Order, stability, and change in Afghanistan: from top-down to bottom-up state-making

Abstract

This article presents findings from long-term empirical fieldwork and archival research into current and historical patterns of governance in north-eastern Afghanistan, conducted between 2006 and 2009. Despite the long civil war, striking continuities have been found in the make-up and functioning of the local social order. Patron–client relations, eldership, and related practices of mediation are crucial structuring principles of rural society. They have dominated Afghan politics over centuries and still do today. Viewed from a long-term perspective, this continuity, related patterns of representation, and the role of middlemen and brokers suggest a certain degree of stability, in contrast to the popular perception of instability and disorder in this country. Whilst in the past the expansion of the state relied on tacit agreement between government administrators and local elites, resulting in state-making from above, the war broadly changed actors, regimes, and coalitions, but not the underlying mechanisms of the social order. Hence, today, the failure of the current state-building project can be attributed to the fact that the effects of these mechanisms are insufficiently recognized and grasped by Western actors and state-builders. We argue that local Afghan actors have captured the intervention from below. Instead of state-building, we are dealing here with state-making dominated by patronage networks.

Keywords:

• social order
• local governance
• Afghanistan
• stability
• patronage
• mediation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a first draft of this article.

Notes

1. Only a few sources speak of Afghanistan (as a country) as being ungoverned or ungovernable – see for example “Fixing a Broken World” (Economist, 2009). Usually authors distinguish spatial entities within Afghanistan as ungoverned, and they mostly refer to the Afghanistan–Pakistan border region – see for example Mills (2009), Chalk (2007), and Windmueller (2009).

2. Both authors conducted their research between 2005 and 2012 in the framework of the Local Governance and Statehood in the Amu Darya Borderlands project of the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. Extensive field research at the village level was carried out in north-eastern Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009.

3. The fieldwork based on oral history interviews was conducted in April and May 2007 and from December 2007 to January 2008 in Kunduz and Imam Sahib. In line with social-anthropological research convention and to protect the respondents, names of people and small places are not given.

4. The term ‘state-making’ is preferred here over ‘state-building’ because it emphasizes the negotiation dimension of state control and the processes of its extension. It allows taking into account the partial willingness and acceptance of those who are subject to the extension of state control on the one hand, but also the domination of state structures ‘from below’ through the dominance of certain patronage networks. Accordingly, state-making has to be distinguished from the commonly referred-to state-building, as its outcome is not fixed and certainly differs from the ideal vision of the international intervention's state-building agenda. See also Agrawal (2001) and Mielke (2013).

5. In the social sciences, discourses on ‘the problem of order’ have been broadly dominated by two underlying notions. One associates order with a call for ‘ordering’ and stipulates order as the antipode of chaos, disorder, fuzziness, and violence. In contrast, according to constructivist notions (Berger and Luckmann 1966), order forms at cognitive levels in the observer's mind and thus implies subjective meanings. The two ‘schools’ are not mutually exclusive; nor does either represent a homogeneous concept. In fact, viewed from a scientific-historical angle, both idealized notions can be interpreted in chronological order: as the first is affiliated with modernist scientific thinking, the second is attributed to postmodernism's post-structural approaches. Nevertheless, the latter does not necessarily escape a normative bias, as individual processes of ‘ordering’ are likely to make use of normative frameworks for orientation in everyday life. The identified overlap suggests that a multitude of ‘phenomena of order’ exist. While semantics provides for the existence of several parallel meanings of order in popular and academic accounts (Anter 2007), the binary distinction succumbs to the highly complex entanglements that structure social logics empirically.

6. For conceptual clarification, the interested reader is advised to refer to the above-mentioned working paper (Mielke et al. 2011). In the present article, patron–client relations and mediation are seen as institutions rooted in local world-views. The latter are constituted by norms such as reciprocity, seniority, eldership, generosity, etc. Both institutions (social practices) and world-views (cognitive frames) are assumed to resemble the structuring principles of contemporary rural society. In empirical practice, the distinction between institutions and what we summarize as ‘world-views’ is hard to trace, since the two categories overlap in their role of enabling and restraining social interaction. The category which has been termed ‘world-view’ encompasses the cognitive dimension of social order and thus relates to qualities of different sociological concepts linked to norms and values, e.g. shared mental models (Denzau and North 1994), Bourdieu's (1978) habitus, Esser's (2004) habits and frames, and Giddens' (1984) structuration.

7. Similar lists are provided for most of the other towns and settlements in north-eastern Afghanistan. For Imam Sahib, for instance, he lists Mulla Muhammad, ‘Alam Wakil-i Uzbek, Mulla Taj Muhammad Wakil, Nek Muhammad Khan Mingbashi, Khwaja Muhammad Ja‘far, Wat (Ata) Murad Mingbashi-yi Uzbek, etc. (Kushkaki 1989).

8. The law on the establishment of a national administration (Nizam-nama-yi tashkilat-i asasi-yi Afghanistan), issued in 1923, transferred responsibility at the hamlet and village level to local leaders and aristocrats. According to the taxation law (Nizam-nama-yi malia) issued in 1920, an elected village official (malik or arbab) had to cooperate with the revenue office. The decree regulating the taxation of livestock (Nizam-nama-yi mal wa mawashi, 1923, Art. 2) entitled four whitebeards (muysafid) to assist a tax commission in counting the livestock (Grevemeyer 1990).

9. Regarding the aspects and results of the resettlement policy, see Grötzbach (1972), Barfield (1981), Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont (1988), and Grevemeyer (1990).

10. Grötzbach (1972); Dupree (1973); Barfield (1981); Grevemeyer (1990). The cotton company became entirely nationalized in the era of Daoud Khan (Barfield 1981).

11. Interviews, 11 November 2007, Imam Sahib; 13 December 2007, Kunduz; 24 April 2007, Kunduz.

12. Interviews, 11 November 2007, Imam Sahib; 13 December 2007, Kunduz; 24 April 2007, Kunduz.

13. Down to the present, the descendants of the elders own a couple of shops and karawan-sarays in Kunduz City. For example, we find the Sara-yi Arzbegi and the Sara-yi ‘Aziz Khan Mingbashi in the centre of town (interviews, 13 December 2007, Kunduz). Regarding the reconstruction of provincial towns across northern Afghanistan, see Grötzbach (1972; 1990).

14. Interviews, 13 December 2007, Kunduz; 26 April 2007, Imam Sahib; 19 November 2007, Kunduz. See also Grevemeyer (1990).

15. Barfield (1981) provided a detailed study on the working of the Spinzar cotton production system and the ejaza (lit. permission certificate; in the widest sense coupon) trade (139–148). For example, Haji Tawildar Jalil, a son of Mulla ‘Abd al-Karim ‘Arzbegi, worked as officer in the Spinzar Company (interview, 22 November 2007, Kunduz) and probably had a share in the ejaza trade.

16. Interviews, 24 April 2007, Kunduz; 1 May 2007, Emam Sahib; 22 and 24 November 2007, Kunduz; 10 November 2007, Imam Sahib; 12 December 2007, Kunduz. See also Note 18.

17. Interviews, 25 November 2007, Kunduz; 24 April 2007, Kunduz; 23 April 2007, Dasht-i Abdan; 11 December 2007, Imam Sahib; 13 December 2007, Kunduz.

18. Research for the following sections was carried out extensively over a period of 14 months in 2006 and 2007, complemented by a short-term research stay in 2009. Anthropological field research (participant observation, semi-structured interviews, participatory rural appraisal methods), oral-history interviewing, and life-history approaches were carried out in seven districts (Chardara, Qal'a-yi Zal, Warsaj, Farkhar, Burka, Ishkamish, and Kunduz) in the provinces of Takhar, Kunduz, and Baghlan. Given the limited space available, the insights presented here are derived from reflections on the qualitative interview data and can only be presented as extrapolations from observations.

19. Beyond venality there are also the extensive process of commodification of the war and the criminal economies (see Cramer and Godhand, 2002).

20. Interview, 4 June 2006, Qarayatim.

21. Interviews, 23 and 26 August 2006, Qal'a-yi Zal; 12 April 2007, Warsaj. See also Shahrani (1984) and Dorronsoro (2005).

22. Interview, 4 June 2006, Chardara. Reportedly, elders would introduce any volunteer to the Taliban administration in order to not be bothered further and to fulfil the request for appointment.

23. Interview, 12 April 2007, Warsaj.

24. A manteqa is a socio-spatial entity defined situationally from the perspective of the person belonging to it and referring to it. Often thought to be bounded by natural-geographical landmarks, it can be translated as ‘area’, ‘village’, ‘valley’, ‘neighbourhood’, or ‘home’. See Favre (2005).

25. For example, in upper Asqalan, elders requested a former mujahedin commander to act as their ‘Taliban-commander’ (interview, 20 July 2007). In Burka, the heads of the mir-family (rural nobility) in Kokah Bulaq had an agreement with a Gujar commander who had fought jointly with them in the resistance against Soviet forces to act as Taliban commander for the Fulol Valley and ‘save its population’ from harm (interviews, 5 September 2007 and 26 March 2009).

26. This tendency was especially observed in field sites in Kunduz Province. It remains unclear to what extent it can be generalized, as the common narrative suggests that predatory commanders continue to operate in other areas. However, the perception of what ‘predatory’ signifies – either exploitative behaviour towards their own clients in their own zone of influence, or rivalry with other local commanders – needs further investigation.

27. ‘Ushr designates a tax on agricultural produce. It usually amounts to one-tenth of the harvest.

28. See Filkins (2012) for the example of Khanabad in Kunduz. By early 2013, ‘ushr was collected in all districts of Kunduz, as the author gleaned from interviews conducted for a different research study in February 2013.

29. The data were collected as part of the above-mentioned Ph.D. work by Mielke (forthcoming), which investigated local governance patterns for everyday natural resources in three distinct governance arenas (irrigation water, pasture land, and fuel wood).

30. Interviews, 19–21 April 2007, in communities of Takhar Province.

31. Interview, 11 June 2006.

32. As opposed to the first tier, which hailed mainly from Panjshir. In the first Karzai government, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister, Yonus Qanoni, interior minister, and Muhammad Fahim, defence minister, emerged from the so-called Panjshiri faction of Jam'iat's Northern Alliance. The Panjshiri-dominated military arm of Jam'iat-i Islami captured Kabul in late 2001.

33. In pointing to the erosion of the old arbab system and the establishment of district councils by 2004, Barfield (2013) refers to drastic changes (e.g. the cession of local administration to the populace, new rural leaders, and the end of Pashtun dominance). He also acknowledges continuities, for instance conflict resolution outside Afghanistan's administrative framework (p. 123).