ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL INSTABILITY IN
AFGHANISTAN
Understanding Afghanistan’s History
and Politics
Many of the historical events in
Afghanistan went largely ignored by the Western World until those events
directly threatened the security of the West, the US in particular. As a nation
in Central Asia, Afghanistan has been influenced by the surrounding nations, as
well as by the major world powers which have fought for domination of Asia
throughout the past two centuries. Unfortunately, the security and stability of
Afghanistan have been compromised by such battles, and the country has often
been at the mercy of larger world powers, including Great Britain, the Soviet
Union, and the United States.
Consolidation of Afghanistan (1747)
– Pashtun Tribes
Emergence of Afghanistan as a
nation; Pashtun tribes developed an alliance under Ahmed Khan Abdali (Ahmad
Shah Durani). Before this date, the area known as Afghanistan today consisted
of tribes dominated by various empires throughout history.
Anglo-Afghan Wars (British
Intervention and Invasion)
1839-1842 – Britain set up a puppet
government in Afghanistan to prevent Russian influence from spreading; Afghans
protested and revolted; thousands of British and Indian troops were killed,
leading to British withdrawal.
1878 – British troops returned to
major cities in Afghanistan due to fears of Russian influence and power.
1893 – The British drew the Durand
Line, a border between Afghanistan and British India. This border split the
Pashtun population between Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan; Afghanistan
became a buffer state between British India and the Russian Empire.
Reign of King Zahir Shah (1933-1973)
King Zahir Shah was finally able to
rid Afghanistan of British influence and began modernizing many aspects of
Afghanistan, including government (democratic reforms), education (establishment
of universities), and women’s rights.
Reign of Daoud Khan (1973-1978) –
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
Daoud Khan took over in a bloodless
coup while the king was in Italy. He ended the monarchy and established a
republic. However, with democratic reforms came opposition, including from
intellectuals and a communist party. In 1970-71, the government was ineffective
in responding to a drought, increasing domestic discontent with Daoud.
Increasingly, Daoud Khan denied parties like the PDPA any participation in the
government. In 1978, Daoud Khan was assassinated in a coup by the PDPA.
Soviet Invasion (1979) – Soviet
Union, PDPA, Afghan Resistance
Once the PDPA, which was communist,
established itself as the government of Afghanistan, the Soviets began
supplying the new Communist government with advisors and, military equipment.
When resistance to the new government broke out, the Soviets installed a puppet
government and eventually completed a full-scale military invasion. The Soviets
needed a sympathetic government in Afghanistan for several reasons.
First, it needed Afghanistan as a
buffer state for its many central Asian enemies: Iran, Pakistan and China. Iran
was ardently anti-communist but also anti-American., so the Soviets were
concerned the United States might use Afghanistan as a place for battle against
Iran. Iran’s revolution had just established the Islamic Republic of Iran, and
the Soviets did not want to be bordered by Muslim-majority states. The US was
allied with Pakistan and therefore had direct influence on Afghanistan.
Finally, the Soviet Union had spread its empire to Central Asia, but the
Afghanistan could have provided the next stepping stone to the Indian Ocean.
All of these factors contributed to Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Soviet Occupation and Afghan
Resistance (1979-1989) – Soviet Union and the Muhajedin
After the Soviet invasion, the
number of refugees in Pakistan swelled to 400,000 by 1980. Those numbers would
reach over 4 million by the end of the occupation. Peshawar was a base for the
opposition parties and tribal groups to organize the resistance against the
Soviets. The resistance fighters, known as the muhajedin, united around a
nationalist ideology and resistance to foreign domination. The muhajedin
received funding and weapons from the US CIA through Pakistan, as well as from
Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China. The war completely destroyed many villages and
towns in Afghanistan, as well as irrigation systems that were hundreds of years
old. As a result, the infrastructure, economy, and political system of
Afghanistan were left in shambles by the time the muhajedin were able to force
the Soviets to withdraw in 1989.
The Taliban
The power vacuum allowed the
Taliban, a militant student movement that grew out of hardline religious
schools in Pakistan, to take the southern city of Kandahar in 1994 and Kabul in
1996.
The regime, which adhered to a
strict interpretation of Islam.
Bin Laden and al Qaeda relocated to
Afghanistan in the mid-1990s after being forced to leave Sudan. They based
themselves around Kandahar. The Taliban provoked international condemnation,
particularly over their treatment of women. Only three countries - Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - recognized them as the legitimate
government. In 1999, the United Nations imposed sanctions to force the Taliban
to turn over bin Laden, who was wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of
U.S. embassies in the Kenyan capital Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania.
The Northern Alliance
Throughout the Taliban's rule,
fighting continued between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. The Alliance
was made up of ethnic Tajik-dominated groups who had united to fight the
Taliban.
Two days before al Qaeda launched
its Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., a leading member of the Northern Alliance,
Ahmad Shah Massoud, was killed by suicide bombers posing as journalists. Al
Qaeda members were believed to have carried out the assassination to curry
favor with the Taliban.
The United States launched bombing
raids on Afghanistan in October 2001 after the Taliban refused to hand over bin
Laden. With U.S. help, the Northern Alliance took the northern city of
Mazar-e-Sharif, then Kabul. The rest of the country swiftly followed.
2001 and Beyond
At the end of 2001, members of the
opposition and international organizations gathered in Germany and drew up the
Bonn Agreement, which provided a political roadmap for Afghanistan and a
timetable for reconstruction. Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun born to the
Popalzai clan – a sub-group of the royal Durrani tribe – was chosen to head an
Interim Authority. He was later installed as president and won an outright
majority in the first presidential election in 2004. Parliamentary elections
were held the following year.
Presidential elections in 2009 – a
key milestone for peace – were plagued by violence, widespread fraud and low
turnout. Karzai won, after his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah pulled out
saying a planned runoff vote was not going to be free and fair. Parliamentary
elections in 2010 were calmer.
Presidential elections were held in
April 2014, the same year all foreign combat troops are due to leave the
country. The Taliban stepped up attacks ahead of the polls and threatened to
disrupt the elections. But, on the day, there were fewer attacks than feared,
and less fraud than in 2009.
A run-off vote between two
candidates – Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani – will be held in June. Under
the constitution, Karzai was not allowed to stand in 2014. The government's
authority remains fragile and violence has soared.
Taliban numbers swelled from 7,000
in 2006 to roughly 25,000 in 2009, according to a 2009 U.S. intelligence
assessment. More recent estimates vary from between 20,000 and 35,000.
U.S. President Barack Obama decided
to send additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009, boosting the total number of
foreign troops to about 150,000. Most of the new U.S. troops headed south to
the heart of the Taliban insurgency, where British, Canadian and Dutch soldiers
did not have enough strength to keep hold of ground they captured.
NATO leaders began transferring
responsibility for security to Afghans in 2011. The Afghan army took command of
all military and security operations in June 2013. Foreign troops work with the
Afghan National Army, which was about 183,000 strong in June 2013. The Afghan
national police force numbered about 150,000. More than 13,000 Afghan soldiers
and police officers have been killed in the past 13 years, since early 2011,
the U.S. government has been seeking to hold peace talks with the Taliban, but
it is unclear whether the militants are cohesive enough to agree on a joint
diplomatic approach to the talks.
In May 2011, bin Laden was killed by
U.S. Special Forces in northwestern Pakistan. By then, al Qaeda's influence on
the Taliban had greatly diminished. NATO plans to keep a small military
training and support mission in Afghanistan after the end of 2014, which the
Taliban says is an encroachment on the country's independence. Western officials
say that the exit of most foreign troops will remove one of the Taliban’s main
recruiting tools.
Going Home
Millions of Afghans fled to
neighboring countries during the years of conflict, and the Taliban's fall
triggered one of the largest and swiftest refugee repatriations in the world.
Since 2002, Afghans have been
streaming home, mostly from Iran and Pakistan. More than 5.7 million Afghans
have returned to their country, according to the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR).
Another 2.5 million refugees and many undocumented Afghans were still in
Pakistan and Iran in 2013, and further afield.
Pakistan and Iran have said they
want the remaining Afghans on their soil to go home.
The number of people displaced
inside Afghanistan is about 620,000, according to UNHCR. However, this is a
conservative estimate because it is impossible to access and collect
information in many areas.
Factors
Responsible
The following factors have strongly
affected Afghanistan’s political stability.
Political scientists believe that
higher population size and concentration raises the risk of civil conflict. It
could also lead to higher probability of revolutions to overthrow governing
elites in non-democratic countries. This claim, supported by political
scientists, does not refer to the number of people that eventually join an
insurgency, but only the number of people that start one. They constitute
enough rebels to pose a serious threat.
In Afghanistan the rural population
is an important determinant of political stability.
Now and in the past, the political
stability in Afghanistan has been threatened mainly by rural residents.
Currently almost all insurgent groups such as the Taliban are based in rural
areas. From those safe heavens they recruit insurgents and manage all of their
destructive activities against the government.
The reasons are very obvious: rural
areas are safe havens where insurgents could easily and freely plan their
destructive activities. Moreover, the threat of rural populations to political
stability of Afghanistan results from the interconnection of the following
well-known facts:
Geography
Insurgency is closely related to the
geography of the country. The presence of rough terrain, poorly served by roads
and at a distance from the centers of state power, favors insurgents. This is
fostered by the availability of cross-border sanctuaries inhabited by people
that can be easily manipulated by local insurgents. In this scenario it is not
uncommon that these local populations get trapped between their
responsibilities as citizens of the country and their cultural loyalty to the
local insurgent groups. Moreover, the government does not have a permanent
control over these areas, which nurtures a decent atmosphere for insurgent
groups.
Poverty
People feel that their government
has abandoned them and failed to provide financial means to elevate their
living standards. This problem is enhanced by the fact that the country has a
large percentage of young men who cannot find enough employment opportunities.
Their contribution to economic development and their participation in the
political process is highly underexploited. Afghan young men tend to
participate in activities that are either economically unproductive, such as
joining gangs and drug cartels or politically destructive, such as organizing
resistance groups under leadership of insurgents.
Extremism
It is a well-known fact that
religious extremism has become the core of much of Afghanistan’s violence.
Extremists justify their version of Islam to force people to accept their
Islamic interpretation. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that
almost all of the rural residents are uneducated. Recently, there has been a
dramatic increase in insurgent attacks in the country. Security handovers from
NATO to Afghan forces, and the American pullout have motivated the Taliban to
increase their destructive activities. The threat might strongly resurface yet
again.
Based on these three reasons, the
rural population has a strong impact on the political stability of Afghanistan.
Reconstruction Hurdles
Billions of aid dollars have poured
into Afghanistan to help rebuild the shattered infrastructure and economy.
Afghanistan depends on aid for most of its spending. International donors
provided $35 billion in aid to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2010. And, in 2012,
major donors pledged another $16 billion in development aid through 2015, in an
attempt to prevent it from deteriorating further when foreign troops leave in
2014, but demanded reforms to fight widespread corruption. The aid was tied to
a new monitoring process to help prevent money from being diverted by corrupt
officials or mismanaged. While strides have been made in improving access to
education and health care, less than a third of the population of 33 million is
literate and the average person earns only about a $1,000 a year, according to
the U.N. Development Programme.
Corruption
Reconstruction efforts have been
dogged by allegations of corruption and waste on the part of the government,
aid agencies and contractors. Public sector corruption is rife and Afghanistan,
along with Somalia and North Korea, are considered to be the most corrupt
countries in the world in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions
Index. Government officials and international aid workers have been accused of
stealing money or taking bribes. Some companies that won contracts to rebuild
the country have been accused of delivering shoddy roads, hospitals and schools
or even nothing at all.
Many also complain that parliament,
which is supposed to voice their grievances and keep the government in check,
is made up mainly of ex-warlords and powerbrokers who use their position to
serve their own interests.
Humanitarian Crisis
Civilians have borne the brunt of
years of conflict and underdevelopment. Thousands are killed every year and
millions have been displaced. An estimated 36 percent of the population lives
below the national poverty line, and nearly 60 percent is chronically
malnourished. The Taliban insurgency has forced many schools and health clinics
to close. Natural disasters also affect tens of thousands of people every year,
including earthquakes, frequent floods and drought. Aid agencies rely on air
services to reach people in remote or insecure areas. More than 160
organizations use the U.N. Humanitarian Air Service, which has two airplanes
and a helicopter, to transport aid workers and supplies. Violence is not the
only threat to life. Children die of easily preventable diseases, and malnutrition.
Afghanistan is one of three "polio endemic" countries with most cases
in the turbulent south, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
Tuberculosis is another major public
health challenge. Experts say women in particular suffer high rates because
they tend to spend most of their time indoors and have less access to medical
care than men do.
Drugs
Afghanistan produces 74 percent of
the world's opium, the United Nations says. The Taliban, which banned
cultivation during their rule, are now exploiting the trade to fund their
insurgency. The majority of poppy fields are in the country's south and
southwest where the Taliban are most active. One of the main tools in combating
the narcotics trade involves fostering alternative livelihoods. The idea is to
wean farmers away from poppy cultivation by offering them fertilizers and seeds
for legal crops.
