Afghanistan: Transition under Threat

1 Looking Back at the Bonn Process

On 5 December 2001, a range of Afghan political actors attached their signatures to the text of what was to become known as the Bonn Agreement. The product of a conference that brought together non-Taliban forces, it set out a path for transition to fresh political arrangements for a country that had endured decades of turbulence. The agreement prompted high hopes among ordinary Afghans that a new opportunity had emerged for them to escape from the miserable rut to which they had long been consigned. Furthermore , the endorsement of the Bonn Agreement by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 1383 of 6 December 2001 appeared to anchor Afghanistan’s transition firmly in the agenda of key issues confronting the international community, inspiring the conviction that Afghanistan would not be abandoned in the way that it had been following the completion of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in February 1989. More than six years on, the political situation in Afghanistan no longer seems promising, and the fears of the wider world that Afghanistan could become another Iraq are matched by the fears of the Afghans that they might be abandoned once again (Maley 2006a, 135–38). Insecurity plagues many parts of the country, and international forces deployed in the southern provinces of Afghanistan to assist the process of reconstruction are under frequent attack from well-armed, well-trained “neo-Taliban” (Giustozzi 2007; Tarzi 2008), whose operations from bases in Pakistan belie the high hopes of 2001 that Afghanistan had finally turned the corner. The government of president Hamid Karzai is increasingly beleaguered, and a 3 1 William Maley Looking Back at the Bonn Process 4 • William Maley whispering campaign against Karzai himself is being sedulously promoted in Kabul, in Islamabad, and in more remote capitals. Although Afghanistan is not yet the catastrophe zone that Iraq has become, ominous clouds now hang over its transition. The aim of this chapter is to explore what factors have contributed to this slide. Was the Bonn Agreement defective, or did problems arise mainly in its implementation? Were Afghanistan’s pre-existing problems simply too great for any intra-elite agreement to be able effectively to address them? The broad argument that I will advance is that there is some merit in each of these claims. The problems of Afghanistan are indeed awesome and defy easy solution. The Bonn Agreement was a bold and brave attempt to carry intra-elite negotiations to a higher level than had ever been attempted in Afghanistan, but it was nonetheless limited in what it could and did address. And many factors have complicated the process of creating an effective state structure to deal with the pressing needs of ordinary Afghans. But the two greatest problems, I shall argue, lie outside the direct control of the Afghans themselves. The first is the relentless, compulsive drive of Pakistan to interfere in Afghanistan’s affairs, a propensity that Western states have altogether failed to address in an effective manner. The other is the corrosive effect of the Iraq war in draining attention and resources from Afghanistan, where they could have been used to far greater effect. The net result has been a near-fatal loss of momentum in the Afghan transition , which leaves it now teetering on the brink of real disaster. The crisis in Afghanistan will not be resolved by mere rhetoric, or tentative steps, or half-measures: only a comprehensive and far-reaching re-evaluation of Afghanistan’s needs and of the dimensions of international engagement holds out much hope of saving the situation. The Afghan Context The delegates who gathered at Bonn faced a daunting heritage from the years of strife that followed the communist coup of April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. These dramatic events had widespread ramifications for both state and society in Afghanistan (Bradsher 1999). The Afghanistan of the royalist and republican eras is no longer the Afghanistan of today, and the easy formulae that might have been used to underpin the practice of politics in the past no longer work well in this radically altered environment. Four particular factors lay at the heart of Afghanistan’s dismal inheritance. First was the substantial disintegration of the Afghan state. The Afghan state administration even before the 1978 coup was a ramshackle apparatus , blighted by corruption and nepotism, but relatively ubiquitous, al- though not especially strong in...