Acknowledgments
An
earlier version of this paper was presented at the meeting
of the Afghanistan Support Group, Stockholm, Sweden, 21
June 1999. I would like to thank the U.N. Secretary General’s
Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden for that opportunity.
I owe special thanks to Ashraf Ghani for many exchanges
of ideas on this subject over the years. I also benefited
from comments and assistance from Sadiq Ahmed, William
Byrd, Zareen F. Naqvi, Michael von den Schulenburg, Lakhdar
Brahimi, Ahmed Rashid, Didier Leroy, and R. Scott Horton,
but they, like Ashraf Ghani and my employer, the Council
on Foreign Relations, bear no responsibility for the views
expressed herein, which are mine alone.
The
Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan
Nervos
belli, pecuniam infinitam. (The sinews of war, unlimited
money.)
Cicero,
Phillipic against Marc Anthony, V.ii.5
Summary:
The 20-year old Afghan conflict has created an open war
economy, affecting Afghanistan and surrounding areas.
Not only has Afghanistan become the world’s largest opium
producer and a center for arms dealing, but it supports
a multi-billion dollar trade in goods smuggled from Dubai
to Pakistan. This criminalized economy funds both the
Taliban and their adversaries. It has transformed social
relations and weakened states and legal economies throughout
the region. Sustainable peace will require not just an
end to fighting and a political agreement but a regional
economic transformation that provides alternative forms
of livelihood and promotes accountability.
Classical
interstate war may be, as von Clausewitz wrote, nothing
else but the pursuit of politics with the admixture of
other means, but the pursuit of politics through both
peaceful and violent means requires money. Just as in
many parts of the world political power is a principal
means to the pursuit of wealth, war too may create conditions
for economic activity, though often of a predatory nature.
Political leaders speak in public about their ideas and
goals, but much of their daily activity is devoted to
raising the resources to exercise power and reward supporters
or themselves. How political leaders raise and distribute
these resources often determines the outcome of their
acts, as much as if not more than their stated goals and
intentions.
The
dominant current form of war is neither Clausewitzian
interstate war nor classic civil war (government versus
insurgency), but transnational war involving a variety
of official and unofficial actors often from several states.
Such wars develop particular patterns of economic activity.
The longer they persist, the more society and economy
adapt to war, creating a relatively stable type of social
formation, the civil or transnational war economy. A few
actors profit, while most have no say in the development
of their own society. Peacemaking requires not only political
negotiations but transforming the war economy into a peace
economy and creating institutions for accountability over
economic and political decision making (Ignatieff, 1998;
Wallensteen and Stollenberg, 1998; Holsti, 1995; Reno,
1998; Kaldor, 1999; Keen, 1998; Jean and Rufin, 1996).
The
war economy of Afghanistan, which exemplifies this type
of system, is an open war economy affecting a broad region.
Stateless and devastated Afghanistan has become both a
source of the world’s most valuable contraband – opium
and its derivatives – and a transport and marketing corridor
where armed groups protect a region-wide arbitraging center
where profits are made off policy-induced price differentials.
The region in question includes Dubai, the world’s largest
duty-free shopping mall; Pakistan, a state where the combination
symbolized by the two ISIs – the Directorate of Inter-Services
Intelligence and a trade regime for import-substitution
industrialization – have created a highly armed and corrupt
society where economic interest and the imperatives of
covert action combine to undermine enforcement of fiscal
rules; Iran, where subsidized gasoline sells for three
cents a liter; Afghanistan, an essentially stateless territory
that has become the world’s largest producer of opium
but that includes the remnants of a road network that,
with difficulty, links Iran, Central Asia, and Pakistan;
Central Asian states recently opened to the world without
the institutions to govern markets; and a variety of linked
wars, including Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Kashmir.
In
this context, through the development of an Afghan diaspora,
the spread of means of transportation and communication,
the development of cultural, kinship, and economic ties
between Afghans and all the neighboring societies, the
opening of borders and lack of customs enforcement in
many areas, and the increase in opium production and other
contraband activities, the Afghan war economy has given
rise to a pattern of regional economic activity and associated
social and political networks that compete with and at
times undermine official economies and states.
Transformation
of this criminalized war economy is thus essential not
only to Afghanistan but to neighboring regions. The economic
and political stability of Pakistan, in particular, is
threatened by phenomena associated with the political
economy of war in Afghanistan, but the phenomena also
reach into Iran, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf,
and Central Asia, and, through the drug trade, into Russia,
Europe, and North America.
Prewar Economy,
State, and Society (TOP)
The
pre-war society of Afghanistan cannot be reconstructed,
but today’s structures developed from transformations
of that fragile and fragmented society. Furthermore, in
the event that political conditions permit an attempt
at reconstruction, an understanding of prewar social,
economic, and political relations is necessary if Afghans
and international actors are to avoid replicating or even
magnifying dysfunctional features of the system that proved
so vulnerable to external intervention and institutional
collapse (Rubin, 1995a).
In
the 1970s Afghanistan had an economy and society bifurcated
between a rural, largely subsistence economy and an urban
economy dependent on a state that in turn drew most of
its income from links to the international state system
and market. Agriculture and pastoralism accounted for
about 60 percent of GDP, and about 85 percent of the population
depended on the rural economy for its livelihood. As late
as 1972, economists estimated that the cash economy constituted
slightly less than half of the total. This figure probably
increased later in the 1970s, as a result of the expansion
of the national market after completion of the nation-wide
ring road and a rise in remittances from labor migration
to Persian Gulf countries after the 1973 oil price rise
(Rubin, 1995a, 62-75; Fry, 1974, 135-62).
Government
expenditure consumed less than 10 percent of the whole
economy, less than 20 percent even of the cash economy.
Government domestic revenue was even less than that. In
the 1960s foreign aid accounted for 40 percent or more
of the budget, including virtually all development projects.
This aid came from both the Soviet- and US-led alliance
systems, though the former predominated, especially in
the military. As aid declined in the late 1960s, export
of natural gas from northern Afghanistan to the Soviet
Union (principally Uzbekistan) replaced it, so that these
rentier incomes continued to finance slightly less than
half the budget. Most of the rest came from taxes on a
few items of foreign trade and government monopolies of
commodities such as fuel and tobacco (Rubin, 1995a, 296-7).
The
result was a government largely autonomous from most of
the society it ruled. It was free to institute reforms
in the limited part of the society it controlled but unable
to transform or govern most of rural society. Hence when
the elite was deposed in a coup d’état, it had
few organizational resources to fall back on. The resistance
developed largely in isolation from the pre-war rulers,
whom Pakistan in any case blocked from reconstituting
an Afghan nationalism with its irredentist claims on areas
of its neighbor.
Afghanistan
was among the world’s poorest countries, but it lacked
the grinding poverty of ex-colonial societies with a higher
degree of capitalist penetration. Its rural society still
included a safety net based on an ethic of asymmetrical
reciprocity within kinship-based solidarity groups (qawm).
This solidarity was slowly being undermined by inroads
of the market and education but the process was much less
advanced than in neighboring countries. This was most
manifest in some areas where property rights came to depend
on enforcement by the state, rather than being a manifestation
of local social relations. The state, which established
private property in land and pasture, assured Pashtun
nomads and landlords access to pasture and agricultural
land in the largely non-Pashtun areas of central and northern
Afghanistan. The state also made possible the development
of absentee landlordism in the periphery of major cities.
Before the mid-1950s, an merchant class led the country’s
economic development, but thereafter the state nationalized
the banking system and controlled the small industries
that developed.
Urban
society depended on the redistributive activities of the
state. Since after the mid-1950s the private sector was
largely confined to trade, the state controlled most urban
employment, which expanded together with the foreign funded
state. The state controlled almost the entire educational
system (secular and Islamic), which expanded rapidly since
the 1950s. The exception was the private, rural madrasas
(Islamic academies) that steadily lost influence and prestige.
The Islamic Movement of Taliban later emerged from these
madrasas (and their kindred institutions in Pakistan)
after nearly a generation of destruction of the state
schools and the competing elites (nationalists, communists,
Islamists) they had spawned (Roy, 1986; Rubin, 1995b).
Changes
in the role of women, including voluntary unveiling, and
women’s secular education and professional employment,
were entirely urban phenomena dependent on the state sector.
They were decreed by the highest (male) leadership of
the state in order to implement a (lightly) imposed vision
of modernization. The subsequent collapse and loss of
legitimacy of the weakly modernizing state also meant
the weakening of the institutional support for women’s
public roles (Dupree, 1998).
War
Economy under Soviet Occupation and the Soviet-supported
Najibullah Regime (TOP)
During
the Soviet occupation (1979-1989) the bifurcation of Afghan
society and economy became even more pronounced, but a
number of new phenomena also emerged:
These
changes laid the basis for today’s regional war economy.
On
one side, the state’s dependence on foreign aid and sales
of natural gas became even more pronounced, but aid now
came exclusively from the USSR and its allies. The state
lost not so much control of (which it never had) but access
to much of the rural areas. The state expanded the urban
institutions under its control, and a larger proportion
of the population depended on it not only for employment,
education, and health care, but food as well. By the Soviet
withdrawal, nearly all of Kabul’s food and fuel was donated
by the USSR and distributed by the government through
a coupon system. As men under government control were
largely enrolled in the war effort, women’s civilian roles
expanded rapidly in the Soviet-supported state civilian
sector.
A
different culture of dependency developed in the other
sector of the society, with different social effects.
Soviet counter-insurgency devastated the rural economy
in much of the country (Swedish Committee for Afghanistan,
1988: 37). Rural trading networks were also badly disrupted,
and food production fell by half to two thirds. The destruction
not only impoverished the rural population but weakened
the elites whose power depended on control of agricultural
and pastoral resources. In some areas, notably the irrigated
plains north of the Hindu Kush under government control,
the government pressured the peasants to grow cash crops
such as cotton and sugar beets for sale to government
factories, increasing dependence on the state, as well
as the role of cash in the economy (Rubin, 1995a).
Much
of the rural population fled, largely to Pakistan and
Iran, where it depended on international aid. (Urban employment
was more easily available in Iran, where refugees were
not confined to camps, and many local men were off fighting
against Iraq.) In Pakistan, access to aid was largely
controlled by the Islamic parties recognized by the Directorate
of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as recipients of
US- and Saudi- supplied military assistance. The humanitarian
aid thus funded a stable rear base for the mujahidin,
just as the Soviet aid to Afghan cities constituted a
stable base for the Soviet-supported regime. It was in
these refugee warrior communities that Afghans also came
in contact with the international Islamist groups, mainly
Arab, who supplied both humanitarian and military aid,
as well as fighters.
In
these communities, as well as in rural areas in Afghanistan
(whether under resistance or government control) women’s
roles remained traditional or were subject to new restrictions.
These restrictions resulted from both the insecurities
of life in exile and a reaction against reforms associated
with the disaster that had overtaken the country.
This
segment of the population came under the control of two
related elites: the mujahidin party leaders outside the
country and the commanders inside the country. Both became
important economic actors, displacing both the prewar
state and the notables, mainly landowners, who had dominated
village life. The party leaders were completely dependent
on foreign aid initially, but some of them succeeded in
turning it into personal fortunes. Some of these were
invested abroad (in London real estate, Australian tire
factories, etc.), but some was laundered into the regional
war economy, especially into arms and drug trafficking
and other forms of smuggling.
Within
Pakistan, both officials of the mujahidin parties and
Pakistani officers involved in the arms pipeline became
rich. A considerable amount of cash was transferred directly
through multiple channels to pay for the expenses of war,
and there was never the slightest degree of accountability
for these transfers. The humanitarian aid that supported
the 3-4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan also passed
through many international, Pakistani, and Afghan hands
before reaching its intended beneficiaries. Intermediaries
of various sorts skimmed off cash and resold commodities.
Profits from both the arms trade and the humanitarian
business were laundered through various avenues, including
the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Dubai-based,
Pakistani-owned institution that collapsed in 1992. But
the arms pipeline itself was also porous. Arms were sold
off at all stages of the pipeline by both Pakistanis and
Afghans, feeding the existing large arms markets in the
area.
The
transport of the arms and supply of goods to the refugees
directly expanded the existing infrastructure for smuggling
and money laundering. While the arms were delivered to
mujahidin parties by Pakistan military trucks (which were
also used for smuggling on return trips), the arms and
other supplies were then transported to the border region,
and, where possible, into Afghanistan, by private trucks,
the same fleet that was used for the drug trade and other
smuggling, but which now expanded, thanks to the increased
demand.
The
basis for Pakistani-Afghan smuggling had long been the
Afghan Transit Trade Agreement (ATTA). Under this agreement,
a variety of listed goods could be imported duty-free
in sealed containers into Pakistan for onward shipment
to land-locked Afghanistan. Much if not most of the goods
were instead sold in smugglers’ markets (bara bazaars)
in Pakistan. Many of these bazaars were located in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan
border, where Pakistani law does not apply. The trucks
used in this lucrative trade were in turn converted for
the arms and drug trade, which in turn made more money
available for investment in smuggling linked to the ATTA.
This
extension of the Afghan war economy was mainly located
in Pakistan. Within Afghanistan itself, the main economic
actors were the commanders. Contrary to some stereotypes,
these commanders were by and large not the "traditional"
(i.e. tribal or landowning) elites favored by the royal
regime, which had been weakened by destruction of the
rural economy, but a group of new elites that benefited
from US, Pakistani, and Saudi policies of supporting only
Islamist parties rather than the nationalist former elite
(Roy, 1986; Rubin, 1995a). Some commanders originated
outside the mujahidin party structures and launched local
insurgencies initially relying on local resources: zakat
and ushr (Islamic taxes) levied on agriculture,
flocks, trade, and wealth, and "contributions"
from traders and other wealthy individuals, as well as
the plundering of government supplies. As the war intensified,
however, commanders increasingly depended on foreign aid
relayed by the parties, and subsequently they too became
more autonomous from local society (Rubin, 1995a: 255-8).
The
commanders sought economic strategies that would increase
their autonomy from the party leaderships as well. In
a number of areas far from the Soviet-controlled main
roads they established bazaars selling items mainly imported
from Pakistan and Iran. They also provided security to
traders in return for tribute. Where possible they sought
aid from Western or Islamic humanitarian organizations
engaged in cross-border assistance from Pakistan. Such
aid provided services and employment that increased resources
under their control as well as their prestige (Dorronsoro,
1996). In some areas they pressured the peasants to grow
opium, a cash crop they could tax. It was also during
this period that the production of opium started to increase.
The
production of opium was related to one of the major macro-economic
changes induced by the war: a rapid increase in the supply
of money, which, combined with the destruction of the
much of the subsistence economy, induced an apparently
large, if as yet unmeasured, monetization of economic
and social relations, as well as hyper-inflation. The
foreign supporters of the mujahidin supplied them with
millions of dollars in cash, and the associated smuggling
enterprises in Pakistan produced large cash profits that
had to be laundered, but it is unknown how much of that
cash ever entered Afghanistan, rather than staying in
Pakistan or being sent elsewhere. The Kabul government,
however, accelerated the emission of currency after the
decision to withdraw Soviet troops. Not only did the government
have to pay for expanded security forces, including militias
recruited on a strictly mercenary basis, but it also lost
its principal sources of revenue. Soviet aid declined,
and natural gas revenues fell after 1986, due to poor
maintenance and lack of investment, and ended when the
Soviet troops left, taking with them the technicians who
ran the gas fields. Money supply data published by the
IMF shows that beginning in 1987 and until the fall of
Najibullah the value of banknotes in circulation increased
by an average of 45 percent per year. Observers spoke
of food prices rising by factors of five or ten. The afghani
rapidly lost value against the dollar, trading at 1000
to the dollar, or about twenty times the official rate,
by the summer of 1991 (Rubin, 1995a: 153-64).
Such
a situation created tremendous incentives to find cash-producing
activities. Starting in 1987, after the introduction of
Stinger missiles and the Soviet decision (still secret)
to withdraw, and a consequent change in military tactics,
roads became much more secure. Both trade and humanitarian
assistance that had previously traveled by pack animal
over mountain trails could now go by truck (SCA, 1988).
Trade, including the import of goods into Afghanistan
and the transit trade (smuggling) into the neighboring
countries from both the Persian Gulf and the Far East
via the trans-Siberian railway, and the drug trade increased.
Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Tajik" commander in
northeast Afghanistan who built up the most extensive
resistance organization inside the country, controlled
the emerald and lapis lazuli mines of his native valley,
Panjsher. He levied a tax on each shipment of gems. After
1984 or so, Massoud also apparently enjoyed a protection
income from the Soviets: he allowed convoys from the USSR
to pass by his area to Kabul unmolested in return for
a share of their content. At the same time, smaller commanders
could accept the monetary payoffs offered by Kabul without
renouncing their local power or allowing government administration
into their areas.
In
those areas where it could be grown economically, opium
was the main expanding source of cash incomes, for both
commanders and the peasantry. In some regions of Afghanistan
(the upper Helmand Valley in particular), the climate
and soil combine to create the world’s highest opium yields.
The ease of marketing opium made it an obvious target
for taxation and predation by local power holders. Equally
important, however, is that unlike any other crop available
to the peasants, its cash value as an export was so certain
that the buyers – commanders or international syndicates
– would advance credit for it in advance of planting under
a system known as salaam. The Afghan peasants receive
a mere fraction of the eventual street value of the opium.
In the provinces with the highest yield (Farah, Qandahar,
Nimroz, Helmand), the income per hectare from opium is
less than 2.5 times that from wheat, and in some it is
substantially less than that (UNOCHA, 1997). But a peasant
who plants opium can obtain a cash advance to see his
family through the winter, even if the implicit annual
interest rate in the salaam system (estimated at
as high as 100 percent) substantially lowers the realized
income. Opium substitutes for credit as well as income
and is thus one of the few reliable alternatives to dependency
on humanitarian assistance. As the opium is refined and
moves up the supply chain, prices rise rapidly, so that
more sophisticated organizations controlling opium bazaars
or border crossing points (as opposed to just some rural
areas) could realize much more substantial incomes.
As
a result of these opportunities, commanders substantially
expanded their autonomy from the parties, from Kabul,
and from the local population during the period after
the Soviet withdrawal but before the fall of the Najibullah
government. Different commanders made different use of
this new situation. A few (Massoud, Heart commander Ismail
Khan) used these resources, as well as Western and Islamic
humanitarian assistance, to build territorially based
institutions inside the country. Gulbuddin Hikmatyar,
the extremist then favored by Pakistani intelligence,
used revenue from the drug trade to build up an enlarged
military force based in Pakistan and south of Kabul. Others
enriched themselves through payoffs, investment in trade,
and predation, especially collection of arbitrary tolls
on trade passing through their area. Battles broke out
from time to time over control of key trade routes, in
particular those used for the transport of opium. The
war economy, like the political structure, remained largely
fragmented among small, largely predatory actors each
of whom maintained an interest in sustaining the chaos
that permitted his predation. At the same time, the overall
lack of security of both person and property blocked the
expansion of even this criminalized economy.
From the Islamic State
to the Islamic Emirate (TOP)
The
fall of the Soviet-supported government of Najibullah
in April 1992 brought mujahidin groups, and in particular
Massoud, to power in Kabul, but rather than establish
a new form of state power that would provide the conditions
for peacetime economic development, the new Islamic State
of Afghanistan reinforced the growing pattern of regional-ethnic
war economies embedded in transnational networks. Despite
its name, the new power enforced virtually nothing Islamic,
did not organize itself as a state, and covered only parts
of Afghanistan. Networks in various regions spanned the
borders. Pakistan supported and instigated attacks on
Kabul by Hikmatyar and others, assuring that the authorities
could concentrate on little but military affairs. An uneven
pattern of regional consolidation partly replaced the
previous fragmentation, but no power could create a national
state or market. Massoud’s organizational power enabled
him to occupy and hold Kabul (or most of it), but he could
not extend his direct control beyond parts of the city
and the northeastern region that constituted his ethnic
base. The fall or defection of former regime forces to
local mujahidin groups in the rest of the country effectively
removed the last obstacles to warlordism and economic
predation. Thus a partly new form of economic bifurcation
developed.
Despite
the change in power, the central state and its associated
economy continued to develop in a way continuous with
the past. Massoud and Rabbani did little to change the
mores of Kabul except requiring women news readers to
wear headscarves on television. As the city was gradually
destroyed by the civil war partly incited by Pakistan,
the bazaars became less lucrative. Civil servants were
often unpaid. The UN and international humanitarian agencies
stepped in to replace the USSR as the supplier of food
for the most vulnerable, but the amount they delivered
remained only about half the amount supplied by the Soviets
(120,000 tons versus 250,000 tons of wheat per year).
The blockade of the southern and eastern routes into the
city by Pakistan-supported forces, first Hikmatyar and
then the Taliban, impeded the commercial supply of food.
The
printing of currency remained probably the single most
important source of state expenditure. Banknotes printed
under first contract in Russia and then by the American
Banknote Company continued to be delivered weekly to the
Rabbani government. The resulting devaluation of the afghani
and inflation were so severe that the government introduced
new currency notes. Under Najibullah the official exchange
rate had been af. 50 to the dollar, and the largest bill
was the af. 1,000 note. By the summer of 1991, the afghani
was trading at about 1,000 to the dollar, and it continued
to fall. The Rabbani government issued first a 5,000 and
then a 10,000 afghani note. Each time it did so the currency
fell further. Hikmatyar forbade the use of the af. 10,000
note in bazaars under his control. The former communist
ethnic Uzbek warlord of northern Afghanistan, Abdul Rashid
Dostum, had his own notes printed after breaking with
Rabbani in January 1994. By September 1996, when Kabul
fell to the Taliban, the afghani was trading at 17,800
to the dollar there. Furthermore, the afghani was worth
even less (25,600/dollar) in Dostum’s de facto capital,
Mazar-i Sharif, indicating the lack of a national market,
a phenomenon that has persisted even though the Taliban
now control Mazar as well.
This
partial regionalization of the monetary economy reflected
the regionalization of the real economy. Each region,
controlled by a different warlord grouping, was more integrated
with the neighboring state than with the rest of the country.
The northern militias that had grouped themselves around
General Abdul Rashid Dostum controlled the trade with
the newly opened states of Central Asia through the bazaar
of Mazar-i Sharif and the customs point at Hairatan. A
variety of small commanders in Badakhshan, allied with
some of the Islamic forces who had fled from Tajikistan,
controlled the opium crop of Badakhshan, which moved north
through war-torn Tajikistan with the help of corrupt officials
and members of the Russian border troops and CIS peacekeeping
forces. The Arsala clan (Haji Abdul Qadir and his brothers)
was at the center of the commercial development of Jalalabad,
profiting from Nangarhar province’s skyrocketing opium
production and using the Jalalabad airport as a center
for the import of goods from Dubai for smuggling into
Pakistan in alliance with Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun
truckers and the local administration of the NWFP. Herat
under Ismail Khan turned into a boom town for trade with
Iran and transit trade coming overland from Dubai (transported
by the same trucking networks) and out to Pakistan by
the southern route. Southern Afghanistan became the largest
opium producing area of the country, possibly the world,
as well as an entrepôt for the smuggling of goods
into Quetta, some over land and some via the Qandahar
airport. The continued prevalence of petty warlordism
and continual infighting in the area, however, imposed
high costs on traders in the form of tolls and tribute.
The
independence of the Central Asian states transformed the
economic stakes in Afghanistan. The oil and gas-rich Central
Asian states, in particular Turkmenistan, saw Afghanistan
as a possible pipeline route to connect them to world
markets without having to reverse US sanctions against
Iran. Pakistan saw commercial and political connections
to Central Asia via Afghanistan as key to the development
of "strategic depth" in its confrontation with
India. Pakistan also needed natural gas, and the Daulatabad
field in Turkmenistan, just north of the Afghan border,
was well positioned to be connected to the Pakistan national
network via a pipeline though Herat and Qandahar to Baluchistan.
This, in turn, placed Pakistan in opposition to Iran,
which aspired to be the outlet to the south for the resources
of the entire Caspian region, both Central Asia and the
trans-Caucasus. The US began to define a national interest
in promoting the national independence and economic diversification
of the Central Asian and Caucasian states, without relaxing
its sanctions on Iran. Pipelines through Afghanistan would
nicely meet both goals. Various companies, including the
US-based UNOCAL, the Saudi company Delta, and the Argentine
firm, Bridas, began negotiations with the Rabbani government
and various de facto powerholders. Bridas paid the Rabbani
government $1 million for a contract signed in January
1996 awarding it the right to the pipeline route (none
of which was then controlled by that government). There
were reports of payoffs in Pakistan as well. The pipeline
projects have since languished as a result of political
uncertainty and the turn of US policy against the Taliban
as a result of their harboring of the accused Saudi terrorist,
Usama bin Ladin, but some of the effects of early competition
over pipeline routes have persisted.
Pipeline
politics formed an important part of the strategic and
economic context in which the Islamic Movement of Taliban
arrived on the scene in October 1994. Significantly, the
Taliban’s first major operation was to free a Pakistani
trade convoy, led by an ISI officer, heading for Turkmenistan
via Qandahar and Herat, along the projected pipeline route,
from a blockade set up by tribal (Achakzai) militia, who
were demanding exorbitant tolls. The convoy rolled on
to Turkmenistan via Herat as the Taliban marched into
Qandahar (Rubin 1995b; Maley 1998; Rashid 1998).
Nearly
five year later, the Taliban, who have renamed the country
the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, are the militarily
dominant group in all regions of Afghanistan save the
northeast, where Massoud and some local commanders affiliated
with Rabbani hold out. Shia commanders still offer resistance
in north central Afghanistan as well. To say that the
Taliban "control," say, 85 percent of the country
would be an exaggeration, but they have largely defeated
or disarmed competitors, mainly local armed power-holders.
The Taliban advance was partly accomplished militarily:
with Pakistani assistance, they have built up the largest
more or less centralized armed force in the country. But
the accomplishment was also financial. Like Najibullah
and the mujahidin parties before them, much of the allegiance
professed to them was purchased for cash. In areas that
are frequently reported to change hands between the Taliban
and their opponents, the common change of events is the
payment of a commander by one side or another, who then
announces a change in allegiance. The Taliban captured
Kabul after paying of a Hizb-i Islami commander (Zardad,
in Sarobi) who blocked their advance up the narrow defile
from Jalalabad.
The
Taliban’s victory has permitted the consolidation of a
number of phenomena that had been developing previously,
namely the emergence of transnational trade networks of
the Afghan regional diaspora, linked to smuggling and
drug trading groups in the surrounding countries as well
as to political parties, religious groups, and elements
of the administration, especially in Pakistan (Rashid,
1998). On a smaller scale, northeast Afghanistan is becoming
linked to Central Asia.
The
key achievement of the Taliban is what they call "security,"
meaning above all the suppression of virtually all forms
of predation by local power-holders, including tolls,
banditry, and exaction of exorbitant tributes. Taliban
officials often describe this situation by telling visitors
they can now drive from one end of the country to the
other even at night with a car full of gold, and no one
will disturb them. This method of describing their achievement
illustrates its important economic motivation, as well
as the principal beneficiaries: those driving from one
end of the country to the other with trucks full of valuable
goods. The security provided by the Taliban has greatly
reduced the cost of long-distance trade and provided the
peasantry with greater confidence that they will enjoy
the fruits of their labor. This is one reason for the
rise in recent years of not only the transit trade but
the production of both wheat and opium in Taliban dominated
areas.
The
provision of security of travel along the entire route
from Torghundi, on the Turkmenistan border, through Herat
and Qandahar, and out to Pakistan via Spin Boldak has
opened a major corridor for the smuggling of duty-free
consumer goods from Dubai to Pakistan and beyond. Some
good are flown directly into the Qandahar airport for
shipment to Pakistan. The content of this trade complements
the smuggling taking place under cover of the ATTA and
responds directly to changes in the latter. Driving from
Qandahar to Farah in June 1999 along the main smuggling
route, I noted that many of the trucks appeared to be
carrying automotive vehicle tires and spare parts rather
than the electronic appliances (televisions, video cassette
recorders) I had heard so much about. I later learned
that automotive parts had recently been eliminated from
the list of goods eligible for duty-free import under
ATTA, and that they were therefore being imported by this
alternate route (Naqvi 1999).
A
World Bank study estimates that this trade amounted to
at least $2.5 billion per year in 1997, the first year
after the Taliban capture of Kabul, equivalent to nearly
half of Afghanistan’s estimated GDP and around 12-13 percent
of Pakistan’s total trade. Diplomatic sources in Central
Asia reported that truck traffic through Torghundi tripled
within two weeks after the Taliban capture of Mazar-i
Sharif in August 1998, so the figure now might be significantly
higher. These figures exclude trade in illegal goods such
as drugs and arms, which would also raise the figures
significantly. This transit trade has provided an important
mechanism for the laundering of profits from the drug
trade.
The
drug trade is also a major source of Taliban revenues.
In recent years Afghanistan has been the world’s largest
producer of opium, with a harvest estimated at 2,800 tons
of raw opium gum in 1998. While the farmers receive little
for this crop, it sells for thousands of dollars per kilogram
at the Afghan border. The Taliban levy zakat of
20 percent on this trade, yielding revenues in the vicinity
of $100-200 million per year. The funds raised in this
manner do not fund the expenses of the Taliban government
based in Kabul but directly to a war treasury controlled
directly by the Taliban leader, Mulla Muhammad Umar, in
Qandahar. In addition, the Taliban also request special
contributions from the truckers when funds are needed
for an offensive (Rashid, 1999). The Peshawar and Quetta
trucking associations were key financial backers of the
Taliban, as they greatly profited from the latter’s abolition
of predatory tolls and raids along the road. According
to some reports, it was these trucking interests more
than the Pakistani ISI and military who urged the Taliban
to capture Herat in September 1995. The truckers also
donate significant sums to the madrasas, a traditional
way for the newly rich to legitimate their wealth and
attain respectability in Muslim societies (Rashid, 1998).
The
transit and drug trades are complemented by service industries.
A network of fuel stations has grown up along the route
to supply diesel to the trucks, and sources in Qandahar
claim that these are controlled by members of the families
of some important figures in the Taliban leadership. Qandahar
itself now has several areas of the city devoted largely
to parking for trucks and boasts several fuel stations
itself, as well as shops and tea houses catering to the
drivers. Much of the fuel, of course, is smuggled from
Iran, where its subsidized price is approximately $0.03
per liter, considerable less than a soft drink.
The
Taliban have this made a transition from localized predatory
warlordism to a weak kind of rentier state power based
on a criminalized open economy. The benefits of this new
economic activity are evident in increased prosperity
in Qandahar, Jalalabad, and Herat. The trade also appears
to have shifted more toward the Taliban’s home base in
Qandahar. Kabul, seen by the Taliban as the center of
corruption, and key to the national, not regional, economy,
has largely been left out and is experiencing increasing
poverty. The population of Kabul is more dependent on
international humanitarian assistance, when it is available,
than other areas of the country, but this aid does not
seem to play an important role in legitimating the Taliban
domestically, as Kabul is not part of their political
base.
This
increase in economic activity has provided the Taliban
with a more stable source of domestic revenue than other
armed groups. The World Bank study cited above (Naqvi,
1999) estimates that the Taliban derived at least $75
million in 1997 from taxing Afghanistan-Pakistan trade,
and, as noted, they may receive over twice that amount
from taxes on the drug trade and contributions from the
truckers.
The
official budget in Kabul is paid for by direct foreign
aid from Pakistan (Rs. 500 million or about $10 million
in 1998), and a few taxes from Kabul itself. Until late
1998 the Taliban also received direct financial assistance
from Saudi Arabia, which provided subsidized fuel, as
well as cash grants. These were ended in protest over
the Taliban’s failure to expel or curb Usama bin Ladin.
Bin Ladin himself is reputed to have put some of his wealth
at the Taliban’s service, paying, according to some reports,
for the capture of Kabul in September 1996. It is not
known how much income the Taliban may still derive from
supporters in the Persian Gulf, though their leaders tour
mosques there and raise what appear to be significant
contributions, especially in the UAE (some from Arabs
and some from expatriate Afghans active in the transit
trade).
Interestingly,
the Taliban have not begun printing their own currency,
though they now control the head office and all major
regional branches of Da Afghanistan Bank (the central
bank). Banknotes apparently continue to be delivered to
Afghanistan from American Banknote via the Massoud-Rabbani
forces, and the Taliban continue to recognize these notes,
despite their protest against this funding of their enemies.
From the Taliban capture of Kabul in September 1996 to
May 1999, the afghani lost about 60 percent of its value
against the dollar in Kabul and over 70 percent of its
value in Mazar-i Sharif. The Taliban have forbidden the
use of "Dostum" currency.
Hence
unlike all previous governments, the Taliban cannot finance
their operations through the printing press, while their
opponents can undermine their finances by printing money.
Taliban banking officials state that they recognize the
Rabbani currency because he was the ruler ("padishah")
of Afghanistan and that they do not wish to undermine
national unity by circulating two national currencies.
In practice, since the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate is recognized
by only three countries (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates), all of which have their own banknotes
printed abroad, the Taliban would probably be unable to
obtain professionally printed notes.
The
network of groups supporting the Taliban illustrates the
intertwining of economics, politics, and religion in the
region. The Taliban are a transnational movement led by
Afghans but organizationally present in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan primarily through a particular sectarian
network of madrasas and political parties (Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i
Islam) belonging to the Deobandi movement. This movement,
named after a town in northern India where conservative
ulama established a madrasa in the nineteenth century,
was founded to combat Islamic modernism, and, in particular,
reforms in Muslim education. Unlike Islamic revolutionaries,
Deobandi activists oppose blending Islamic concepts with
modern institutions or political ideologies and favor
little more than the imposition of a rigid interpretation
of sharia.
The
Afghan leadership of the Taliban receives key aid (capacity
building) from Pakistani intelligence and military officers
and recruits troops and staff from both sides of the border.
About 25-30 percent of Taliban troops are now estimated
to be Pakistani volunteers, mostly recruited from madrasas
and political groups, not the Pakistani military. These
fighters are increasingly organized in separate groups,
as are groups of Arabs and other international supporters.
The
religious and political networks are in turn are supported
by trans-border economic networks (consumer goods smugglers,
drug traffickers). These have close relations not only
with the Taliban but with the local administration in
Pakistan, where the goods are sold in smugglers’ markets
(Rashid 1998). The transit trade and drug trade thus erode
the integrity of the Pakistani state. Given that country’s
fiscal dependence on customs duties and sales taxes on
luxury goods, the toleration of such a large black market
is a significant contributor to Pakistan’s financial crisis
(Naqvi, 1999). Attempts to impose fiscal discipline in
Pakistan, which would harm the economic base of the Taliban,
languish from the effects of both ISIs. Such measures
are opposed not only by Pakistani constituencies, including
smugglers, that have formed around the effects of the
import-substitution industrialization trade regime, but
by the security services, including the other ISI, that
want to strengthen the Taliban. For instance, some Pakistani
economic technocrats proposed reforming the ATTA to require
payment of duty upon entrance of goods into Pakistan,
which would be refundable at the point of entry into Afghanistan.
When the Taliban refused the first proposal, the Pakistani
state made no further effort to press the issue. And yet
the country continues to receive disbursements from an
IMF Extended Fund Facility.
The
economic networks involved extend beyond Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Afghanistan now appears to be the second largest
trading partner of the United Arab Emirates (along with
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, one of the only three states
that recognize the Taliban regime). This reflects the
purchase of duty-free goods in Dubai by Afghan traders
shipping them onward for smuggling. Afghan traders dominate
the grain trade in Dushanbe, and Persian is becoming more
common even in the Pashto- and Hindko-speaking bazaar
of Peshawar. The northern-based opposition also benefits
from the drug trade and smuggling (including the gems
of Panjsher).
The
drug and arms trade have brought international organized
crime into the region. Though about 90 percent of the
opium is grown in Taliban-controlled southern Afghanistan,
increasing portions of it are smuggled northward, partly
under the control of the Russian mafia. Russian organized
crime groups have been involved in Afghanistan for years.
They are important as arms suppliers for Massoud and as
middlemen for opium exports. One major export route goes
from territory controlled by Massoud and Rabbani in the
northeast across the Tajikistan border, where some of
it is transported by Russian troops and border guards
to Osh, Kyrgyzstan, which has become a major transshipment
point. The money involved in the drug and arms trades
is undermining state institutions throughout Central Asia
and is also affecting Russia.
The
burgeoning long-distance trade, both criminalized and
criminal, is an important source of Taliban power. The
use of the provision of security to remove tolls and create
a more uniform national market is a classic task of state
building. The decision of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and
the US to supply massive quantities of weapons only to
religious parties rather than to Afghan nationalists who
might challenge Pakistan, followed by Pakistan’s post-1994
support specifically for Deobandi networks, combined with
the resources produced by this trade to allow a group
of ulama to control the state apparatus directly or the
first time in history. The Taliban do not represent a
qawm (solidarity group) or an ethnicity, despite
the dominance of Qandahari Pashtuns in their leadership.
They represent not just a partisan faction but a social
group, the privately educated, rural ulama and their students
affiliated to the Deobandi movement. This network covers
all rural parts of the country inhabited by Sunni Muslims
but was marginalized and encapsulated by 100 years of
statebuilding and the creation of new elites in partnership
with the rulers. For the past 20 years various factions
of these new elites, educated in Afghanistan’s state institutions
and in the West and the USSR, have busied themselves killing,
arresting, and exiling each other with the help of foreign
powers. Meanwhile private madrasas offered the only education
available for Pashtun refugee and rural boys after 1978,
since the West did virtually nothing to provide modern
education for them. The consequent growth of the madrasas
reinvigorated the Deobandi network. It lost, however,
its ties to the khan-dominated local economy and society
that had circumscribed its power. Both the state and the
rural economy that had strengthened the khans collapsed.
The Deobandi ulama became reinvigorated and more autonomous
in exile and in warlord-dominated Afghanistan, resulting
in their becoming more extremist and deracinated than
was traditionally the case. In exile they also linked
to international networks, both political and economic.
The replacement of the khan-dominated subsistence and
local-trade economy by a warlord-dominated commercial
agriculture tied to long-distance contraband provides
this newly armed elite with the opportunity to mobilize
resources to exercise power directly, as it never did
before.
The
domination of the central state, or what is left of it,
by this previously marginalized group has effectively
reversed the pattern of social, political, and economic
bifurcation developed under the royal regime and intensified
under the communists. The capital city is now ruled by
a force from the countryside, which is attempting to reverse
the past decades of reforms. The Taliban have not used
the resources they can mobilize to rebuild much of the
state’s administrative apparatus and, as noted, have not
printed money to finance their operations, as did Najibullah,
and as Rabbani and Massoud still do. Most (two thirds,
according to one senior Taliban official) of the funds
of the Islamic Emirate, as the Taliban call their state,
go to the war effort, and there is no formal budget. Civil
servants’ salaries are derisory (e.g. $5 per month) and
are paid infrequently in any case. Nor have the Taliban
as yet shown interest in a development strategy. A few
foreign businessmen have started ventures in Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan, mostly tied to the transit trade. These include
a British-American venture into telecommunications, which
will facilitate contact of Afghan merchants and truckers
with suppliers and customers in Dubai and Pakistan, and
a cement factory, needed for road repair. U.S. sanctions
against investment in Taliban-controlled areas in July
1999 are unlikely to affect an economy that is already
predominantly illegal.
The
Taliban in power thus raise resources from foreign supporters
and criminalized trade, which they use in turn to fight
their opponents and impose the strict version of sharia,
which consists largely of harsh prohibitions, rather than
a positive vision of developing an Islamic society. The
Taliban attitude toward the state reflects both the negative
experience of the past 20 years, during much of which
a central state dominated by a foreign ideology destroyed
much of the country, and the longer-standing Afghan popular
view of the state as a predator that takes from the people
and gives little or nothing in return (Dupree, 1980).
The annihilation of the state and the development and
reformist agenda it had pursued under several governments
also spells the end for now of the emancipation of urban
women through decrees by modernizing male leaders.
Micro Political Economy
of Conflict (TOP)
In
addition to the macro-economics of the conflict discussed
thus far, socio-economic conflicts related to the war
have also developed at the local level in ways that differ
from region to region. The collapse and partial revival
of the state, the destruction of assets, and the mass
displacement and partial return of the population has
created a growing crisis in property relations. The old
regime in Afghanistan had established private property
in land and pasture and used these regulations in favor
of Pashtun nomads and settlers in northern and central
Afghanistan. State protection of property in land also
made possible the development of absentee landlordism
in areas around major cities. In many areas landlords
were better able to afford emigration or were enticed
into the regime’s program of "national reconciliation,"
which promised state protection of their property and
exemption from land reform, while tenants and the landless
stayed to fight in the jihad – and for the land of those
who sided with the regime. Property relations changed
greatly over the years of war, and the advent of the Taliban,
a largely Pashtun group professing support for private
property, is changing them again.
Nomadic
sections of Pashtun tribes such as the Ahmadzai formerly
moved their flocks into the high mountains of Hazarajat
during the summer. The nomads, whose mobility gave them
a natural vocation as traders, also had more access to
cash and acted as bankers for the local peasantry, who
were often heavily indebted. The revolt of the Shi’a Hazaras
against the communists in 1979, however, was also a declaration
of autonomy from the Pashtun-dominated Sunni Muslim state.
Since that time Pashtun nomads have been unable to use
pastures in Hazarajat or collect their debts. Hence a
number of the tribes that formerly migrated there have
given their support to the Taliban reconquest of the area.
According to some reports, the "Taliban" troops
investing Hazarajat from the south were largely Ahmadzai
nomads aiming to get their pastures back. More recently,
armed young men from Pashtun nomadic tribes have returned
to Hazarajat with the intention of collecting twenty-year
old debts.
Similarly,
the fertile lowlands on the edges, particular the north,
of Hazarajat, are inhabited by largely Tajik (therefore
Sunni) populations who were also favored by the state
against their Shia neighbors. These groups lost land and
other assets to the Hazaras over the past 20 years and
now form the base of Taliban support in these areas. As
Bamiyan, the center of the Hazara-controlled areas in
central Afghanistan, changed hands in early 1999 from
the Taliban back to the Shia parties and then back again,
both Hazaras and Taliban recruited from among local Tajiks
engaged in several rounds of burning homes, killing, and
expelling populations in a pattern similar to ethnic cleansing.
This may well have been due as much to local conflicts
that became articulated with the national one as to the
latter alone.
Pashtun
nomads also lost pasture on the northern steppes such
as Dasht-i Archi in Kunduz, and Pashtun landlords lost
control of their agricultural lands in these areas. Some
of the these dispossessed forces were recruited into Najibullah’s
"national reconciliation" program (especially
Pashtun landlords who had been local dignitaries under
the king but who had been dispossessed by "mujahidin"
recruited from the peasantry). Landlords around Herat
and Qandahar lost control to their tenants. In other areas
the wealthier landlords were better able to afford the
journey abroad and therefore were more likely to become
refugees. In such cases local ulama often allotted use
of their land to the families of mujahidin or martyrs.
As people return from exile, they demand their land back,
sometimes taking disputes to Taliban courts. All of these
transformations have created a rich field for property
and monetary disputes, sometimes connected to ethnic,
tribal, or clan conflicts, as well as class. The Taliban,
in the guise of restoring lawful private property, seem
to have used their authority to reward their supporters,
which means certain tribes in some areas, Pashtuns in
some areas, and Tajiks in others. More studies of local
situations need to be carried out to understand the nature
of local disputes. As overall security and stability returns,
so do landowners and nomads, creating the ground for disputes
that can undermine peace at the local level and provide
recruits for new revolts.
Political Economy of
Peacemaking (TOP)
"Peace"
could come to Afghanistan in many forms. It could, for
instance, arrive in the guise of a victory by one faction,
most likely the Taliban, or a melding or reconfiguration
of existing armed groups, ending open fighting and transforming
the criminalized war economy into an even faster-expanding
criminalized peace economy. Indeed, whatever political
group might take control of Afghanistan, the economic
incentives for misgovernment are nearly irresistible.
Only the drug and transit trade are really worth the effort
of taxation, while the rest of the economy is hardly productive
enough to make governing it worthwhile. It is difficult
to recover the cost of more than a very sparse administration
of such an economy and society. Such a political economy
would leave the power holders as unaccountable to most
Afghan people as they were under previous regimes. Most
of the population would be left to fend for themselves,
in conditions of greater security, but without a development
agenda, public services, or reforms, notably in the status
of women.
Such
a peace would continue to threaten the region, as expanding
drug trade, money laundering, and smuggling would undermine
governance in several countries, strengthen Taliban-like
forces in Pakistan, continue to pose both political and
practical obstacles to international reconstruction assistance,
and provoke a defensive reaction from Afghanistan’s other
neighbors in Iran and Central Asia. The resulting tensions
among and within states in the region would make such
a peace elusive indeed.
A
more challenging but, if successful, more rewarding alternative,
is to consider peacemaking in Afghanistan as part of a
larger problem, of transforming the political economy
of a region. It has finally dawned on Europe and the United
States that nothing less will work in the Balkans. There
is no reason to think that Central and Southwest Asia
will be a simpler problem. It would be premature to offer
a full plan, which in any case is beyond my competence.
The resources for such a project are also unlikely to
be harder to raise outside of Europe. But I can offer
a few suggestions as to what such a plan would have to
accomplish.
No
major institution has started planning for reconstruction
of Afghanistan or involved Afghans in thinking about what
such a process would involve. Even starting a serious
international planning process conditional on a cessation
of hostilities and observance of minimal humanitarian
and human rights principles (the right of both sexes to
available education and health care) might affect the
current dynamic of conflict. Local actors now assume that
no aid for reconstruction will be available however they
behave. It is not surprising that they find it relatively
easy to dismiss international professions of concern about
Afghanistan and their own behavior.
Aid
for reconstruction of Afghanistan should be decided upon
and disbursed in such a way that it build reciprocity
between state and society and make the former more accountable
to the latter. For instance, programs aimed at replacing
opium poppies would also have to find alternative sources
for financing state activities (Rashid, 1999). The existing
economic actors would have to be drawn into alternative
forms of activities from which they could realize reasonable
profits that they could enjoy more easily than the perhaps
larger but illicit ones of today.
The
international private sector could also be involved as
a source of funds. Today positions on the proposed pipeline
and other potential international investments in Afghanistan
are polarized around attitudes toward the Taliban. Those
who favor confrontation or boycotting them oppose such
investments, while Taliban supporters and some in favor
of engagement with the Taliban support them. The pipeline,
in particular, which requires an investment of $2.5 billion,
at least half of which would have to be financed externally,
is stymied by political opposition and, potentially, US
sanctions.
A
more creative solution might find ways to finance the
investment while reducing the risk that it would fund
the war. Could, perhaps, financing be offered, on the
condition that the rental income go not to any armed group,
but to a fund for community development and reconstruction?
This would resemble the arrangement currently in operation
for overflight fees. Airlines crossing Afghan territory
on long-distance flights pay such fees into a Swiss account
managed by the International Air Transport Authority (IATA).
The funds are held in trust for spending on civil aviation
requirements deemed necessary by IATA (AFP, June 29, 1999).
Perhaps such a fund from pipeline incomes could be administered
by an international organization under a board including
the major political groups as well as prominent Afghans
and technical advisers, Afghan and international. Naturally
the problem of fungibility would have to be addressed.
The
current dysfunctional regional political and economic
relationships would also have to be changed. At the moment
Pakistan’s actions in Afghanistan are the result of semi
autonomous groups within the state and society pursuing
their goals. The civilian prime minister does not fully
control the military, parts of the intelligence services
may be freelancing, and provincial governments deeply
corrupted by links to smugglers openly refuse to implement
central regulations. The result is a set of policies in
Afghanistan that could deeply threaten Pakistan itself.
Pakistan in effect promotes economic practices that destroy
its own budget due to a combination of internal corruption
and the imperatives, as the security services see them,
of covert action in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Pakistan
needs to develop the institutional basis for articulating
a national interest that would unite both economic and
security concerns, as well as the welfare of its own people.
Articulation of such a national interest would also favor
more equitable relations with Afghanistan. Pakistani businesses
could benefit from legitimate trade with Afghanistan and
even more from its reconstruction under international
auspices. Representatives of Pakistani businesses that
stand to benefit from contracts for the reconstruction
of Afghanistan also should be involved in the planning
process. They constitute a significant support base for
the Pakistani civilian politicians, and might help shift
the balance of interests toward legitimate business interests
in Afghanistan.
Greater
financial discipline and accountability in Pakistan would
be key to this process. This far Pakistan’s fiscal crisis
has been seen largely as a country-specific problem, but
it is central to the decay of state institutions and governance
throughout the region. A comprehensive plan for the reconstruction
of Afghanistan would also have to include significant
reform in Pakistan to transform some of the destructive
links between the two societies. The ATTA would have to
be reformed as part of a general change away from the
high duties of an import substitution regime toward the
legal institutionalization of the greater openness that
exists de facto outside the law.
This
in turn would be virtually impossible to sustain in a
region with such wide disparities in trade policy. International
institutions should work with the regional powers toward
something approximating a customs union which would both
make legitimate trade more attractive and reduce incentives
to smuggling. Greater cross-border cooperation and confidence
building measures with Iran might also help reduce regional
tensions and create a common stake in rebuilding the country.
The
drug and arms trades present particularly difficult obstacles.
The Taliban have recently agreed to rather stringent crop-substitution
programs in some of their core areas. But such programs
will only be sustainable if the economy of Afghanistan
and the region begin to offer more alternative sources
of livelihoods, especially to young people, and if a transformed
economy can provide alternative sources to finance the
state.
Most
important is working with Afghans to change the image
and role of the state, seen largely as a distant and indifferent
if not hostile power. Local power structures that have
largely grown up as defensive measures of self-rule to
keep the state or powerholders away have to be incorporated
into official structures of planning and service provision.
It is unlikely that any central power will find it worthwhile
to provide localities with much in the way of governance
and services. For this very reason, Afghanistan needs
a decentralized governance structure in which provinces
and localities should receive official authority to tax
and plan in consultation with local shuras (councils).
In the past local societies developed unofficial power
structures to shield themselves from the state, rather
than participate it, and the centralizing mentality shared
by the Taliban and much of their opposition reproduces
that past pattern. Instead, modest local resources under
local control could be directed into locally accountable
planning processes rather than a dysfunctional central
state. The central state will still be needed for provision
of basic security and dispute resolution, but a clear
division of labor among levels of governance will promote
greater accountability over the reconstruction process.
The
disintegration of the state creates such potentials, though
the criminalized economy that has filled the gap in providing
livelihoods has created interests that will resist it.
But unless peacemaking can appeal to the interests of
powerful economic actors and transform them into agents
of peace, it will be limited at best to halting fighting
in one place before social and economic forces provoke
it once again elsewhere in this dangerous region.
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Author
contact information:
Barnett
R. Rubin
Council
on Foreign Relations
58
East 68 Street
New
York, NY 10021 USA
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