Afghanistan

Politics and Economics in a Globalising State

Niamatullah Ibrahimi, William Maley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429841392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers an overview of the formation of the Afghan state and of the politics, economic challenges and international relations of contemporary Afghanistan.

It opens with an account of some of the key features that make Afghanistan unique and proceeds to discuss how the Afghan state acquired a distinctive character as a rentier state. In addition, the authors outline a complex range of domestic and external factors that led to the breakdown of the state, and how that breakdown gave rise to a set of challenges with which Afghan political and social actors have been struggling to deal since the 2001 international intervention that overthrew the anti-modernist Taliban regime. It then presents the different types of politics that Afghanistan has witnessed over the last two decades; examines some of the most important features of the Afghan economy; and demonstrates how Afghanistan's geopolitical location and international relations more broadly have complicated the task of promoting stability in the post-2001 period. It concludes with some reflections on the factors that are likely to shape Afghanistan's future trajectory and notes that if there are hopes for a better future, they largely rest on the shoulders of a globalised generation of younger Afghans.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Middle East and Central Asian studies, international relations, politics, development studies and history.

1

INTRODUCTION

More than 40 years have passed since a communist coup on 27 April 1978 tipped Afghanistan into an abyss of bloodshed and disarray, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty about the future continues to be a feature of the daily lives of many ordinary Afghans. Rarely has any single country been so continuously disrupted for so long. Yet at the same time, Afghanistan has been dramatically transformed since 1978 and has absorbed the effects of globalisation in an arresting fashion since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many Afghans would leave the country if given the opportunity, and many have good reason to do so, but survey evidence suggests that a solid majority, some 58 per cent, would prefer to stay.¹ This alone should give pause to those who see Afghanistan as a disaster area with nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Any broad generalisations about Afghanistan have the potential to mislead. Afghanistan’s story is much more complicated, and this book explores why this is the case. Four points of context deserve to be emphasised at the outset.

First of all, Afghanistan is a complex country. The borders of its landlocked territory have been largely defined since the late nineteenth century, but within those boundaries one can find desert plains, green valleys, and the rugged mountains that make up the so-called Hindu Kush, an offshoot of the adjacent Himalayas. This formidable terrain has shaped the development of Afghan society. No comprehensive census has ever been completed in Afghanistan, but the current estimate of its population stands at 32,225,560. The majority of the population, 71.3 per cent, still live in rural areas, many in small villages, although, as in many countries, Afghanistan’s people are increasingly to be found in urban areas, where 24.1 per cent dwell (the remainder being nomads).² The population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but alongside the Sunni Muslim majority is a substantial Shiite minority, and amongst adherents of both of these components of Islam there are diverse forms of belief, worship and ritual to be found,³ as well as an increasing number of people whose Muslim identity is mainly cultural rather than religious. There are also small communities of Hindus and Sikhs left in Afghanistan, although terrorist attacks have thinned their numbers in recent years.

The Afghan population is also ethnically diverse. The largest ethnic groups are the Pushtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, but more than 50 distinct groups have been identified,⁴ and the exact numbers that the different groups comprise have been both a matter of contention for political reasons and also the subject of methodological debate, since ethnic identification is subjective rather than objective, and there are also Afghans whose parents and ancestors come from different groups. These factors help explain why social scientists increasingly shy away from simple ideas of ‘identity’, recognising that individuals may choose to identify themselves in different ways as circumstances change, and that in everyday life, people as a matter of course shift between different social worlds, often with considerable dexterity. This is particularly likely in perilous situations, where to be identified with particular groups may be a life-threatening development.

In addition, Afghanistan is linguistically diverse. In common with what has been experienced in many other countries, a grammatically easy language, namely, Persian, has become the lingua franca or koine of the country at the expense of other languages such as Pushto which are grammatically more complicated. As a result, a surprisingly large number of Afghans are bilingual or even trilingual, with English increasingly seen as the language to master if people are to move ahead. This diversity is not without its problems. Issues can arise over whether a tongue used by a particular group, such as Hazaragi amongst Hazaras, is a distinct language or merely a dialect of Afghanistan’s Dari Persian, as well as over which languages should be recognised as official languages and which cannot aspire to such status.⁵ On occasion such disputes can become the occasion for the airing of a much wider set of grievances, posing challenges both for political leaders and for those with an interest in the promotion of community harmony.

Afghanistan is frequently described as a ‘tribal’ society, but this label is liable to mislead. The very word ‘tribe’ is an English word and in recent years has been treated with considerable caution by anthropologists who have been increasingly alert to its colonial origins, and to the danger that its use will lump together quite diverse forms of social organisation. As Elisabeth Leake has put it, ‘Colonial officials across empires constructed “tribes” to explain local relationships, to create leadership hierarchies, and to establish “stable, enduring, genealogically and culturally coherent units” that were easier to understand and thereby govern’.⁶ It is also the case that social relations need not be arranged around lineages in the way that the idea of ‘tribe’ seems to imply. Amongst groups such as the Tajiks, the village provides a stronger basis for community than does the lineage. The term qawm, used quite frequently in Afghanistan to describe a social network, is considerably more elastic than the idea of the tribe, but more useful as a tool for making sense of Afghanistan’s complexities.

Second, as a result of decades of war, Afghanistan is a damaged country. It was a very poor country even before the April 1978 coup and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, but the events of the period since the late 1970s have greatly added to Afghanistan’s difficulties. The mortality associated with war has been on a scale that boggles the mind. According to a (conservative) demographic study, between 1978 and 1987, unnatural deaths amounted to 876,825, or to put it another way, over 240 deaths every day for ten years straight.⁷ This was undoubtedly the most lethal period in Afghanistan’s recent history, but civilian casualties have continued to be a major blight well into the twenty-first century⁸; between the beginning of 2007 and the end of 2018, some 35,636 civilian deaths were recorded in United Nations data.⁹ And these figures are only the tip of a very ugly iceberg. For every person killed, there are likely to be many more injured, maimed, disabled or traumatised, in a society which by virtue of its poverty is poorly equipped to cope with the enduring needs for assistance, both medical and psychosocial, that such victims of war have.

Afghanistan has also witnessed enormous human displacement. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there were some 6.2 million Afghans living outside the country.¹⁰ Refugee camps in Pakistan in the 1980s provided a support network for the Afghan resistance forces that were combating the Soviet Army in Afghanistan,¹¹ but as conflict dragged on after the completion in February 1989 of the Soviet troop withdrawal and the collapse of the Communist regime in April 1992, refugee camps also became breeding grounds for the anti-modernist Taliban movement. There have been refugee movements back and forth since then, but the Afghan refugee population long remained the largest in the world, and it took the massive outflows from Syria following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 to displace Afghanistan from this unfortunate pedestal. In addition to refugee movements, Afghanistan has also witnessed very substantial internal displacement with all the consequences of social dislocation that flow from it.¹² The risk of forced migration of Afghans remains very high.

Human displacement has also contributed to a further form of damage, namely, the erosion of human capital as displaced persons have been detached from the environments in which they would have learned the kinds of skills necessary to function effectively within Afghanistan’s economy. It is hard to learn to be a farmer when sitting in a refugee camp, since one loses access to the kind of practical knowledge that is central to the accomplishment of this kind of activity. Of course, Afghanistan also suffered enormous destruction to its infrastructure during the 1980s, and the continuation of conflict in the 1990s meant that far less ‘reconstruction’ took place than one might have hoped. To some extent that has changed since 2001, but as we shall see, the process of reinvigorating economic life in Afghanistan has faced considerable difficulties.

Third, unhappily for its people, Afghanistan is also a strategically located country. In the nineteenth century it was widely seen as a buffer state, physically distancing the expanding Russian Empire from the British Raj in India. Both the Russians and the British saw an interest in preventing Afghanistan from falling under the domination of the other and pursued various strategies designed to block any such outcome. During the First World War, Afghanistan maintained its neutrality, but its proximity to India meant that it was a focus of efforts by Wilhelmine Germany to boost Germany’s influence, notably via a mission headed by Oskar von Niedermayer and Werner Otto von Hentig.¹³ It was faced with similar efforts by Nazi Germany during the Second World War,¹⁴ when Afghanistan once again adopted a neutral position. During the Cold War, it trod a delicate path, with both the United States and the Soviet Union supporting development projects in Afghanistan from which they clearly hoped to extract a degree of influence. But the vulnerability to which it was exposed by its strategic location became very clear with the Soviet invasion in December 1979, and although with hindsight it is clear that the Soviets’ motives in entering Afghanistan were not geostrategic,¹⁵ this was far from obvious at the time, and led to Afghanistan’s becoming a theatre for contestation in what many came to see as a Second Cold War.

Afghanistan has also been seen as a crossroads, linking different regions of the world.¹⁶ This is understandable in a cultural sense; Afghanistan’s landscape is richly supplied with archaeological relics of the different civilisations that at various times have been present on its territory. This is surely one part of the country’s fascination. But in a more concrete sense, it has also been viewed as an economic crossroads. This was most obvious in the late 1990s, when companies such as the US UNOCAL and the Argentinian Bridas competed for the opportunity to build resource pipelines – under Taliban protection – from Turkmenistan to the energy-hungry South Asian market. Nothing much came of the endeavour at the time,¹⁷ but the hope has lingered on that a ‘crossroads’ role may prove Afghanistan’s salvation.

The greatest problem of Afghanistan’s strategic location, however, is that it has become a theatre for competition between regional rivals with an incentive to compete through proxy forces rather than direct confrontation. Afghanistan occupies a very uncomfortable seat. Whether one sees it as surrounded by distinct conflict spheres, or as a victim of multiple interlocking security dilemmas and strategic challenges,¹⁸ it is unfortunately the case that the interests of its people in peace and stability have frequently been subordinated to the selfish interests of neighbouring countries to deny their rivals influence in Kabul and the territory around it. Thus, Afghanistan is not just haunted by its own immediate problems; it is also a victim of tensions between India and Pakistan that go back to the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 and are regularly refuelled by the Kashmir dispute.

Fourth, Afghanistan is a romanticised country. This may seem a quaint point to make, but how Afghanistan is seen in the wider world actually has important ramifications for how it will be treated. In Afghanistan’s cultures there is of course much to celebrate, including a rich oral tradition, as well as literary, artistic and musical achievement.¹⁹ There is in turn a developed and extensive scholarly literature dealing with Afghanistan’s history, politics, societies and cultures,²⁰ and while some works from the nineteenth century now have a decidedly ‘Orientalist’ or ‘colonialist’ tinge, other work has been immensely instructive. But there is no doubt that in contrast to countries such as, say, Singapore, Afghanistan has been seen as markedly exotic. Tales from Afghanistan can be found in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, who never once set foot in the country, and of Sir Henry Newbolt; and even the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle contain references to Afghan wars. Older travel writings also tended to emphasise the esoteric at the expense of the mundane. The 1980s did not do much to overcome this problem; on the contrary, those years witnessed a revival of what one might call a ‘war travel’ genre, which in turn stimulated the information and propaganda departments of various resistance organisations that recognised that they had a constituency with which to deal. Some works on Afghanistan by authors with a strongly developed ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ complex still appear from time to time, and they have the potential to plant damaging stereotypes in the minds of outside observers and policymakers. The most important development countering these tendencies has been the emergence since 2001 of a vibrant community of young Afghan journalists and scholars whose work has transcended these stereotypes. Writings of high quality in both Afghan and European languages have emerged from their computers, the very technology itself pointing to major changes Afghanistan has undergone. These writings have helped to show that ordinary Afghans are not very different from ordinary people in most other countries; they simply face, on a daily basis, different challenges and different incentive structures.

This book cannot address all the complexities that flow from these issues of context, but it does set out to provide the reader with an overview of some of the key matters with which it is important to be familiar in order to make sense of the dramatic developments that from time to time put Afghanistan in the headlines. It opens with a discussion of state formation in Afghanistan. As we shall see, the Afghan state emerges through a complicated process which to a degree accounted for the character that it came to assu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Map
• 1 Introduction
• 2 State formation
• 3 Politics
• 4 The Afghan economy
• 5 International relations
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index