Our Article

Introduction

This is a high level summary of some of the many factors contributing to the collapse of the Afghan government earlier this month. It draws on a number of published sources and over more than twenty years of personal contacts with Afghans and others, and also describes opportunities for constructive outcomes from the current turbulence.

The upper level of the Afghan government was, in many respects, like a house of cards built on sand¹, and it collapsed as soon as the international players who sustained it decided it was time for their forces to leave. The multiple factors contributing to this situation have roots that go back over a century. 

Two Levels of Conflict

Tamim Ansary’s history of Afghanistan, Game Without Rules², describes two levels of conflict in in the country. One level is various versions of the Great Game, involving Russia and Britain in colonial times, and more recently the Soviets and the US, then India, Pakistan, Iran and others vying for influence. This, he says, is the conflict that most outsiders see.

The other level of conflict is less visible to outsiders – it is a long-standing pattern of centre- periphery violence driven in large part by exploitation and alienation of the rural poor by rulers in Kabul. In this indigenous conflict there have been recurring cycles in which the alienated periphery attacks the centre, occupies the seats of power, and then repeats the pattern of exploitation, only to have the poor rise up again a few decades later to repeat the cycle. This has been going on for well over a century and may be behind some of what we are seeing today.

Context, Donor Inputs and Absorptive Capacity

The most recent Lessons Learned report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)³ makes it clear that over much of the time since the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban in 2001 those in the donor community who were responsible for the massive reconstruction effort did not understand the Afghan context. They were manipulated by self-interested elites and poured far more resources into the country than its systems could adequately absorb. With the best of intentions they strove to reshape Afghanistan’s systems into a Western model – which had some benefits in areas such as human rights, health, education and the status of women – but was disconnected from the deeper roots of Afghan society and as such was largely unsustainable.

Elite Capture and Corruption

In his 2013 paper⁴, Corruption and Human Security - Prepare for a Rainy Day or be Prepared to Drain the Swamp, retired General Charles Tucker describes the effects of flooding an ill-prepared country’s systems with too much aid. He says that “raining” significant development aid on an economy before helping it develop basic capacity to govern is not only counter-productive, but is corrupting. In such cases, the aid institutionalizes monopolistic rent-taking tendencies. Thus, the aid does long-term damage to the country by perverting its governance system and converting localized petty corruption into institutionalized grand corruption – corruption that is difficult (or impossible) to reverse through traditional anti-corruption campaigns.

Tucker goes on to say that local elites with organizational capacity are often able to capture these excessive resource flows and the institutions into which they are poured, and use them for their own benefit rather than to serve the public. In a conversation in Kabul in 2013 with a senior advisor to the US Ambassador I was told that they had recently competed visits to the heads of most of the country’s ministries. He said that not one of the Ministers expressed any concern for the population’s well being, and as a result the US just did not know what to do. It was a heartbreaking summary of the situation at the top of the Afghan system and the inability of well-intentioned donors to achieve positive results from their efforts.

Renter State and Democratic Deficit

Afghanistan has long been what is known as a “rentier state” – where a government’s revenues come from exploitation of natural resources or donors rather than from taxation of citizens in a functioning economy.  Leaders in such states pay more attention to the sources of revenue – in Afghanistan’s case foreign occupiers or more recently its donors – than in strengthening the private sector and establishing legitimate and accountable relationships with domestic taxpayers.⁵ The consequences of this situation are well documented in a 2020 report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN)⁶ which notes that the seeds of the state’s problems were planted during and shortly after the first Bonn Conference in 2001, where poorly-designed institutional structures were put in place that defined the country’s trajectory for years to come.

Turbulence, State Trajectory and Path Dependency: an Opportunity

The current turbulence is extremely troubling, but it also presents an opportunity for the country to alter its trajectory to a hopefully more constructive and accountable relationship among its leaders and its population, and to break the recurring cycle of centre-periphery conflict that has long been a major source of the country’s troubles.

In unstable and chaotic contexts relatively small well-designed inputs early in the process can have long-term beneficial effects on a system’s trajectory.⁷ This path dependency could contribute to a better future than was set out during and after the Bonn Conference. Laying the seeds for the emergence of contextually-appropriate, honest, accountable and effective institutions is within the capacity of many knowledgeable and well-intentioned Afghans.

Let's hope that opportunities arise soon for them to make these constructive inputs to the processes that are unfolding before our eyes.

1 (Mansfield, 2016)

2 (Ansary, 2014)

3 (SIGAR, 2021)

4 (Tucker, 2013)

5 (Verkoren & Kamphuis, 2013)

6 (AAN - Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2020)

7 (Kiel, 1994)