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The Challenges to Nation-Building
in Afghanistan
continues ......
Warlords also have come to evolve as a general pattern in Afghan society
that has remained war-torn for more than last two decades. One of the most popular understandings of warlords among historians is one that describes military strongmen leading private armies and using their military might to achieve power.
Warlordism, however, is not necessarily
the outcome of a process of disintegration. It might as well result from the emergence of first among equals out of a group of commanders and small military strongmen, in a situation where the state has collapsed, as part of an “attempt to re-establish stability within anarchy.”
The issue of the predatory character of warlords leads us to the problem of the local or partial legitimacy of the warlord. While it is natural for scholars to maintain that warlords do not have any legitimacy and that greed far outweighs grievance among their motivations, scholars like Susan Woodward point out that a warlord might often have a genuine local constituency, possibly developed only for opportunistic reasons but nonetheless real. This is implicit in her argument that a warlord might “seek popular allegiance on the basis of the fear and insecurity generated by the absence of reliable authorities.”
The first village-based armed groups
appeared in 1978-1979, as an armed insurrection against the newly established leftist regime spread around the countryside. At the same time, the Islamist parties were infiltrating armed guerrilla units from Pakistan, while the decline in the capacity of the government to police the countryside led to the spread of banditry.
Weapons began to be imported from Pakistan, while others were trickling down to the village level due to army/police losses and desertions. The trickle became a flood when in 1980 the US and a number of other countries began to supply huge quantities of weapons to the opposition parties based in Pakistan.
Weapons became a political currency in the Afghan context, as parties were trying to buy influence through the supply of arms and ammunition.
To be continued....