A path for Afghanistan

...This was democracy at work, Afghan style...

...the acknowledged benchmarks are international human rights instruments to which the state is formally party...

...Many female winners were teachers and development workers, such as Saheri Sharif...

...There was no future, only a horrific present...

...More young people and women entered Afghan politics than ever before...

...They are often easy prey for criminal gangs and warlords...

...We need a fresh start," he says, ". . .and that has to begin with a new generation...

...The codified decision-making procedures of the councils build upon, and replace, certain features of, customary Shuras...

...During that period, Commander Ahmad Shah Massood, who became known as the Lion of the Pansjhir Valley, was an enlightened statesman as much as a military leader...

...Warlord leadership is based on power that is not politically authorized...

...During this fall's first national parliamentary election campaign, eight candidates were assassinated...

...Congress, which is 15.2 percent female...

...The dispute and the pointed language of the Security Council resolution do not augur well for Afghan security...

...Nearly fifty humanitarian workers (Afghan and international) have been targeted and killed since 2002...

...They operate mostly in the south and the east...

...they know that the Taliban have been regrouping...

...They are nervous over the recent announcement that the United States may begin withdrawing troops during spring 2006...

...This place has always been more real estate than nation-state," he said...

...President Karzai has reached out to other ethnic groups and is gradually implementing new rules of the governance game...

...They are wonderful people, with a rich history and culture, and often below the surface, some fine leaders— the glue that holds the thing together...

...The West had helped the resistance win a war, but it failed to help the people win the peace...

...Even Kabul is experiencing an increase in security incidents, including rocket attacks and kidnappings, both attempted and successful...

...Unsurprisingly, candidates for the Parliament included current jihadists, past and present warlords, former communists, former Taliban (including the former chief of the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue), and former Mujahadin who fought both the communists and the Taliban...

...Many districts are considered too risky for international staff operations...

...Music, television, video, chess, soccer, and kite flying were banned...

...The failure was produced by an environment of political instability for which the West bore responsibility...

...Eventually, he was assassinated in an al-Qaeda operation days before the September 11 attacks...

...The fine leaders could not operate above the surface because this land was on everyone's way to someplace else...

...By 1928, Amanullah faced tribal uprisings and before long had fled to India, while a fundamentalist Tajik bandit proclaiming himself Habibullah II occupied Kabul...

...Refugees are steadily returning from Pakistan and Iran—nearly four million since the fall of the Taliban regime according to the UN...

...Afghanistan's experience with constitutions has been, at best, uneven...

...ABIG REASON the country has been more real estate than nation-state is that, broadly speaking, there have always been two Afghanistans—one urban and one rural...

...there was an upward spike in violence, and Human Rights Watch has warned of an "underlying climate of fear...

...IN ADDITION TO promoting habits of democracy, new leaders have to be supported in promoting the new Constitution...

...So long as the Soviets were in Afghanistan, it was the good jihad...

...They know that democracy challenges entrenched power and traditional moral values...

...The new 249member parliament will have a higher percentage of women (27.3 percent) than many of its Western counterparts—including the U.S...

...They are gender inclusive, though in some conservative areas separate male and female councils are elected...

...In Farah Province in the southwest, Malalai Joya took second place with nearly eight thousand votes...

...A warlord can be a commander upon whom a community relies for protection...

...The power-based leadership of commanders and warlords, the rectitude-based leadership of Mullahs, and the kinship-based leadership of tribal heads now confronts an enlightenment-based leadership that is earning public respect...

...But the most dramatic and hopeful trend is the emergence of new leadership...

...Only in assenting to new law will the people assume responsibility for its application...

...It did not go well...

...The legacies of Alexander the Macedonian, Genghis Khan, the Soviet Army, the Mujahadin, and finally the Taliban and Osama bin Laden share one feature: leadership based on power and divorced from authority— or with only the Qur'an as the authorizing symbol of governance...

...However, its European allies refuse to step up their participation because the British plan contemplates fighting terrorists, insurgents, and drug trafficking warlords—a task most Europeans view as belonging to the Bush administration's war on terror...

...As a journalist in Peshawar, Pakistan, on the rim of the Afghan war of the 1980s, I was fortunate to spend time with the late anthropologist Louis Dupree, whose book Afghanistan had become required cold war reading...

...Through the 1980s, for many in the West, Afghanistan held a romantic image of a land of Kipling and Kim, where turbaned freedom fighters crossed deserts, mountains, and Central Asian steppes to fight the foreign occupiers...

...At the same time, brutal behavior by American and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) forces—such as the two American soldiers charged with assaulting Afghan detainees at a forward operating base in Oruzgan Province—empowers neo-Taliban and fundamentalists in the government who oppose any international presence...

...The female factor is momentous...

...So began the common tension in independent Afghanistan's history: a clash between the urban center's exercise of power based on narrow secular authority and the power, based on religion and custom, wielded by elites in the rest of the country...

...leaders are committed to these principles as the operational code of the new state...

...When I spoke with men in both Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-iSharif, they indicated a willingness to support female candidates...

...This tension has shaped the rule of law from Amanullah to the Taliban...

...In one NSP village, Nawach, a remote mountain community in Parwan Province, the Development Council chair is a schoolteacher who is new to a position of authority...

...A separate NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) of about ten thousand troops operates in the capital, the north, and the west...

...This experience of being "outcast from life's feast" feeds a collective fire in the belly of the indigenous leadership that may be transforming Afghanistan from real estate to a variably democratic nation-state...

...How might the new state cross the finish line...

...These are revered customary decision mechanisms called for moments of great community import...

...But variable-speed democracy in an undeveloped post-conflict state is not a bad beginning...

...President Karzai and the new leadership, accustomed to the actual minefields of Afghanistan, are well aware that the path to post-conflict democracy is also littered with mines...

...The program enables rural communities to select, manage, and implement development projects using block grants...

...More significant for Afghan democracy than the 249-member Parliament are the (soon to be) twenty thousand new village Development Councils...

...Democratic governance cannot take hold across Afghanistan unless it takes root beyond Kabul and a few provincial capitals...

...it was a pawn in the games of external powers that imposed leaders...

...This Afghan disaster reached the United States in 2001 and rattled to its core the public order of the world community...

...Some local leaders are already committed to inclusive decision-making whose benefits are broadly dispersed...

...In this democracy, power is more or less equitably shared...

...Afghanistan was a captive nation...

...They are more interested in governing than warring," said merchant Kahild Wakhil, "and they listen...

...But the grant was not big enough to satisfy all three needs...

...This is a quiet revolution of the type once described by Sir Henry Maine as the progression "from status to contract...

...A promising approach designed by Afghans is the National Solidarity Program (NSP), currently funded at $117 million dollars over a four-year period by the World Bank...

...A new chapter in Afghanistan has opened with the constitutional Loya Jirgah and the adoption of a constitutional text...

...Girls' schools and colleges were shut...

...Leaders and followers in the urban centers and the north will more quickly embrace democratic principles, norms, and behavior than will those in the conservative Pushtun south...

...But there are important new leaders who are still, as Louis Dupree said, "below the surface...

...He says his party represents a generation that is tired of religious and power elites who have brought the country to near ruin...

...This new leadership could transform the democratic myth of the capital into the operational code of the provinces...

...If nurtured, they could spawn a tsunami of leaders committed to new ways of decision-making...

...When national election facilitatortrainers visited Nawach and other NSP villages, they found that the habit of democracy had already taken root...

...Meanwhile, Afghans seethed, furious at a succession of warlords and leaders not of their own making...

...There are many complaints about warlords, but the picture is complicated...

...The Roman jurist Papinian said, "Lex is a common engagement of the Republic...

...Successful candidates included Shukria Barakzai, who edits the Women's Mirror and was also a delegate to the constitutional Loya Jirgah...

...Presidential and parliamentary elections have since been held, a new currency has been introduced, and a new legal system is being nurtured...

...and human dignity for ordinary Afghans is more secure than it has ever been...

...There are about twenty thousand coalition troops in Afghanistan...

...Voter participation in five key provinces ranged from 71 percent to 75 percent...

...That same day, four British soldiers in the north were wounded when gunmen opened fire...

...Although almost all Afghans want to get rid of the warlords, they also want their own to be the last to disarm...

...Through the 1990s, America turned its attention inward to Wall Street, to mutual funds, and to White House scandals...

...In Afghanistan, rather than promoting the text in taverns and in essays, the "Federalist" must make a case in the mosques, the teahouses, and the Development Councils...

...And every so often, the process will have a setback, such as when journalist Ali Mohaqiq Nasab was convicted by a Kabul court under the country's blasphemy laws...

...The elected council responded to community demands by deciding to spend its NSP grant to build a road to replace the path down the mountain into the valley below...

...It was on the battlefields of Afghanistan that our cold war was won...

...These leaders became a threat to the population, and Afghanistan became an isolated failed state that bred violence, desperation, and terrorism...

...Abandonment is fresh in the collective memory, and many Afghans worry that American troop withdrawals next spring are the beginning of an exit strategy...

...The country's first constitution, promulgated by King Amanullah in 1923, established new courts and introduced secular legal codes and reforms directed at traditional customs such as the wearing of the veil...

...Getting to know these people means getting out of Kabul and the provincial capitals into the rural areas...

...An example is the leader of the National Youth Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, thirty-year-old Jamil Karzai, a cousin of the president...

...It must contend with solidarity groups that include clans and extended networks...

...Afghan leaders were nurtured and empowered by a Kalashnikov culture...

...24 DISSENT / Winter 2006 When the Soviets withdrew, all pretenses to leadership in the common interest evaporated as Massood joined the greedy Mujahadin fight for power that opened the way for the Taliban...

...CHARLES NORCHI is a Fellow in the Center for Public Leadership of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University...

...Beyond the urban centers, there is little knowledge of the new Constitution...

...Certain traditional norms must be abandoned in order to achieve a sustainable Afghan democracy...

...With the Taliban ousted, Afghanistan has held critically important legitimizing assemblies called Loya Jirgahs...

...A UN Security Council Resolution has extended the ISAF mandate until October 13, 2006...

...The fear of returning to a Taliban nightmare sustains Afghans in their drive to democracy, human rights, and development...

...This light security footprint leaves Afghans and humanitarian workers vulnerable...

...Afghans have horrendous memories of occupation, war, and Taliban rule—more conquerors than khans and kings...

...A surprise winner in the provincial capital of Herat was Fauzia Gailani, an aerobics instructor who defeated a fundamentalist protégé of warlord Ishmael Khan...

...They were convened on a national scale to confirm the new transitional government and to approve a new constitution...

...Yet twelve million voters registered, and more than 50 percent turned out to vote—in a country with no tradition of national elections...

...Although conservatives and jihadists will be well represented, the new Parliament will not altogether be a rogues' gallery...

...Although 25 percent of total parliamentary seats were reserved for women, female candidates won seats in their own right in thirteen of thirty-four provinces...

...But a price was paid in human dignity—by the poor and marginalized who became refugees, the many victims of torture, the innocent villagers who were massacred, and by every Afghan who has since stepped on a land mine...

...The rural experience is one of extreme underdevelopment and customary, rather than codified, law...

...Even with reasonably effective security measures, the likely outcome in the short term is variable-speed democracy...

...It is a history that need not be repeated...

...She has become a popular and promising leader since speaking up against warlords in the constitutional Loya Jirgah...

...In October 2001, even as an American air strike attempted to rescue him, Abdul Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban while on an ill-advised secret mission—killed by the Kalashnikov culture that he could not escape...

...He has worked in and written about Afghanistan for many years...

...Britain is now preparing to assume the ISAF command in 2006 and deploy troops in the troubled south...

...But a constitution is not merely a text, it is a process...

...These are people who, to adopt the title of a book by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, have placed "Leadership on the Line" (the subtitle of the book is especially apt for new Afghan leaders: "Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading...

...responsibility for decision-making is more or less widely distributed...

...That is because younger candidates, university educated candidates, and female candidates had the courage to put new leadership on the line...

...The democracy I have in mind has space for Afghan culture...

...An "enormous task of political persuasion" has accompanied the adoption of constitutions in other countries, as Akhil Amar reminds us in America's Constitution: A Biography...

...Crossing the Khyber Pass, the young commander Abdul Haq, who had left Kabul University to oppose the Soviet occupation, said, "Afghanistan can be a democracy when the occupiers are gone, and when we have a new generation of leaders who can lead without the gun alone, and without the Qur'an alone...

...They worry about increasing criminal gang activity...

...Friday lashings, amputations, and executions were held at the city soccer stadium...

...Five members of a mobile medical team working with the UN were slain when two insurgents on motorbikes threw a hand grenade into their vehicle in Kandahar...

...That process must be shepherded by indigenous leaders willing to break with the past...

...It began in 2003 and is implemented by the Ministry of Rehabilitation and Rural Development (MRRD) with the assistance of twenty-three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as facilitating partners...

...But absent a long-term security commitment by the 28 DISSENT / Winter 2006 West, there will be no stable nation-state, no democracy, and fewer enlightened leaders...

...His goal is to foster national unity and political stability, while gambling that any battles will be confined to the ballot box and parliamentary debates...

...WHERE IS AFGHANISTAN now in its slow march to democracy and stability...

...it has a contextual threshold...

...He has invited old foes to participate in elections and in the government...

...Women were banned from the work force...

...The issue is," as Olivier Roy writes, "to root democracy into the local political culture...

...It is not the electoral success that is so striking as the vigorous participation of women and their acceptance by the population, including many DISSENT / Winter 2006 25 conservative men...

...The mechanism for development management is a Development Council, which a community must agree to establish in order to participate in NSP and receive 26 DISSENT / Winter 2006 a grant in the amount of $200 per family or $60,000 per community, Development Councils are elected by secret ballot...

...If this promotional task is not performed, the Afghan people are unlikely to accept their new Constitution as authoritative and controlling...

...So why not try something new while we still can...

...For democracy to take hold in Afghanistan, it must account for Shura and other customary traditions...

...These communities display the functional equivalents of formal law...

...NSP operates in thousands of villages across all but two provinces and will eventually reach twenty thousand villages...

...On average, 76 percent of women participated and council membership was 38 percent women...

...But directed value change and institutional development are esDISSENT / Winter 2006 27 pecially delicate because of prevailing crises and personal insecurity...

...Life unfolds in what Michael Reisman calls (in Law in Brief Encounters), "micro-legal systems...

...He explained how community members were concerned about access to schools, health clinics, and markets...

...It is always the neighboring warlord (along with his private army) who should lay down weapons first...

...A new national Afghan army and a police force are being trained but will not be effective for years...

...they have existed alongside successive pathological Afghan states and enabled many ordinary people to survive...

...Invariably, the outcomes have been cumulative human rights abuses and what I call disvelopment, that is, the unraveling of the little development that existed...

...A common denominator in the repetitive failures of governance, human rights, and economic development in Afghanistan has been bad leadership...

...Families headed by war widows had no means of support...

...In a tough environment, they are not all equally unpleasant...

...Afghans are hungry for such an engagement...

...The key challenge in this early phase of the constitutive process is the grounding of new constitutional principals in a largely traditional society...

...This fee-for-service system protects communities against criminal gangs and banditry in the absence of a government capable, or an international community committed, to doing so...

...Afghans look to foreign forces for protection, but the ratio of international troops to population is extremely low...

...cONSIDER THE elephant in the room: security...

...NSP is the most extensive center-to-periphery connection in the history of Afghanistan...

...On a single October day, twenty-one people were killed—insurgents, Afghan soldiers, and civilians...

...In the rural areas, democracy will more rapidly take root in NSP villages where the habit of participation has been formed than it will elsewhere...

...Briefly, the world took notice when the Taliban destroyed the two gigantic Buddha statues that for centuries had peacefully stood watch over silk route travelers and the armies of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Russian czars, Britain's Queen Victoria, and the Soviet army as they traversed the Bamiyan Valley...

...As new institutions displace customary practices that have evolved over centuries, there is a risk that value displacement can spawn violence and instability...

...Afghanistan will travel back to its future: not a country, just real estate...

...It means examining the culturally specific decision processes of the Shuras, or traditional councils, by which most of Afghanistan has been governed for centuries...

...and that neo-Taliban figures remain in their midst and threaten progressive-minded leaders and followers...

...He built schools and clinics, implemented a tax system in the region under his control, and occasionally negotiated truces with the Soviets...

...Few paid much attention as Mullah Omar's Taliban marched to Kabul and cracked the whip in the name of Allah...

...Ominously to many Afghans, the resolution also stated that "the responsibility for providing security and law and order throughout the country resides with the Afghans themselves...

...The future of Afghanistan turns on their emergence and the growing public expectation that their authority can put Afghanistan's slow march to democracy on a firm and steady course...

...NSP provided Afghans with the first experience of casting a secret ballot...

...Refugees are also a reminder of the abandonment that Afghans have suffered...

...Most Afghans live with insecurity, and if they advocate human rights and oppose warlords, they live with an expectation of violence...

...The turnout was down in comparison to the 70 percent turnout in the earlier presidential election, but new players emerged to risk leading in the common interest, rather than for the personal accumulation of power and wealth...