Afghanistan: Transition under Threat

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Mark Sedra Geoffrey Hayes This collection of essays is the result of a workshop held near Waterloo, Ontario , Canada to examine Afghanistan’s war-to-peace transition. Among the thirty-five participants were diplomats, academics, aid workers, soldiers , and practitioners with extensive experience in Afghanistan. The wideranging and frank discussions revealed that the Afghan state building process actually comprises three separate transitions—political, economic, and security—which have in many respects been advanced independently.1 This realization informed the structure of this book, which deconstructs each of the transitions separately while elucidating the interconnections that exist. The final section of the book offers an in-depth look at Canada’s experience in Afghanistan, covering both its multi-faceted activities within the country and the impact of domestic politics on its strategy and approach. With rifts emerging in the NATO alliance concerning the future of the Afghan mission, and popular support for the military deployment dwindling among member-state populations, understanding the policies, priorities , and political calculations of countries like Canada is critical. The insight gleaned from the Canadian case can help to understand the positions of other NATO member states and the critical role medium-sized donors play in countries like Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s political transition and in fact the entire state building process was born at the December 2001 Bonn conference, which assembled Taliban opposition groups and members of the international community under the auspices of the United Nations. But in this volume, Ali Jalali reminds us that, despite the tremendous amount of global attention devoted to the Bonn talks, the state building process “was an afterthought to the fight against global terrorism, and was driven by the desire to remove the threat to the United States emanating from Afghan territory.” Donors like the United States were fixated on rooting out the Taliban and alQaeda , not consolidating a particular type of peace in Afghanistan. Both Jalali and William Maley note that there were considerable limits on who could come to the table at Bonn, with the Taliban and any sympathizers largely excluded from the political process. As a result, the agreement xiii xiv • Introduction could be considered a “victor’s peace” rather than a “grand bargain for peace,” as it legitimized “a change of regime that involved handing over power to factional leaders that were on the ‘right side’ of the war on terror ” (Goodhand and Sedra 2006, 35). Furthermore, it could be considered only a partial peace, as the losers, the Taliban, were not fully defeated and retained the capacity and will to challenge the new political order (ibid.). The Bonn Agreement offered a blueprint for Afghanistan’s political transition , outlining a series of benchmarks to be achieved. Among those were the convening of an Emergency Loya Jirga to choose an interim government, the holding of parliamentary and presidential elections, and the development of a new constitution. The process was enormously successful in meeting those benchmarks, but the manner in which it did had the effect of distorting, and, in some ways, undermining the post-conflict transition. To achieve the level of stability necessary to meet the Bonn milestones, the government endeavored to co-opt rather than confront armed powerbrokers, a form of “warlord democratization” (Rubin 2006; Goodhand and Sedra 2006). While the state gained legitimacy through the two elections, its accommodation of armed commanders under the government tent slowed reforms and bred public distrust of the state. More interested in preserving their power and autonomy then advancing Afghanistan’s democratic transition, the bulk of these commanders would instrumentalize their positions within the state to advance their own parochial interests. The colonization of whole government institutions, most notably the police, by armed factions stunted Afghanistan’s transition. Although the Bonn process successfully met many of the primary criteria on the democratization checklist, it did so largely at the expense of the imperative of institutionalization. Roland Paris argues that institutionalization should precede political liberalization in cases of post-conflict peacebuilding . Successful democratization processes can be undertaken only when the state possesses the institutional capacity to provide basic public goods, notably security (2004). Ali Jalali notes that this sequencing was reversed in Afghanistan. Over two decades of civil war had destroyed the state’s institutions, leaving a legacy of corruption and poor governance that was hardly a suitable foundation for democratization: “elections in the absence of effective state institutions hampered the development of the democratic process.” Nor did the Bonn process adequately integrate the development, security , and...