AFGHANISTAN: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF A MODERN STATE.

AuthorNawabi, Jawied

INTRODUCTION

In August 2019, Afghans marked their centennial independence from the British Empire; yet, presently Afghan independence is a phantasm. But it was not always so. In August 2017, President Donald Trump announced a new policy for the US occupation of Afghanistan, which had become America's longest war (2001-21). Retreating from his preelection statements when he called the war in Afghanistan a "total disaster" and a waste of money, President Trump decided to escalate the occupation by sending an additional 4,000 troops, bringing the total to about 14,000 boots on the ground. (1)

The military surge was meant to defeat the Taliban, who had been fighting against the US-backed Afghan government and the US occupying forces since 2001. A key factor in Trump's policy reversal was a series of photographs taken in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, in the 1970s. The photographs show women strolling on the sidewalks wearing long-sleeved blouses, miniskirts, and unaccompanied by men. The photographs were meant to contrast Afghanistan's more liberal past with the religious traditionalism and lack of women's rights and freedoms that are socially and politically dominant in Afghanistan today. In addition, the photos were interpreted to suggest that with a military defeat of the Taliban, which the troop surge was ostensibly meant to accomplish, a modern Afghanistan would be possible.

After Trump assumed the presidency, the conflict had escalated. In addition to the troop deployment, the United States increased its support for the Afghan air force, intensified airstrikes and bombing raids, and dropped the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in history on the country. Meanwhile, since the beginning of the war at least 47,000 Afghan civilians (these are conservative figures) had been killed, and millions had been displaced, becoming internal and external refugees. (2) Still, the US campaign in Afghanistan had been an abject failure in terms of bringing peace and development. As the "Afghanistan Papers," consisting of over two thousand pages of government documents, dramatically illustrate, the US presence in Afghanistan has been marred by dysfunction, corruption, waste and mismanagement, unaccountability, and deliberate public deception. (3) Moreover, over the last several years, the Taliban have intensified their resistance and terrorist attacks, and together with ISIS, which has more recently infiltrated Afghanistan, have targeted not only foreign and Afghan security forces but also civilians at polling stations, sporting events, schools, and shopping areas. Despite the US military surge, the Taliban once again control large parts of the country. (4) During their rule over Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban had eviscerated social freedoms, dismantled the modernizing state, and replaced it with a theocratic, medieval failed state. In February 2020, dismissing the inclusion of the Afghan government as a US puppet regime, the Taliban negotiated with the United States a peace agreement effectively handing the country over to the Wahhabi-fundamentalist (namely, the Taliban), anti-modern, and reactionary group. Honoring the agreement, President Biden withdrew the remaining US troops at the end of August 2021, but a significant CIA corps and a sizable private contractor presence, including private mercenaries, remain in the country. (5)

The dissemination of the 1970s Kabul photos shed light on a history of Afghanistan that has been obscured by decades of war, religious fundamentalism, and deception among the American foreign policy establishment. Among influential US foreign policy experts, Afghanistan is presented as a country without any tradition of a central state or, at best, a weak state. (6) It is depicted as a fragmented, tribal-based society ruled by local or regional warlords--a society of unbroken tribalism and traditionalism, impenetrable to secular and modern values, and culturally impervious to political and economic modernization--in essence, an archaic country, stuck in times long past. Francis Fukuyama and Robert Kaplan typify this general point of view. According to Fukuyama, Afghanistan "never had a modern state... it remained a tribal confederation with minimal state penetration outside of the capital Kabul... and years of communist misrule and civil war eliminated everything that was left of that already weak state." (7) In Kaplan's estimation, "Afghanistan existed without bridges to the twentieth century. The country is mired in medievalism." (8)

The characterization of Afghanistan by Fukuyama, Kaplan, and much of the US foreign policy community is orientalist and revisionist history. Fukuyama et al. survey contemporary Afghanistan's weak state and the tribal, ethnic, religious warlordism that dominates the politics of the country and extrapolate backward, pointing to contemporary failures in nation-building as being rooted in Afghan history and culture of tribalism and/or corruption. This ahistorical analysis absolves foreign actors of their role in unmaking Afghanistan's state and modernization project, which resulted in contemporary warlordism, religious fundamentalism, parasitic levels of corruption, and a lack of basic state capacity.

Recent scholarship arrives at a similarly debatable conclusion. Carter Malkasian blames the failures of US state-building efforts on an internal Afghan culture of corruption. (9) S. Yaqub Ibrahimi, using a state--society relations framework, argues that the fragility of the Afghan state is the result of its own internal cultural/political dynamics. (10) Ibrahimi employs the predatory, rentier, and developmental typologies used to designate the quality of a state's effectiveness to execute the large-scale developmental tasks and day-to-day administrative duties of a functioning modern state. From its origin and throughout its history, Ibrahimi concludes, the Afghan state was "a 'rentier-to-predatory' state." (11) While we might agree with Ibrahimi's categorization of the Afghan state today, we disagree with his historical assessment of the Afghan state and his overemphasis on state--society relations as the explanatory framework of the Afghan state. As our argument will make the case, by the 1970s, the Afghan state had formed along the "rentier-developmental" state pathway, as evidenced by the many developmental projects under way during the leadership of Daoud Khan. Furthermore, we disagree with Ibrahimi's emphasis on the endogenous dynamics of Afghan state--society relations in explaining the lack of a modern state in the present. While internal factors no doubt had a role, Ibrahim's and Malkasian's frameworks minimize the crucial importance of exogenous causal factors (mainly the US/British policies), which we argue have overwhelmed and distorted the internal modernizing dynamics of Afghanistan's state-building project, transforming a once-promising "rentier-developmental" state into a failed state.

In fact, for much of the twentieth century Afghanistan did have a modern state and was solidly on the path to social and political modernization. As the photos that piqued President Trump's interest illustrate, the historical record of Afghanistan's state development reveals that the country had undergone more than half a century of economic, political, and social modernization. While Afghanistan's modernization was contested by religious conservatives, tribal leaders, and ethnic minorities who were discriminated against, nonetheless, by the 1970s traditionalist forces were socially and politically in retreat, and the state was on a modern trajectory. (12)

The political struggle between modernizers and traditionalists is not unique to Afghanistan. Where Afghanistan's historical course differs is in the role that foreign powers have had in determining the outcomes of political struggles endogenous to the country. The contemporary triumph of warlords, and as a consequence the decimated state, is not a predestined, linear outcome determined by Afghanistan's "medievalism." Instead, it is the result of political contestation between secular modernizers and religious, tribal warlords and the role played by exogenous forces that reversed decades of secularization, modernization, and state formation and brought Islamic fundamentalists and tribal reactionaries to positions of power in Afghanistan. (13)

There are many volumes of scholarly and journalistic research on Afghanistan. Our essay draws on this literature to offer a unique interpretation by contextualizing the failure of US-sponsored state-building in Afghanistan with more successful efforts in the country's history. (14) Our analysis is historical. It highlights the centrality of state-led development in the making of a modern Afghan society in the mid-twentieth century. (15) After two decades of neoliberal reconstruction, Afghanistan is what David Chandler has termed a "phantom state": a state in possession of legal sovereignty (de jure) but which, due to its dependence on external actors for security and material provision, "lacks strong links between the state and society," which is the basis of "social and political legitimacy." (16) Our main thesis is that Afghanistan's phantom state is not an unintended consequence or the result of Afghans' culture, tribalism, ethnic division, or a history lacking in modern state institutions. Instead, a new technique of control has been instituted. The neoliberal nation-building model privileges the market over the state; makes the fiscal apparatus of the state dependent on external, mainly Western support, exposing the state to external monitoring; and, despite the language of capacity-building, actually circumscribes the sovereignty of the state, relegating it to the periphery of social and economic life. (17)

In US-occupied Afghanistan, neoliberal nation-building was instituted through extensive reliance on NGOs, private consultants, and foreign and domestic...

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