From war economy to peace economy? Reconstruction and state building in Afghanistan.

AuthorGoodhand, Jonathan

Winning the peace in Afghanistan depends in no small part on international and domestic efforts to transform the war economy into a peace economy. Based on international experience, this is unlikely to happen quickly. In other contexts, economic activity generated in conflict has persisted into "peacetime" conditions. (1) This article puts forward a tentative framework for understanding the war economy and explores some of the implications for current efforts to build peace. (2) While it focuses on how the Afghan economy has been "adjusted" by war, this process can only be understood with reference to the politics of state formation and state crisis in Afghanistan and the wider region. Four interrelated themes are highlighted. First, the war economy has been both a cause and a consequence of state crisis. Second, the war economy has empowered borderlands, transforming the politics of core-periphery relations in Afghanistan. Third, the war economy is part of a regional conflict system, with Afghanistan reverting to its pre-buffer state status of a territory with open borders, crossed by trade routes. Fourth, international actors helped create the war economy by supporting armed groups in the 1980s and adopting a policy of containment in the 1990s.

These themes will be explored through an analytical framework that subdivides the war economy into the combat, shadow and coping economies. Though they are interconnected, each involves different types of actors, incentives, commodities and relationships. It is argued that these economies are not only concerned with profit and predation but also with coping and survival. The war economy has contributed to processes of actually existing development, leading to the transformation of social and economic relations in Afghanistan. This suggests that the policy focus should change from its current emphasis on eradication and control to one that seeks to harness the energies of war in order to build long term peace and security.

THE STATE, BORDERLANDS AND A REGIONAL CONFLICT SYSTEM

The historical development of the war economy in Afghanistan has been dealt with elsewhere (3). The lack of serious research inside the country during the war years held back understanding, and reliable data is still difficult to come by. (4) However, the following themes can be drawn from the literature and provide a useful starting point for analyzing the Afghan war economy.

First, to understand the economy one has to look at the Afghan polity. Many of the features of the current political economy have strong continuities with the past. The state in Afghanistan was built upon shaky foundations. Internal processes of colonization were never completed because rulers lacked the military force to subdue the tribes or withstand external aggression. Territorial sovereignty was an ideal to which Afghan rulers aspired but rarely if ever achieved in practice. In fact, for most of Afghan history there was no state in any robust sense of the term. There were instead multiple sovereigns including small-scale local chiefs, tribal confederations, bandits or warlords.

Second, one has to look "below" the state, to appreciate the relationship between the Afghan war economy and "non-state spaces." (5) Throughout Afghan history there has been an ongoing struggle between center and periphery, between a modernizing state and borderland communities attempting to remain beyond the reach of the state-building project. In this "conversation" between state and borderlands, violent conflicts have been defining moments of change, shifting the balance of power back and forth between core and periphery. Arguably, the borderlands were empowered by the Afghan wars and there is a need to rethink the nature of their relationship with the reemerging state.

Third, the analytical gaze needs to be directed beyond the state to appreciate the regional dimensions of the war economy. Afghanistan is part of a regional conflict complex, or a "bad neighborhood" which connects other latent and open conflicts within the region, including Kashmir, Tajikistan and the Ferghana Valley. The Central Asia conflict complex is one of 16 regionalized violent conflicts to have occurred since the Cold War. (6) The outer borders of this complex are unclear, but for the purpose of this article the core Central Asian regional complex is defined as Afghanistan and the neighboring countries of Pakistan, Iran and all the Central Asian states, i.e. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The region includes close to 300 million people. Beyond this core regional complex, China, India, Kashmir, the Caucasus and the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, are also significant.

Fourth, Afghanistan's political economy has significant international dimensions. It includes drug dealers in London and Moscow and Islamic radicals in Chechnya and the Philippines. It has also been shaped by international policies, from the "sticks" of sanctions and drug eradication programs to the "carrots" of humanitarian and development assistance.

COMBAT, SHADOW AND COPING ECONOMIES IN AFGHANISTAN

The term "war economy" is used here to include all economic activities carried out in wartime. This can be further broken down into three types of economy that emerge in wartime conditions, namely the combat, shadow and coping economies, which enable different groups to wage war, profit, cope or survive. Each has its own dynamic and patterns of change. The main characteristics of these three economies are:

Combat economy: includes the production, mobilization and allocation Of economic resources to sustain a conflict and economic strategies of war aimed at the deliberate disempowerment of specific groups. (7) Whereas the former involves the generation of resources to wage war, the latter involves the destruction of resources to undermine the ability of opposing groups to wage war. Shadow economy: refers to economic activities that are conducted outside state-regulated frameworks and are not audited by the state institutions. (8) In most conflicts there are actors who profit from conflict. However, unlike the conflict entrepreneur, the economic entrepreneur operating as part of a shadow economy may have an interest in peace, if peace can enable the maintenance or increase of profits. Coping economy: refers to population groups that are coping (i.e., maintaining their asset base) or surviving (i.e., undermining their asset base). These categories are not static and they change over time according to the influence of changing political regimes and various external shocks. Table 1 presents a typology, of these three economies. While this may be conceptually useful as an aid to analysis, in practice there is considerable overlap between these three categories.

CONTEMPORARY DIMENSIONS OF THE AFGHAN POLITICAL ECONOMY

In the following section some of contemporary features of the Afghan political economy are examined. The combat and shadow economies have persisted and, in some respects, they have been reinvigorated in the post-Taliban order. Afghanistan has reverted to the pattern of governance of the early 1990s, with regional warlords reestablishing control over personal fiefdoms. While warlords control the smuggling and drug trades, which in turn fund their own private militias, there are few incentives for engaging with the embryonic central state. In addition, many of the international/regional dimensions of the Afghan political economy are still present.

Combat Economy

The combat economy has global and regional dimensions. The strategies and processes by which states consolidate or strengthen their positions domestically within the international state system play themselves out beyond national borders. For instance, Pakistan's attempts to become a friendly neighboring territory to give it greater strategic room for maneuver in relation to India has had profound implications for Afghanistan's political economy. There have also been regional "blow-back" effects, most seriously in Uzbekistan, where the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) challenges the legitimacy of the state, and in Pakistan where armed proto-Taliban groups have caused growing instability and may threaten the long-term security of the state. (9) Also important are the non-state transnational networks, which have sustained Islamic radicals, most notably Al-Qaeda, but also the IMU, outlawed Pakistani groups, Chechens and Chinese Uighurs. During the 1990s Afghanistan itself became a borderland, a place of refuge and training camp for global or regional jihad.

The regional dimensions of the combat economy appear to be deeply entrenched and have persisted beyond the Taliban phase of the conflict. In addition, warring groups continue to develop and utilize extremely sophisticated ways of operating in and exploiting regional and global economies. Duffield's description of warlords who "act locally, but think globally" is an apt one here. (10) These conflict entrepreneurs have developed their "asset portfolios" by building up a command over the means of violence and developing links to global markets.

International attention has tended to focus on drugs in relation to the war economy, but external resource flows including arms, ammunition, fuel and financial support from state and non-state actors in the region have probably been more significant than internally generated revenue. During the 1980s, Afghanistan received more than 3 million tons of military supplies, making the country the world's largest per capita arms recipient. There are estimated to be around 10 million small arms and light weapons (SALW) currently in circulation. (11)

Few warring groups have ever been purely self-financing, and most depend on external support from international and regional actors. There are indications that elements within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)have continued to support Hekmatiya's...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT