Introduction: In October 2001, the Bush administration launched the war in Afghanistan and then declared that it wanted to transform Afghanistan into a "free and democratic country". On August 16, President Joe Biden gave a speech on Afghanistan at the White House, admitting that the U.S. had made a major mistake in trying to establish a "unified, centralized democratic system" in Afghanistan.
Why did the U.S. "political reconstruction" in Afghanistan fail? What are the unique features of Afghanistan's social structure and political order? Zhao Minghao, a researcher at the Center for American Studies at Fudan University and a part-time researcher at the Research Base for Humanistic Exchange at Peking University, believes that discussing these questions will help deepen the thinking about "where Afghanistan is going.
In October 2001, the Bush administration launched a war in Afghanistan and then declared that it wanted to transform Afghanistan into a "free and democratic country". The United States' hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan now shows that this goal has been completely defeated.
On August 16, President Joe Biden gave a speech on Afghanistan at the White House, admitting that the U.S. made a major mistake in trying to establish a "unified, centralized democratic system" in Afghanistan.
Why did the U.S. "political reconstruction" in Afghanistan fail? What are the unique features of Afghanistan's social structure and political order? Discussing these questions will help deepen the reflection on "where Afghanistan is going".
Afghanistan: "Mosaic" social structure
Afghanistan is not a typical nation-state. Its existence as a "nation" depends on two major factors: external forces, especially "external invaders"; and the power of "qawm" (community) based on kinship within the country.
The modern Afghan state regime that emerged in the 19th century was more a product of the game between the British and the Russian powers, and its borders were not drawn along ethnic, tribal, or sectarian lines, but largely to meet the needs of external forces to "divide and rule" Afghanistan. It can be said that Afghanistan's history as a "nation" has always been filled with pressure from outside.
Internally, the social basis of political power in Afghanistan stems from the "qawm," a very Afghan concept, which we will translate as "ethnic group". The "qawm" are micro-societies, which can be an extended family, a tribe, a village or an ethnic group, and constitute the basic unit of Afghan society. Whenever Afghanistan faces external aggression, the qawm negotiate and come together through the Loya Jirga (the traditional Afghan way of discussing political matters) to work together to deal with the aggressor. Ordinary Afghans are far more loyal to the qawm they belong to than they are to the "state," and the qawm will comply when they believe it is in their best interest to join with the state leader. They will submit to the authority of the central government only when they believe that their association with the national leadership is more beneficial.
There are seven major ethnic groups in Afghanistan, namely Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Aimaqs, Turkmen and Baluchis. The deep divide between ethnic groups, tribes, and sects, coupled with years of civil war, mutual hatred and mistrust, make it extremely difficult to advance the centralization and sharing of political power in Afghanistan. In addition, "the intractable conflict between the modern elite in Kabul and the more conservative rural areas of the country" is one of the fundamental contradictions of Afghan society.
The Pashtun dynasty, founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747, first took control of the entire country, but it still granted a great deal of autonomy to the regions. Later, Abdur Rahman Khan, who came to power in 1880, tried to impose direct rule by force; Habibullah Khan and Amanullah Khan also introduced large-scale social and economic reforms in the early 20th century; in 1964 Zahir In the 1970s, the pro-Soviet Najibullah regime introduced a policy of reform that provoked strong resistance and revolt, and eventually had to be suppressed by Soviet troops. the chaos.
The so-called central government of various regimes has been in place, but there has been no fundamental change in the "mosaic" and fragmented micro-social structure of Afghanistan. The source of Afghan political loyalty is still mainly ethnic/tribal affiliation and religious factors, and the national level of identity is very weak. The central government lacks the power and resources to exercise local control or provide public goods in multiple parts of the country, and attempts by the central government to increase its control often result in resistance from local forces.
U.S. Chooses "Presidential System" for Afghanistan
Prior to the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had controlled more than 90 percent of the country's territory and were trying to reshape the country's political institutions. This process was interrupted by the arrival of the Americans, who chose a different political path for Afghanistan – a "presidential system.
In November 2001, the Bush administration promoted a UN conference in Bonn, Germany, to which Afghan politicians and representatives of relevant countries were invited, to start the so-called "Bonn Process". At the conference, the issue of Afghanistan's basic political system and the choice of leaders and key members of the interim government became the focus of debate.
The U.S. side believes that the implementation of the presidential system and the establishment of a strong, centralized central government can put an end to the political factions and strife in Afghanistan as soon as possible, and also help improve the efficiency of coordination between the U.S. and the Afghan side. This idea is opposed by the Afghan "Northern Alliance" (a joint anti-Taliban front of non-Pashtun armed forces, including Tajiks and Uzbeks). The coalition has a natural aversion to and suspicion of centralization - they are opposed to the Taliban regime, but that does not mean they are willing to accept a central government dominated by Pashtuns. "The Northern Alliance has proposed that Afghanistan should have a cabinet of prime ministers to avoid a presidential dictatorship that would lead to the overpowering of one ethnic group.
It can be said that the new Afghan government created by the Bonn process has been questioned from the very beginning in terms of its representativeness and legitimacy, and the Pashtuns also believe that their own interests have not been safeguarded in the Bonn process. In the words of Thomas Barfield, a leading expert on Afghanistan, the new government in Kabul is an "arranged marriage, not a love match.
Even so, the Bush administration was keen to promote the success story of Afghanistan's democratization. In his 2004 State of the Union address, he said, "Afghan nationals, men and women alike, are building a free, proud nation that is fighting terrorism, and the United States is proud to be their friend.
This optimistic description is clearly at odds with reality. Due to a lack of authority, the U.S.-supported central government has very limited practical authority, and President Karzai has even been derided as the "mayor of Kabul. Yet even the "mayor of Kabul" has to rely on a "network of nepotism" to eke out his political position - as U.S. scholar Steve Hess has criticized. Steve Hess criticizes, Karzai "has used his presidency, his position as a distributor of foreign aid, arms and cash to the United States and other countries, and his position as an appointee to key government posts to build a system of personal cronyism to support his rule.
In this context, the conflict between the United States and the new Afghan government has become more and more pronounced. Karzai and other Afghan politicians have repeatedly criticized the U.S. and other Western countries for bypassing the central government and creating a "parallel government" in Afghanistan. The U.S., for its part, has accused the Afghan government of corruption. The Afghan people, however, believe that the U.S.-backed Afghan government consists of a greedy "Kabul elite", and they are angry with the U.S. for this.
It can be said that the U.S. is neither well liked by Karzai's government nor supported by the Afghan public, which makes it more difficult to promote political reconstruction in Afghanistan.
The Corruption Conundrum
Over the years, the issue of corruption has become the focus of conflict between the U.S. and Afghanistan.
In 2012, the U.S. Government Accounting Office issued a report stating that only 15 cents out of one dollar of aid funds allocated by the U.S. Agency for International Development reached the recipients, 30 cents went to NGOs to undertake administrative overhead for aid projects, and 55 cents was embezzled or misused in links involving the local Afghan government.
In the U.S. view, corruption is a symptom of the Afghan government's reliance on a "network of nepotism" to operate its power. But in Afghan society, which emphasizes blood and ethnic ties, if a person becomes an official, he or she is considered responsible for using the power he or she wields for the benefit of his or her family and ethnic group, thus giving corruption a cultural and customary dimension.
To avoid corruption, U.S. government agencies often choose to implement reconstruction on their own, bypassing the Afghan central government, and contract most reconstruction contracts to local warlords and strongmen. Some estimates suggest that about one-third of the aid from the U.S. and other Western countries is flowing into the country without the knowledge of the Afghan government.
An estimate from 2010-2011 shows that about 90 percent of the aid was allocated by international organizations, NGOs and others, rather than by the Afghan government. As a result, the central government has been severely constrained in budget planning and implementation of reconstruction, and its prestige and ability to govern has been questioned.
The conflict between the Afghan government and the U.S. is becoming more and more intense and open. 2009 Afghan election, the U.S. criticized the election as a serious fraud, and Karzai retorted fiercely that the U.S. was trying to manipulate the election to support a weak regime in Afghanistan; not only that, the U.S. also secretly supported suicide attacks and undermined the peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. In short, the United States is the root cause of all the problems in Afghanistan.
Another five years later, Afghanistan's general election saw a serious political confrontation between Ashraf Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun candidate, and Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik representing the interests of the "Northern Alliance. Abdullah, a Tajik representing the interests of the "Northern Alliance," is at loggerheads. John Kerry, then U.S. Secretary of State, had to intervene, and eventually Ghani became president and Abdullah became chief executive.
At this point, the U.S. had to accept the political reality of a mountainous Afghanistan, and the "presidential system" that the Bonn process sought to establish eventually evolved into a system of power-sharing between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups.
U.S. Neglect of Local Governance in Afghanistan
"Prior to September 11, Afghanistan had experienced more than 20 years of civil war. In the process, many self-governing warlords emerged, forming a political symbiosis with local strongmen and illegal economic organizations, collecting taxes and controlling trade routes, and maintaining a state of de facto local autonomy all year round.
It can be said that the key to establishing an effective political governance system and achieving stable development in Afghanistan lies not at the central level but at the local level, and not in the modern cities but in the rural areas. However, in terms of strengthening regional governance, the United States lacks both sufficient political will and the corresponding resources, leverage and capacity.
After the war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration publicly pursued the "democratization" of Afghanistan and tried to implement a centralized presidential system, but privately, the CIA of the Department of Defense and others have been bribing and fostering local warlords in order to combat al-Qaeda and the Taliban. However, in private, the Defense Department, CIA and others have been buying and fostering local warlords to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and even condoning their involvement in the illegal economy, including drug trafficking. As Sarah Lister of the London School of Economics and Political Science puts it, "different parts of the U.S. government have pursued contradictory policies, with some effectively undermining the efforts of others to limit the power of local strongmen.
In this way, a valuable opportunity for political reconstruction in Afghanistan was squandered. Local warlords and strongmen sent their proxies to serve in the National Assembly and provincial and district councils, thereby infiltrating the new Afghan political system. In his 2009 assessment report, Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, described the phenomenon of local fragmentation in Afghanistan this way: "Some local and regional power brokers ...... who are economically independent and have loyal armed supporters, and their autonomy impedes efforts to build an intact Afghan regime. In the vast majority of cases, their interests are aligned with neither the Afghan population nor the Afghan government, which has led to conflicts that insurgent groups can exploit."
It should be said that the U.S. has made some efforts to strengthen local governance in order to salvage "nation-building" in Afghanistan, such as during the Obama administration, when the U.S. focused on supporting the Independent Office of Local Governance's "Under the Obama administration, the U.S. supported the District Delivery Program, an initiative of the Independent Office of Local Governance. The program covers more than 80 key districts in the Helmand Valley, Kandahar, Kabul, Herat, and the Baghlan-Kunduz corridor, helping them to improve their governance capacity in terms of financial and human resources. However, the actual progress of this project has been very slow, and it has since been abandoned.
Why has the U.S.-driven local governance program been ineffective? The U.S. scholar Stephen Biddle has made a penetrating analysis - the U.S. has underestimated the political complexity of local governance in Afghanistan and mistakenly treated improving local governance as an "apolitical" process. apolitical" process. In reality, however, "unsupervised 'capacity building' often makes the problem worse by injecting money and resources into crony networks that enable them to enlist allies, fight opponents, and intensify their efforts to extract resources from the population.
It is worth emphasizing that although the Taliban lost power in 2001, it has remained an important political force in Afghanistan, with strong political influence at the local level - something that distinguishes it from terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. As an adversary, the Taliban presents not only a security challenge to the U.S. and Afghan governments, but it also competes strongly with the latter in terms of governance.
The Taliban's "comprehensive knowledge of local culture, language and tribal structures" is an advantage over U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and it understands the political importance of rural areas, creating circuit courts in several locations to help people deal with complex conflicts over land and other issues, conditionally allowing women to receive education, and agreeing to development assistance programs in areas under its control.
It is the operation in grassroots society and rural areas over the past two decades that has laid an important foundation for the Taliban's return to power today.
Recently, the Taliban began consultations with former President Karzai, Afghan National Reconciliation Commission Chairman Abdullah, Hezb-i-Islami leader Sikhmatyar and others on how to establish an inclusive political structure. According to the latest news, Karzai and Abdullah have been placed under house arrest by the Taliban. As a Tajik political force, former Vice President Saleh and Masood Jr., son of Northern Alliance leader Masood, are leading troops in a fierce battle with the Taliban in the Panjshir Valley. With the withdrawal of the Americans, everything seems to be back to square one.
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