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The Challenges to Nation-Building
in Afghanistan
continues.....
In the absence of a local capacity for self-governance, an interim administration is set up before administrative control is transferred to newly elected officials. Afghanistan has already completed the mandate established by the Bonn Agreement.
The political and democratic infrastructure mandated by the Bonn Agreement is now in place with a new constitution, a Presidential election that secured Hamid Karzai’s position as the elected president and the parliamentary elections that
brought in place the representatives of the Lower House and the Provincial Councils.
The task of building a viable Afghan state involves expanding the authority, capacity, and accountability of formal institutional structures, some newly fashioned, vis-à-vis the multiple centers of power, wealth, and
status that have historically existed in its highly decentralized society which is a monumental task. An examination of the reasons of its unstable polity and social characteristics is to provide an essential
background to an analysis of the viability of the present state-building efforts. The viability of an imposed centralized form of government in an essentially ‘tribal’ and ‘decentralised’ society and polity is a difficult proposition.
Political Instability
Given its historic weakness of political instability, many analysts and
observers of Afghanistan have made serious attempts to answer the intricate questions of political instability in Afghanistan. These attempts are all rich in their content and reflective in their approaches.
As pointed out by Amin Saikal, these scholarly works range from Louis Dupree’s seminal volume Afghanistan and The Emergence Of Modern Afghanistan by Vartan Gregorian to Leon Poullada’s Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, to the Fragmentation of Afghanistan by Barnett R. Rubin and The Afghanistan War by William Maley. He adds that these works and many more, some comprehensive and others very selective in their individual coverage and approach, have informed us well from various perspectives and ideological angles about a wide range of factors and dynamics influencing the Afghan polity and determining its fortunes and misfortunes in history.
To be continued...