate and functioning state, but internal migration, power games and foreign interference washed away its dreams. Civil war has destroyed the state, its institutions, and devastated the economy. The mujahideen in the 1990s did not discriminate between innocents and criminals in the course of fighting in Kabul. From 1992 to 1994, they killed over 60,000 men, women and children in Kabul alone. The rise of the Taliban in 1994 kept the war going and they started their business with a new strategy of killing, abduction and humiliation of the innocent citizens of the country. The criminal structure that fuelled the civil war is still in place.

War criminals and factional leaders remain in positions of power within society and continue to maintain criminal militias. A source from the Afghan defence ministry informed this scribe that the leaders of the Northern Alliance in and outside the government have begun to stockpile arms and take other steps to prepare for a future civil war in Afghanistan. Some experts understand that after the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, the US-backed regime will collapse and the civil war might be worse than that in the 1990s when the Soviet army left the country. Kabul will be dominated by violence and torture. The Taliban will return with renewed vengeance.

The writer is author of Policing in Multicultural Britain, can be reached at zai.musakhan222@gmail.com