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"The Insubstantial State"
- Brookings Institution Press
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44 eleven “The Insubstantial State” In my first two months I went to meet as many Afghans as I could, and I also tried to establish contacts outside official spheres. I’d realized that if I relied on formal relationships I wouldn’t get very far, but also that the Pashtun saying that you need to pay seven visits to someone before you can start talking seriously to them is more than just a saying: it’s a fundamental social rule without exceptions. So I subjected my detail to a veritable tour de force as I went on lightning visits to members of the government and other institutional leaders, representatives of civil society, ambassadors of NATO members, and representatives of those countries and international organizations most deeply engaged in Afghanistan. We’d leave ISAF headquarters even five or six times a day, and for the Tuscania carabinieri regiment, that meant ten or twelve trips because they had to make a reconnaissance of each location before an appointment. I was trying to sketch out a map—my own personal map—of Afghan power. In other words, I wanted a face, a voice, and a perception of each of the names that had been whirling around my head for weeks. My biggest help in getting my bearings and prioritizing was my colleague and dear friend Ettore Sequi. In the four previous years he’d been the Italian ambassador to Kabul, and a few weeks earlier Javier Solana had chosen him as the European Union’s special representative for Afghanistan. His appointment, like that of Kai Eide and my own, was part of the regular turnover of top figures in Kabul’s international community, considering that no one can stand the stress and hardships for too long. It’s unlikely that an ambassador will be in office for more than a couple of years. Ettore, on the other hand, had been there five, so he had the right 11-2423-0 ch11.indd 44 6/3/13 1:51 PM “The Insubstantial State” 45 connections in Afghan society, and there was no one better at interpreting the humor of the country and its ruling class. Usually we met at the residence of Ambassador Claudio Glaentzer, who had also just arrived. As time passed it was great to see that our weekly meeting of three, originally for professional reasons, had turned into a sort of get-together of old friends. Claudio’s residence was a small haven, an escape from the chaotic city and the frenetic ISAF operations base. As soon as I was through the gate, I relaxed and almost felt as if I was on vacation. A perfectly restored vintage Lince biplane (one of the sixteen reconnaissance aircraft sold by the Italian royal air force to King Zaher in June 1937) had pride of place in the garden ; our military had found it a couple of years earlier on the outskirts of Kabul, in what is probably one of the world’s largest deposits of war relics. now . . . where was i? Ah, yes, my map of power. From my first meetings with the Afghans I understood that it would be a tortuous exercise, with endless overlapping levels extraneous to politics and institutions. Innumerable factors contribute to making an Afghan powerful. It’s not enough to have a political role or be in public office to be influential and respected. Before I left Rome, my friend, the anthropologist Antonio Palmisano, had given me a book by Olivier Roy on the relationship between state and society in Afghanistan. The volume had been written in 1985, at the height of Soviet occupation, and it had recently been republished in Italy with the title Afghanistan, l’Islam afghano, edited by Carlo degli Abbati. According to Roy, Afghan power is neither a place nor a person, but constitutes “an elusive network which needs constant maintenance and reconstruction.” Basically it is woven from the number of relationships the person has, and consensus is the underlying prerequisite to wielding power. It is precisely this need to maintain and renew consensus that can never be taken for granted, and this forces those in power to show constantly that only they are worthy of this consensus and the power it bestows. For Roy, the Afghan state is insubstantial and has a purely bureaucratic consistency. The power of state institutions exists only if traditional matrices such as solidarity, tribal and family ties, the clergy, and the religious brotherhoods are available. 11-2423...