The Nation: Government in Afghanistan Nears Collapse

[marmar]

Government in Afghanistan Nears Collapse

Robert Dreyfuss
July 6, 2011


Maybe Afghanistan’s politics is so dysfunctional and broken by war that it’s too much to expect any of it to make sense. But it seems to me that then United Nations is on the wrong side of the current fight to the death between President Karzai and Afghanistan’s parliament.

In case you haven’t been following the news: last year’s parliamentary election was so chaotic and flawed that it resulted in the near-total disenfranchisement of Afghanistan’s Pashtun ethnic minority, which makes up a healthy 40 percent of the population. Many Pashtuns either didn’t vote, because of sympathy or support for the Taliban and dislike of the Afghan government, or couldn’t vote, because of Taliban threats and violence. As a result, in some provinces in the south and east where Pashtuns dominate, not a single Pashtun was elected to parliament. For Karzai, that was a disaster, especially since he’s trying to reach out to his Pashtun base as part of his search for a deal with the Taliban and its allies. Earlier this year, a special court appointed by Karzai ruled that sixty-two members of parliament, mostly non-Pashtuns, were elected fraudulently, a step toward installing Pashtun members in their place. Not surprisingly, Karzai’s opponents in parliament, especially Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who oppose Karzai’s outreach to the Taliban, cried foul, challenged the constitutionality of the court, and demanded the impeachment of Karzai.

If the war in Afghanistan ever made any sense at all, this stuff makes it clear that it's close to hopeless. It also underscores the urgent importance of US efforts to find a political settlement that brings both Pashtuns and the Taliban into a deal and which mollifies the non-Pashtun groups that make up the old Northern Alliance, and who are rearming in the north to fight the Taliban if and when a deal begins to emerge.

Yesterday, the two sides actually came to blows in parliament! The government has all but ceased functioning, a constitutional crisis looms, and there are worries about armed factions relaunching the civil war that plagued the country in the early 1990s. It’s that bad. Members of parliament have started carrying guns. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/161818/government-afghanistan-nears-collapse

[hobbit709]

1. Afghanistan has been pretty much dysfunctional since the Soviets invaded.

It's had periods of almost stability when one faction or another had enough power to control things for a while but it never lasted.
Trying to build a strong central government on a base of shifting tribal alliances and old feuds is guaranteed to cause problems. Especially when you throw religious fanaticism into the mix.

[Lurks Often]

2. Afghanistan has been dysfunctional forever

I don't think it has EVER had a central government that had complete control of the whole country.

One of my hobbies is an interest in the military history of India and the surrounding areas prior to 1947 and as far back as I've gone (mid 1700's), all I have ever read is that Afghanistan has always been a country made up multiple different tribes, many often hostile to each other. The tribes and the tribal areas are sometimes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is why the Pakistani government is, among other reasons, not able to fully control who crosses the border in the northwest part of the country.

[hobbit709]

3. True, but it was more or less functional before 1979.

At least up until then it was relatively stable compared to now.

[Bragi]

4. Yep, what's been clear from day one is this...

What's been clear is that whenever the U.S and its allies eventually left, the same cabal of war lords, drug barons and religious medievalists who have run the place for the past couple of hundred years would resume running the place.

The big question from 2001 till now has always been this: how many lives and how much money did we want to spend before leaving?

I suppose a corollary question has been: Would we need helicopter extractions from the embassy rooftop to get the final load of invaders and compromised locals out of there?