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The Challenges to Nation-Building
in Afghanistan continues....
Strong leaders have controlled tribes by nominating leaders, keeping
chiefly members as hostages, establishing marriage alliances between
chiefly and royal families, executing dissidents or fostering dissension
between rivals for leadership or between neighbouring tribes. The state
has used three modes of persuation such as tribalism, Islam and
nationalism in order to gain legitimacy. Since ‘tribalisation of the state and
the abuse of power by the power holders are inevitable in Afghanistan
what needs to be done in the post Taleban setup is to evaluate the
strengths and weaknesses of the emergent and existing local and regional
self-governing communities. Hence, the crucial issue is whether to
support a militarily strong central government or favour a kind of central
government that would be willing to help strengthen local selfgovernance and incorporate all such communities into a powerful pyramid of national governance. Hence the logical solution seemed to be
the formation of a central government based on the principles of elections
and power sharing among all interest groups in the country (tribal, ethnolinguistic, sectarian and gender) on an equitable basis- that is by applying
the Islamic principles of Shura or consultative rule.
A strong argument in favour of incorporating the tremendous
strengths of a re-emergent civil society into a new community rule-based
state structure has been given by M. Nazif Shahrani. He considers this as
the only feasible road to face the national challenges. He also argues that a
constitutional guarantee of the rights of community self-governance at
the local, district, provincial, and regional levels throughout the country,
allowing local communities to run their own local civil, judicial, security
and educational administrations and also to maintain law and order with the help of a community police force was necessary.
To be continued...