ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL INSTABILITY IN AFGHANISTAN

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.