Afghanistan (34 page)

The culture of corruption has enabled the (old) patronage system to influence and, in some places, control the (new) universal franchise. The importance of local leaders among a population that has been mobilized along ethnolinguistic, tribal, or local (rather than national) lines has helped make it possible for a particular patron to be paid for delivering the bloc votes of his clients. Much of the vote-buying is aimed at meeting the needs of the patronage system, especially in light of the particular ideological and political edge voting has acquired in recent years. Competing claims of family, clan, ethnicity, and politics divert the minimal flow of resources. The pre-1978 government had at least a competent and devoted civil service in both Kabul and provincial capitals. Some of these men and their successors have throughout the years, accommodating Communists, mujahideen and Taliban alike, tried to maintain order and at least a modicum of the rule of law. Neither Peshawar nor Kabul cared much about competence in 1978–92, but rather promoted those with proven political loyalty and familial or patronage ties. There were a considerable number of competent and loyal Afghans in both systems, but this was in spite of, rather than because of, the incentives. Only inside Afghanistan did the harsh Darwinism of waging an insurgency and the need to forge coalitions with other Afghans bring forth a generation of more effective leaders in those years, especially those, such as Ahmad Shah Massoud, who escaped control from Pakistan.

In 2008–10, efforts were under way to combat official corruption inside
Afghanistan.
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The High Office of Oversight was established in June 2008. Each of Afghanistan’s cabinet ministries is forming inspectors-general offices. Transparency was considered a condition for increased Afghan government involvement in receiving and spending aid funds. The US and other donors had deployed experienced personnel to train Afghans to combat corruption. In 2009, one of these estimated that it would take ten years of hard work for this to become effective.

But all corruption in Afghanistan is not equal. The West has also insisted that Afghans meet their standards, but have demonstrated little capability or investment in making better the lives of individual Afghans, undercutting their claim to be protecting them from corrupt officials and police or rapacious warlords. As a result, just about every Afghan leader who depends on homegrown support rather than outsiders for authority is considered corrupt by many foreigners. In reality, as with narcotics, targeting every Afghan who benefits from the activity, in the absence of an economically viable legal alternative, is not a viable option.

Corruption has become so pervasive that even a strenuous effort—let alone a few prosecutions to please the foreigners—will not suffice. Just as narcotics cannot be effectively addressed without dealing with the economic and social context of rural Afghanistan in which it exists, combating corruption requires a broad-spectrum approach. In the long term, only a reformed, decentralized government that will involve Afghans at the grassroots level as well as Kabul and a functioning national private-sector economy that allows Afghans to earn and retain wealth legally can displace corruption. Even so, corruption can mutate as fast as any virus and is prevalent in many developing countries much more stable and peaceful than Afghanistan. If corruption is to be held in check, the constraints of pre-1978 Afghanistan, of a concern for keeping face, family honor, and a reputation for fair dealing, needs to be encouraged, like much else, to reappear.

Modernization

In Afghanistan, political and social competition has often been between the different strains of urban, modernizing, and centralizing forces, both secular and religious, and how different vectors were diametrically
opposed by other rural, religious, and traditional forces, aiming to secure the status quo or responding to change by a return to tradition. Foreign supporters have generally been proponents of modernization, and so aid money has financed many of the recent changes and development, as it has those attempted over the preceding century. But evidence, both recent and historical, suggests that for all the diverse peoples of Afghanistan, modernization proves problematic unless they were directly involved and invested in the process. Much of the actions of international involvement in Afghanistan has led to “top-down” or “trickle-down” modernization that ignores this lesson and, as of yet, has not involved or benefited the ordinary Afghan to an appropriate degree.

The failure of modernization that is imposed from the top down stems from its inability to have the Afghan grassroots in the process to both participate in and take responsibility for change and what it achieves (jobs, infrastructure, etc.). Top-down modernization has often been resisted, and even when its implementation by Kabul governments does not have disastrous results, it leads to unused schools, built by foreign aid, that are used as storehouses or, especially in the south and the east, burned by the Taliban.

Those seeking to change Afghanistan often rely on foreign patronage. King Abdur Rahman created Afghanistan as a state with British support in the late nineteenth century. King Zahir experimented with democracy in the Golden Age, paid for by both sides in the Cold War. The Khalqis attempted to remake the country in a neo-Stalinist model in 1978–79 with Soviet support. The Islamist HiH has relied on Pakistani support from the 1970s to the present. The rise of the fundamentalist Taliban—no modernizers but bent on radically changing Afghanistan—was only made possible by the Pakistani military, money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and eventually Al Qaeda support.

Afghans are deeply conservative by nature, especially the rural populations of all ethnicities. Under King Zahir, Afghanistan’s modernization policy was supposed to support Kabul’s domestic and foreign policies while social and economic modernization was more limited. The top-down approach of these policies failed to create a sizable grassroots constituency in support of modernity except in Kabul and other cities,
as well as among modernized groups such as military officers. These groups and the urban elites also spawned the Communist (and Islamist) opposition that were, with foreign help, eventually to bring the slow-moving modernization process to a violent stop. On the other hand, the ulema and traditionally educated communities in rural areas, especially Pushtuns, grew more religious as a reaction to change—a trend that would accelerate throughout the 1978–2001 conflicts—and became hostile to urban elites, mostly linked to the Kabul government. In Pushtun areas, tribal leadership weakened, removing a buffer between modernization and the conservative grassroots.

The conflicts of 1978–2001 brought much destruction as well as modernization. Traditional society was undercut. New organizations such as political parties emerged. Afghans were politically mobilized, polarized, and radicalized. Grassroots Afghans listened to international radio news, becoming aware of the larger world. The original Afghan Taliban emerged from this upheaval as a fundamentalist force, looking backward to an idealized Islamic Afghanistan. The Taliban success in the 1990s was, in many ways, a victory against modernization.

Modernization will largely be identified with the foreign presence until its Afghanistan constituency is recreated. However, there remain core groups committed to modernization in Afghanistan. Even the grassroots, ambivalent about modernization, want the access to education and jobs it has the potential to provide. The new Afghanistan media, with its multiple outlets, has the potential to provide a platform for modernization.

Center-Periphery

The power struggle between the center and the periphery in Afghanistan was reignited in Kabul in 2001, in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban. The vision of a centralized state was, with foreign urging, supported by Afghans of all ethnic and political groups. At Bonn, there was no foreign support for the vision of a federal system in Afghanistan. There was concern that federalism would lead to state fragmentation and invite destructive foreign support for regional figures. A federal system or an investment in subnational power was also seen, by Kabulis or returning exiles, as potentially empowering rivals. During the Constitutional Loya
Jirga, at US urging, Afghanistan became a highly centralized state under a president with extensive powers. Many Afghans, especially non-Pushtuns, were concerned that, in the words of Dr. Abdullah, the former foreign minister and 2009 presidential candidate, “Reviving Abdur Rahman’s entity using democratic tools can only discredit democracy.”
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Provincial governors, never chief executives in Afghanistan, became second-level functionaries, subordinate to the Minister of Interior. They have no independent taxation or budgeting capability. Whatever they have financially is provided by Kabul. Proposals to have provincial governors elected, while popular among delegates to the Constitutional Loya Jirga (who saw themselves likely candidates) were put aside (with US support).
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In today’s centralized Afghanistan, not only has the Karzai administration moved governors around the country to prevent them from developing competing local power bases, but moving teachers between schools and police chiefs out of stations requires action by often non-responsive ministries in Kabul. Other factors contributed to turn the Afghan desire for a cohesive national vision instead into a highly centralized if largely incapable state after 2001. International organizations and aid donors alike concentrated on Kabul, both in terms of governance and economically, until 2008–10.

Since 2001, Kabul and the centralization of power in Afghanistan have been identified with current President Hamid Karzai. Karzai presided over the Bonn process in Kabul and was elected president by a considerable majority in a generally fair 2004 election. Karzai was elected, in large part, because Afghan voters thought that he was what the US wanted, and thus his election would be followed by increased aid and thus an improvement in the quality of life. The widespread accusations of fraud after Karzai’s reelection in the 2009 elections diminished the stature of the process. Ashraf Ghani, who ran for president in 2009, said: “No one calls the election fair or legitimate.”
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Karzai’s administration, which had opened so hopefully, was now largely identified with the incapacity of the Afghan government and the rise in corruption, appearing to favor Pushtuns in practice, while repeating nationalist rhetoric to non-Pushtun audiences, on top of the lack of security, rule of law, and governance. Kabuli intellectuals complained that he
was not among Afghanistan’s “best and brightest” and therefore cannot claim to be a deep or original thinker.
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Ashraf Ghani said in 2009: “I worked for Karzai in 2002–04. The only way to manage him [sic] is to give him options and timelines. . . . When he became the elected president, he would sit on decisions for two years. . . . Karzai focuses on tactics, not strategy, which is why he is so flexible. He is willing to engage with any party and any process.”
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Karzai’s reputation has been undercut by actions of his family members, including reports of involvement in narcotics—albeit, as largely absentee landowners in Kandahar province, where it is ingrained in the rural economy, there is not much they could do to prevent this. However, by 2008, “He cannot control his own family, so how can he control the country?” had become a catchphrase even among supporters in Kabul. The patrimonial aspects of Afghanistan governance made US and coalition support for the centralized Kabul government appear to be support for an increasingly unpopular Hamid Karzai. Dr. Najibullah Lafraie, who served in the post-1992 Afghan Foreign Ministry with Karzai, wrote: “I highly respect President Karzai and admire his integrity and patriotism. However, he has proved to be a very incompetent leader and administrator. He not only lacks a strategic vision but also the necessary decisiveness and he has been incapable of curbing factionalism within the cabinet he inherited from the Bonn conference as well as within the ones he has appointed himself.”
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Prior to 2001, no central Afghan government ever did much to improve the lives of individual Afghans out in the provinces. The government allocated resources to different provinces to strengthen patronage ties or avoid elite challenges to Kabul’s authority. This often became a source of resentment. The tax revenue from the prosperous north was perceived to be mostly spent in the southern Pushtun areas, which did not pay much tax as it was. While Afghanistan is today collecting relatively little internal revenue, the burden to collect at all has fallen heavily on non-Pushtun provinces, in large part because tax collectors would be a target for insurgents in many Pushtun areas. This of course has led to resentment in the non-Pushtun provinces. The lack of a conflict in their area has meant that resources from taxation and outside aid alike are
directed elsewhere, largely to pacify Pushtun areas, in effect penalizing them for maintaining order and a civil society.

Kabul has a thriving civil-sector economy. Outside Kabul, the failure to redevelop a national economy in the wake of the Taliban still reverberates today, with the regional economies in effect continuing to function as low-cost supplements to the stronger economies of neighboring countries rather than making Afghanistan an economic entity. This—along with the continued tension with Pakistan—has helped limit provincial Afghanistan’s integration with the regional and global economies.

The challenge facing Afghans and policy makers around the world today is making the government in Kabul relevant and capable of making material improvement to all Afghan groups. Kabul’s legitimacy was not quickly bolstered and rebuilt after the fall of the Taliban, giving times for its cracks to deepen and resentments to fester. The non-Pushtun areas of the north, center, and west have evolved over the past thirty years and are now mobilized to voice discontent and demonstrate a renewed dissatisfaction with Kabul. Today, Kabul is, in many ways, back where King Zahir was at the start of his reign, almost seventy years ago.