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Waging War and Building Peace in Afghanistan

ASTRI SUHRKE

Visions of peace and the means of violence have been strategically joined at the very foun-dation of the international engagement in Afghanistan since 2001. The two forces have sus-tained each other – peacebuilding efforts have generated legitimacy and political supportfor the war – but the violence has also undercut efforts to create structures of peace andprosperity, thus hastening the international search for an exit. The contradictionsbetween simultaneously waging war and building peace in Afghanistan were recognizedtoo late, or not at all, in international peacebuilding circles. During the early phase ofthe intervention, in particular, the aid and rights communities were vocal advocates fora strong international military presence. The discourse on ‘security’ as a prerequisite fordevelopment and peace has continued to mask the underlying tensions in the security–peacebuilding nexus as they appear in Afghanistan’s internationalized civil war.

The international intervention in Afghanistan after 2001 has been driven by twomain forces – US attempts to project strategic power with military force, and UN-centred efforts to create a less violent world. Visions of peace were thus from thevery beginning built into the intervention next to the instruments of violence. Therelationship between violence and peace was not a simple means–ends affair but acomplex interaction whereby the two opposing forces sustained as well as gratedon each other. Most obviously, the peacebuilding venture provided a measure oflegitimacy that helped sustain political support for the military operations; on theother hand, the violence that soon spiralled into a war undermined the peacebuildingagenda. By the end of the decade, the normative force of peacebuilding had beentrumped by the costs of war, as well as growing recognition of the inherent difficul-ties of ‘building peace’. The stage was set for a scaling back of the international pres-ence. In this phase, a new pattern of interaction between military objectives andthe peacebuilding agenda emerged. Normative visions of an Afghan peace articu-lated by the rights and peacebuilding communities now warned against a precipitateNATO military withdrawal and negotiations with the Taliban.

This article examines four phases of interaction: the initial mission, the expan-sion of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the growing tempo ofengagement for both war and peace, and the scaling back.

The Initial Mission

Antecedents

UN-led peacebuilding activities in Afghanistan did not start in December 2001.Throughout the 1990s, the UN as well as national donor agencies and several

International Peacekeeping, Vol.19, No.4, August 2012, pp.478–491ISSN 1353-3312 print/1743-906X onlinehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2012.709759 # 2012 Taylor & Francis

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non-Afghan NGOs sought to promote peace in Afghanistan along two mainchannels: diplomatic efforts to work out a political settlement between thewarring Afghan factions, and the provision of aid in ways that would encouragecommunity-based structures and initiatives for peace. The two tracks of interven-tion did not always cohere, nor did the various aid actors always agree. A princi-pal purpose of the plan adopted in the UN in 1998 was precisely to producegreater coherence in aid strategies and streamline aid with diplomacy. Called‘The Strategic Framework Agreement for Afghanistan’, the plan established prin-ciples for engagement in conflict situations, and all aid actors were asked toconform.

The normative force of the language notwithstanding (‘principled engage-ment’ and ‘principled common programming’), not all aid organizations linedup behind the plan. Some NGOs recognized it as a coordination tool designedfor explicit political purposes and took exception. The premise of the StrategicFramework Agreement, as Mark Duffield, Nicholas Leader and Patricia Gross-man pointed out in a thorough and perceptive evaluation at the time, was thatAfghanistan was a ‘failed state’. The Taliban regime was referred to as a ‘pre-sumptive state authority’ that did not adhere to international norms and waswidely seen as savagely repressing its population. This ‘definitional represen-tation’ of the situation – which did not recognize the ability of the Taliban toimpose its authority over large parts of Afghanistan as putative state power –was ‘the soil from which institutional arrangements and policy prescriptions’grew.1

The policy prescriptions of the Strategic Framework Agreement were con-densed into seven main principles. The first three paraphrased long-standing prin-ciples of humanitarian assistance (aid should be provided on the basis ofuniversality, impartiality and neutrality); the fourth principle stressed that aidmust not benefit any of the Afghan warring parties, and the seventh called forhigh standards of transparency and accountability in aid. The critical principles,and those that caused most controversy – both within the aid community and inits relations with and the Taliban – were the remaining two.

Principle No. 5 effectively banned any form of aid for institutional develop-ment and capacity-building that could benefit the Taliban state. Only institutionaland capacity-building activities that advanced human rights were permitted, andany recipient authority must adhere to UN laws and principles. That sharply cir-cumscribed the list of potential local partners. Nevertheless, to give aid agenciessome room to contribute to peace and longer-term development, Principle No. 6allowed for assistance activities that would increase ‘indigenous ownership’ at thevillage, community and national levels. As Duffield and his associates point out,this principle encouraged aid actors to circumvent state authorities that wereunpalatable to the international donor community, and engage at the locallevel. Whatever the precise nature of the aid (anti-poverty projects, institution-building, capacity-creation), activities undertaken at the local level in linewith principle No. 6 were explicitly justified in the language of peacebuilding.The UN Development Programme (UNDP) even had a programme run underthe acronym of PEACE (Poverty Eradication and Community Empowerment).

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Seen in this light, the Strategic Framework Agreement was a UN-sponsoredtool for peacebuilding based on support for the people rather than, or evenagainst, the ‘presumptive state authority’. The wider implications were recog-nized at the time. Some aid actors suggested to the Duffield team that if an aidagency were serious about creating peace in Afghanistan, it ‘should supplyarms as well’.2

As it turned out, arming the people (at least some of them) was the next step,although it took the separate and dramatic events of 9/11 to push this dimensionof peacebuilding to its extreme conclusion. The US-led military intervention tocrush the Taliban and chase down members of al-Qaeda is unthinkable in theabsence of the 9/11 attacks.3 Yet the ground had been prepared by the eventsof the second half of the 1990s. The Taliban regime had in this period beenincreasingly stigmatized as an international outcast and condemned in repeatedUN Security Council resolutions for its repression of women, involvement inthe opium economy and support to terrorists. UN sanctions were imposed in1999 and tightened in 2000. By designating the Taliban as an internationalpariah if the regime failed to comply with UN demands, the sanctions effectivelyprepared the legitimatizing ground for more direct intervention.4 The StrategicFramework Agreement was part of this front of hostility by harnessing ‘aid aspeacebuilding’ against the regime. Already in the 1990s, then, the link betweenpeacebuilding and more forceful actions to create a certain kind of peace wassketched out on the horizon.

The Early Years after Bonn

The UN peacebuilding venture in Afghanistan after 2001 blossomed from theseroots. The Bonn Agreement outlined a grand transformative project for socialjustice, rights and democracy, and in the early first couple of years thereseemed to be little contradiction between this agenda and the military strategypursued by the US-led coalition forces. There was a near-consensus in the ‘inter-national community’ that defeating the Taliban was necessary to create the secur-ity that the transformative peacebuilding project required.5 On the ground, therelationship seemed mostly unproblematic as well. The US-led forces in Oper-ation Enduring Freedom (OEF) were waging a war, but mostly in remoteborder areas where they targeted retreating Taliban and al-Qaeda membersand their suspected sympathizers. There were some grievous cases of civiliancasualties and violation of international humanitarian law, most notoriouslywhen US planes bombed a wedding party in southern Uruzgan province in July2002 (with an estimated 50 casualties) and when Afghan militias partneringwith the US Special Forces killed around 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war beingtransported in freight containers to Shebergan prison in the northern Jowzan pro-vince in December 2001.6 Still, for the first two to three years, Operation Endur-ing Freedom touched only a small section of the population.

Meanwhile, the UN and the aid community launched large-scale humanitar-ian assistance and reconstruction programmes, the Afghan Independent HumanRights Commission was established, and the first steps in the political transitiondesigned to move the country from war to peace were taken. The UN-authorized

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peacekeeping force, ISAF, was in place in Kabul by January 2002. The force waswarmly welcomed by the city’s population; now swollen with returning refugees,who celebrated their newly won freedoms and the prospect of peace and prosper-ity. The prominent journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote in March 2002 that BritishISAF soldiers were so popular in Kabul that they caused an ‘instant traffic jam.Hordes of well-wishers – including blue burqa clad women and laughing children– crowd around them’.7

Rashid’s happy picture seemed to confirm the dominant international narra-tive that had framed the response to Afghanistan in 2001.8 In this narrative,the ‘international community’, above all Western governments, had abandonedAfghanistan after the Soviet military withdrawal in 1988–89. Left to itself, thecountry had descended into internal strife that led to enormous suffering for itspeople, paved the way for the Taliban regime and enabled international terroriststo use the country as a base for attacks on the United States. From this narrativeflowed several policy prescriptions: first, the ‘international community must notagain walk away from Afghanistan; second, the international community hadboth a security interest and a moral obligation to help Afghanistan recoverfrom the last nearly three decades of strife and ‘failed state’ condition; andthird, there was no fundamental contradiction between the military intervention,represented by OEF, and the UN peacebuilding agenda. The US military interven-tion was widely seen in the UN system as a just war, and regime change was con-sidered necessary for reconstruction, nation-building and peacebuilding. The UNhad, after all, orchestrated and given institutional expression to the growing inter-national hostility towards the Taliban in the second half of the 1990s. It was allpart of the trend of the times of how to solve ‘the frontier problem in internationalsociety’, as James Mayall puts it, and explicitly justified as such.9

Much of the international community coalesced around this narrative to forma near-consensus on the nature and purpose of the intervention in the early years.At the time, there was only one large, visible crack in the consensus. On the ques-tion of deployment of ISAF, the international actors were deeply divided. Most ofthe civilians engaged in peacebuilding, as broadly defined, called for a large inter-national stabilization force to be deployed throughout the country. The militaryestablishments, however, were initially quite hesitant.

Expansion

The expansion of ISAF started in October 2003 when the Security Council auth-orized force expansion to ‘areas of Afghanistan outside of Kabul’ (SecurityCouncil Resolution1510). In retrospect, this was a watershed in the internationalinvolvement in the country and a major factor in the evolving conflict.10 ISAF, itwill be recalled, was originally conceived as an entity quite separate from the UScombat forces under OEF. Variously called a stabilization or peacekeeping force,ISAF was designed to assist the transitional government in Kabul to establish asecure environment for reconstruction. No sooner had the first ISAF contingentlanded in Kabul, however, than a veritable campaign was launched in

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New York and Washington to expand its mandate and enlarge its area of oper-ation beyond the capital.11

In a literal sense, the campaign succeeded beyond expectations. Already bymid-decade, ISAF forces were deployed throughout the country and NATO’swebsite started producing maps of Afghanistan bedecked with a bewilderingvariety of national flags. By the end of the decade, 46 countries plus the UnitedStates had troops under ISAF command. ISAF and OEF forces had then mergedunder a common NATO–ISAF command (although some US Special Forcesremained outside it). There had also been a merger of functions. ISAF unitsthat had originally been sent on what was officially described as close to peace-keeping were involved in combat operations, while combat units sponsoredreconstruction and development projects in line with NATO’s ‘comprehensiveapproach’ to defeat the insurgency. The merger of military and aid functionswas institutionalized in the Provincial Reconstruction teams, a controversialinnovation in NATO’s inventory of tools for dealing with unconventional con-flicts. For civilians in the rights, aid and diplomatic community who had advo-cated ISAF expansion in order to strengthen peacebuilding it was anunexpected and, to some, a troubling outcome.

The case for expanding ISAF was nestled in a larger international discourse onpost-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding. In this perspective, security was afoundational requirement for the post-war agenda, including promoting econ-omic growth and development, democratic political activity, the rule of lawand human rights. Above all, building (or re-building) the state meant establish-ing a monopoly of legitimate force. In the Afghan context, this meant that ISAFmust expand beyond Kabul to do throughout the country what it had done for thecapital, but also do more: to extend the authority of the central government in acountryside dominated by diverse militias and ‘warlords’. Expansion of ISAFwould signal the international community’s commitment to reconstruct Afghani-stan out of the ruins of a ‘failed state’.

A main argument for expansion was thus ISAF’s success in executing its orig-inal mandate to facilitate the political transition by making Kabul a safe and pol-itically neutral place. ISAF’s presence helped create sufficient safety and order inKabul to permit the newly established government and its international partnersto start rebuilding the city, aid returning refugees, provide humanitarian assist-ance, and reopen schools and the university. There certainly was crime, abuseand insecurity, but a sense of normality prevailed that permitted commercialand political activities to resume.

The contingent that carried out these diverse and demanding tasks, the KabulMultinational Brigade, was less than 5,000 strong. That it achieved a significantmeasure of success reflects three main factors: adroit demonstration of presence, acredible link to US air power, and the willingness of the principal Afghan factionswith capacity to shape the security situation in Kabul at this time to ‘buy into’ theBonn Agreement that had catapulted them into unprecedented positions of statepower. In the provinces, the situation was different. Local strongmen were muchless inclined to welcome a stabilization/peacekeeping force that had a formalmandate to help extend the power of the central government, as the UN Security

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Council Resolution that authorized force expansion pointedly declared (Resol-ution 1510). ISAF units outside Kabul would therefore face a dilemma: theycould accommodate local strongmen and warlords who did not accept the writof the central government and its formal rights-and-democracy agenda, therebycompromising their mandate, or follow the mandate and risk violent conflictby confronting them.

The advocates of ISAF expansion clearly assumed the latter. Among the moreinfluential voices was the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General,Lakhdar Brahimi. In November–December 2001, Brahimi had been scepticalabout sending multinational forces at all, warning that the Afghans were aproud people who did not like to be ordered around by foreigners in uniform.As ISAF deployed in Kabul without meeting resistance and was warmly wel-comed by the city’s population, his apprehensions seemed to melt away.Already by January 2002, when international donors met in Tokyo, Brahimicalled for expanding ISAF beyond the city: ‘[p]eople up and down the countryare calling for the force to be deployed in other regions of Afghanistan’.12 He sub-sequently made the case for expansion to the Security Council in increasinglyurgent tones.13

Brahimi rested his case on the weakness of the Afghan state and its lack of amonopoly of force. In the north, armed factions were fighting among themselvesand Pashtun minorities were subjected to systematic harassment and violence. Inthe east, some governors appointed by the central authority were violentlyrejected by the local communities. In the south, attacks by militants werereported. Throughout the country, violence by local strongmen and general inse-curity was a problem for both the local population and international aid workers.

Other powerful voices joined in. The UN High Commissioner for HumanRights, Mary Robinson, returned from a trip to Afghanistan in early 2002 tocall for deployment of ISAF outside Kabul, citing the impossibility of rebuildingsociety and securing human rights ‘if you have violence, if you have killings, if youhave robberies, if you have looting, if you have women terrified’.14 Human rightsorganizations carried a similar message. Human Rights Watch cited widespreadviolence against Pashtun minorities in the north to recommend immediate ISAFdeployment to that region.15 Aid agencies and NGOs that were poised toaddress the enormous need for assistance, and chafing under security restrictionswanted ISAF to protect the movement of personnel and material throughout thecountry. US analysts argued that US failure to support expansion would be readas a sign of US disengagement and a defeat in the front line of the ‘War onTerror’.16 Experts, crisis management groups and think-tanks joined the lobby.The International Crisis Group advocated an increase from the initial deploymentof 4,500 to 25,000. All were cited in a major hearing in the US Senate in June2002 that addressed the situation in Afghanistan.17 At the time, the appeals fora larger role in Afghanistan were overwhelmingly wrapped in the mantle ofhumanitarian action and peacebuilding. While persuasive to many, it did notmove the Bush administration. When the administration later authorized expan-sion, as we shall see, it was in response to resource assessments in the Iraqi theatreof war, as well as the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan.

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Meanwhile, on the Afghan side, Hamid Karzai, then chairman of the transi-tional government, was a vociferous advocate for ISAF expansion. Given itsmandate, and the fact that Karzai himself did not have a military force onwhich he could rely, ISAF was a surrogate army of the central state over whichhe presided. Other Afghan leaders concurred, but for different reasons. Thepowerful leader of the Northern Alliance forces that had taken Kabul, MarshalFahim had, at the Bonn meeting, already wanted the planned stabilization/peace-keeping force to be deployed beyond Kabul. At the time, his own armies were inKabul, and a multinational force in the capital would constrain Fahim while rivalmilitary strongmen in the north and the west would go scot-free. Expansion ofISAF would neutralize this advantage.18

The US military had, in 2001 and well into 2002, strongly opposed the estab-lishment of a multinational stabilization/peacekeeping force outside Kabul,fearing that the force would distract them from the mission of defeating theTaliban and al-Qaeda. US refusal to assist such a force with logistics or othermatters, including extracting the contingent if needed, effectively vetoed effortsby US and UK diplomats at the Bonn meeting in December 2001 to get agreementon ISAF deployment beyond Kabul.19 Continued opposition from the militaryblocked attempts to expand the force in 2002, and the civilian leadership of thePentagon firmly concurred, although for other reasons: US support for ISAFwas regarded as a diversion from their planned invasion of Iraq.20

The violent aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 changed thesituation dramatically. Needing more troops for Iraq, the US government activelysolicited allied troops for Afghanistan. An expanded ISAF was the main vehiclefor contributions. The situation in parts of the country remained unsettled andin some ways had worsened. Already in mid-2003, US military intelligence inAfghanistan concluded that the Taliban were on their way back, and Secretaryof State Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the Afghan front was ‘heating up’.21

From then and onwards until the end of the decade, demands for more alliedtroop contributions to defeat the Afghan insurgency and demonstrate NATO soli-darity became a steady drumbeat out of Washington.

Allied militaries had likewise hesitated. The British defence chief reportedlythreatened to resign rather than accept British leadership of the first ISAF contingentin Kabul. He only relented when assured that the mission would be short-lived(three months), and on the express condition that US military forces provided‘essential enabling support’.22 The British subsequently agreed to another threemonths, but Turkey, the only country willing to take over the command, was reluc-tant as well.

At bottom was the ambiguous but potentially ambitious mandate of providing‘security assistance’ to a weak central government. This troubled the military. Butit also enabled the various advocates of expansion to make their case on multiplegrounds. Some saw it as an essential tool of state-building or, alternatively, a sym-bolic exercise of power to maintain the post-Bonn momentum; others wantedinternational forces to secure relief supplies and development projects, or toprotect women and ordinary Afghans against abuse, or for standing downarmed factions in the provinces, protecting minorities, and so on. While diverse

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in organizational and policy terms, the many human rights activists, aid organiz-ations, UN officials, analysts and national politicians that engaged on this issueshared the conviction that an international military force was required toprovide security for the multiple state- and peacebuilding tasks ahead.

Waging War and Building Peace

The expectation behind the advocacy campaign of this ad hoc peacebuilding com-munity was that force expansion would enhance security. Reality soon provedmore complex. As it turned out, the growing international military presencefuelled the conflict, providing further provocation and more targets for an insur-gency that had started to revive already in 2003.23 As the violence escalated, thedividing line between a stabilization mandate and combat became increasinglyblurred. The insurgents did not read the fine print that distinguished the originalOEF mission command from ISAF, and the international forces dropped theearlier organizational distinction that had suggested a clear line between ‘securityassistance’ in the form of stabilization or peacekeeping, and combat. By mid-decade, international forces and the insurgents were locked in a fierce conflictthat turned large parts of the south and the east into a war zone. By the end ofthe decade, the violence had engulfed much of the west and the north as well,while suicide blasts and other forms of attack rocked the capital.24 To agrowing number of Afghans, ISAF appeared as an occupation force that sup-ported self-serving elites and fuelled a costly war that claimed civilian lives anddestroyed property.25

The mounting violence exposed the underlying contradictions between thetask of building peace while waging war. The war, it became clear, had a corros-ive effect on the entire peacebuilding project. Failures on the peacebuilding side ofthe ledger could be explained away with reference to the poor security situation inline with the core logic of the security–development nexus. Perhaps most impor-tant, basic policy priorities of the international project were skewed in favour ofwinning the war. When faced with conflicting priorities between peacebuildingtasks, such as promoting justice and good governance, on the one hand, and stab-ility and pursuit of the war on the other, the United States and its main allies gen-erally favoured the latter. The hopes that ISAF units deployed beyond Kabulwould restrain local strongmen proved wrong; in most cases the accommodatingpresence of ISAF empowered them, and when these on occasion were removed (asthe Dutch demanded in Uruzgan and the British in Helmand), greater instabilityseemed to follow.26 Similar indications that the demands of war trumped theneeds of peacebuilding were manifested in other ways as well – the failure toinstitute transitional justice mechanisms and weak human rights policies,27 thesuperficial commitment to develop parliamentary democracy,28 tolerance of thenarcotics economy and the rents it offered the state,29 and unwillingness tocombat corruption and other crimes or injustices committed by high officialsand self-appointed power holders who represented short-term stability.30

There were also signs that the international military presence had negativeeffects that reduced the initial, popular support for the post-Taliban order.

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Repeated coalition offensives – with their civilian casualties, detested night raids,arbitrary detentions and the practice of some US forces of bulldozing villages tocreate ‘safe zones’ around their forward bases – caused deep resentment amongthe Afghans. Possibly the costs would have been easier to live with if the rest of theinternational project had delivered economic benefits and protection from arbi-trary exercise of power. As it was, the benefits from the aid-and-war economywere extremely unevenly distributed, the state administration was mired in cor-ruption, and its legal system rarely offered redress of injustices experienced.

The escalating war ratcheted up the demand for rapid and visible results, bothwithin Afghanistan and from domestic audiences in the contributing countries.To deliver quick and visible results, the interveners adopted measures that under-mined basic precepts of state-building, and by extension its contribution to peace-building. To rapidly create Afghan military capacity, for example, theinternational forces started rearming the militias.31 This, of course, weakenedthe possibility of establishing a monopoly of legitimate force controlled by theAfghan state. It was also a potential source of local conflict and violence,especially in ethnically mixed northern areas.32 The massive expansion of theAfghan army and the national police in the second half of the decade created pro-blems of fiscal sustainability and quality control, arguably two central objectivesof both state- and peacebuilding. The equally massive infusions of aid – amount-ing to nearly 90 per cent of total official expenditures early in the decade andremaining almost steady throughout – produced a rentier state financed by inter-national aid.33 Creation of a rentier state was itself a pre-eminent example of howassistance modalities had been adjusted to suit wartime imperatives even thoughthey violated all sound principles of promoting sustainable development andaccountable government. Predictably, the rentier state also spawned corruptand opportunistic elites, which the United States and its allies were unable toreform and reluctant to remove lest this should endanger the war effort.

The growing insurgency also generated international demands for control thatbypassed protracted deliberations with stakeholders, were at odds with thegeneral discourse of ‘local ownership’, and clashed with the legal framework ofAfghan sovereignty. The tensions between Afghan demands for ‘ownership’and international efforts to control the policy process were ubiquitous, slowingthe reform process and bringing it to a standstill when, towards the end of thedecade, the conflict between President Hamid Karzai and his main internationalsupporters erupted into public quarrels. The intrusive international mission andthe state’s visible dependence on foreign support also contributed to the govern-ment’s legitimacy deficit. Afghan rulers have traditionally invoked religion, triballineage and nationalism to legitimize their rule. A government visibly and heavilydependent on Western aid and military forces had to develop an alternative legit-imizing ideology. Hence the government, but especially its international suppor-ters, looked to ‘good governance’ to legitimize the post-Taliban order. Unlikereligion and nationalism, however, ‘good governance’ exerts no influencesimply by virtue of its ideational existence; it has to actually deliver goods and ser-vices. In this case, it did not, with corrosive consequences for the peacebuildingefforts.

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As the contradictions between the peacebuilding venture and the war shar-pened, the relationship between the respective policy agents became tense aswell. Expressed most clearly in the interaction between parts of the internationalaid community and ISAF, the tension played out in several fields. In part, it was aconflict over knowledge and its use, as exemplified by the controversial practice ofthe US military to integrate civilian anthropologists and similar experts intocombat teams, the so-called ‘Human Terrain Teams’. It was also a conflict overaid resources. When ISAF adopted a counter-insurgency strategy towards theend of the decade, national military contingents came to control substantialfunds for discretionary spending to ‘win hearts and minds’ among the Afghans.US forces, in particular, were allocated large amounts of aid funds (estimatedat US$1.5 billion for 2010–11 alone). Civilian critics argued that this spendingwas at best ineffective, at worst counterproductive by creating conflict, and atany rate unsustainable.34

The underlying contest over who should control resources – civilian aidorganizations or the military – equally concerned definitions of space. As the mili-tary moved into development and humanitarian assistance, civilian aid actorswarned that the neutral ‘humanitarian space’, fundamental to both internationalhumanitarian law and peacebuilding, was shrinking. The aid community that hadearlier argued for ISAF expansion now turned on ISAF’s Provincial Reconstruc-tion Teams – the joint civil–military units that had been one of the principalexpressions of force expansion – with bitter criticism.35 More generally, therewas growing concern within the larger community of civilians, who staffed therights, aid and political agendas of the international project, that the escalatingwar was undermining the peacebuilding project in its very foundations.

Scaling Back

Recognition of the tensions between building peace while waging war, as well asthe costs of the war and failure to gain strategic victories, led the principal inter-national actors involved to reconsider both the war and the peace it was meant tobring. As the principal military actor, the US government led the way in defining ascaling-back process that set 2014 as the target date for withdrawal of inter-national combat forces. The change was framed by a narrative that emphasizedthe distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In this narrative, gains couldbe made by splitting the two by negotiating with the Taliban and related militantswho had exclusively Afghan political ambitions, while pursuing those identifiedas ‘international terrorists’ with military means. The strategy was foreshadowedin a speech by President Barack Obama at West Point in December 2009 and ledto US efforts to open negotiation channels, culminating in the December 2011announcement that the Taliban would open an office in Qatar to facilitatetalks. At the same time, US forces’ military pressure on the ground was increasedas part of a talk-and-fight strategy and the hopes of securing a favourable point ofdeparture for ISAF in 2014.

Beyond 2014, US strategy is reflected in the Security Agreement with Afghani-stan signed on 2 May 2012. The apparent aim is a lower-cost, lower-profile

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presence based on several elements: Special Forces and drones to fight ‘terrorists’(primarily in Pakistan but also in Afghanistan), advisers to maintain supervisoryand mentoring links with Afghan armed forces, and access to bases as part of alarger strategic calculus to project US military power in the region, particularlyin relation to China.

On the political side, the grand transformative project launched in 2001 hadbecome qualified by ‘good enough’. The discourse of aid and reform had increas-ingly recognized the enormous difficulties of building peace in a devastated landin a contested region, and the timeline and scope of the agenda had been scaledback in fact, if not formally. Yet in some respects the language of the Bonnmeeting in December 2011 was firm and upbeat. The formal statement of the85 countries and 16 international organizations represented affirmed their com-mitment to ‘a stable, democratic and prosperous future’ for Afghanistan, andto uphold all international human rights obligations, in particular the rights ofwomen, and support ‘a thriving and free civil society’.36 At the same time, theprospect of negotiations with the Taliban has led to a discursive re-emphasison the core values that had framed the initial peacebuilding agenda of the inter-vention in 2001 and were enshrined in the 2004 Constitution – human rights, therights of women, liberal political democracy and a market economy. Respect forhuman rights and the rights of women were specifically included in the Bonn 2011declaration as guidelines for future negotiations and possible ‘reconciliation’ withthe insurgents. The language reflected the continued prominence of the humanrights agenda in mainstream international politics, but more particularly its sig-nificance in the Afghan context. There were not only memories of the pastrecord of the Taliban. The dominant narrative of international abandonmentthat had accompanied the 2001 intervention was powerfully revived as US-ledforces were preparing to withdraw. As a result, the discursive emphasis placedthe most committed rights activists among the peace-builders on the side ofthose who argued that continued war was preferable to negotiations with theTaliban.

What all of this holds for future peacebuilding in Afghanistan depends on somany factors – local, regional and international – that uncertainty seems to bethe overarching theme. Nevertheless, a narrow focus on the relationshipbetween warfare and ‘aid as peacebuilding’ suggests some conclusions. Withdra-wal of most of the 150,000 international forces, would take much wind out of theideological sails of the insurgency, just as it did when the Soviet troops withdrewin 1988–89. The present war could be transformed into a series of localized con-flicts, possibly with regional international support for rival Afghan factions. In aworst-case scenario, the 1990s would be repeated, with limited space for inter-national assistance. Some variation of the Strategic Framework Agreement ofthe 1990s might be revived as a weapon against governing structures that aredeemed unpalatable (‘presumptive authorities’), or, in the opposite case, insupport of them. In a best-case scenario, foreign withdrawal would beaccompanied by a political settlement that would facilitate reconstruction andpeacebuilding on more genuinely Afghan terms.

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Continued US warfare based on drones raises special issues for a peacebuild-ing agenda. The use of drones is deeply problematic in relation to internationalhuman rights law, international humanitarian law and transparency about theiruse and impact.37 On the other hand, drone warfare in Afghanistan is likely tobe limited (by target and geography), and by its nature is less likely to stir thekind of political sensitivities associated with a massive foreign troop presence,its detested night-raids, large kill-or-capture operations, bulldozing of orchards,and civilian casualties caused by close air support for combat operations. Thisalone may lessen the systemic tensions between building peace while wagingwar observed during the past decade and enlarge the room for broader peace-building activities, whether done mainly by Afghans or with significant inter-national support.

Conclusions

More than ten years of intervention in Afghanistan by actors that in official com-muniques call themselves ‘the International Community’ has demonstrated thecomplexity of the interaction between those engaged in ‘peacebuilding’ writlarge, and the military. In the initial phases of the intervention, there was anear-consensus in this community that violence was necessary to create the secur-ity required for peacebuilding, and the aid community, in particular, urged forgreater military presence – although on the facile and mistaken assumptionthat this would create security without violence. Only when the violence onboth sides escalated, did the inherent tensions between waging war and buildingpeace become apparent and a political solution appeared to be the betteralternative.

The past decade of international assistance in Afghanistan has also demon-strated the enormous difficulties of creating a legitimate government, surely oneof the core elements of peacebuilding. Admittedly, the local context was difficultand Afghanistan’s location in a ‘bad neighbourhood’ certainly did not help. Yetthe numerous evaluations and discursive analysis of the reasons for the shortcom-ings have paid insufficient attention to the internal, systemic contradictions in theambitious, transformative project that was launched in 2011. The three main setsof tensions examined here relate to: (i) waging war while building peace; (ii) theweak legitimacy and overall frailty of a rentier state – itself the product of heavyinternational involvement as well as the supportive role of rents from the shadoweconomy; and (iii) the conflict between international demands for control andAfghan demands for ownership – ownership demands that by necessity wereideologically endorsed by the international community as well.

A decade of international involvement has laid bare these tensions withincreasing clarity. To what extent these have been recognized in the ‘best prac-tices’ units of various donors and international organizations, above all the UNmachinery dealing with peace operations, remains unclear. ‘Best practices’ bydefinition operate on procedural or project levels that tend to miss the larger,overarching structures. Still, the comparatively greater caution demonstrated inthe UN towards recent upheavals in the Middle East suggests considerable

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awareness of the limitations on external assistance for social transformations aspart of a peace operation in deeply conflicted societies. The fierce nationalisticpride evidenced during ‘the Arab Spring’ clearly contributed to this recognition;so did the cumulative frustrations experienced and costs incurred by bothnationals and internationals in Afghanistan. In terms of the evolving policy dis-course, the distance between 2001 and 2011 appears much longer than a meredecade.

NOTES

1. Mark Duffield, Patricia Grossman and Nicholas Leader, Review of the Strategic Framework forAfghanistan, Kabul: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2002.

2. Ibid., p.13.3. More likely responses to lesser attacks would have been cruise missile strikes of the kind that the

US launched in 1998 after the attacks on its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.4. David Cortright and George A. Lopez with Linda Gerber, Sanctions and the Search for Security,

Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002.5. Analysts who were critical of the central state project nevertheless agreed on the need to defeat the

Taliban. See, e.g., Marina Ottaway and Anatol Lieven, ‘Rebuilding Afghanistan: Fantasy VersusReality’, policy brief 12, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jan.2002.

6. Physicians for Human Rights, ‘War Crime in Afghanistan’ (at: http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/issues/mass-atrocities/afghanistan-war-crime).

7. Ahmed Rashid, ‘Security Concerns Mount in Afghanistan as Country Enters Critical Reconstruc-tion Phase’, Eurasianet.org, 13 Mar. 2002 (at: www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav031402.shtml).

8. Jonathan Steele, Ghosts of Afghanistan, London: Portobello Books, 2011.9. James Mayall, ‘The European Empires and International Order’, in Mayall and Ricardo Soares de

Oliveira (eds), The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States,New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, p.53.

10. Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan, London: Hurst,2011, pp.73–88.

11. Renata Dwan, Thomas Papworth and Sharon Wiharta, ‘Multilateral Peace Missions, 2001’, inSIPRI Yearbook 2002, Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2002,p.126.

12. Lakhdar Brahimi, ‘Speech to the International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance toAfghanistan’, Tokyo, 21 Jan. 2002 (copy on file with author).

13. UN, ‘The Situation in Afghanistan and its Implications for International Peace and Security’,Report of the Secretary-General, UN doc., S/2002/278, 18 Mar. 2002 (at: www.un.org/Docs/sc/reports/2002/sgrep02.htm); UN, ‘The Situation in Afghanistan and its Implications forInternational Peace and Security’, Report of the Secretary-General, UN doc., S/2002/737,11 Jul. 2002 (at: www.un.org/Docs/sc/reports/2002/sgrep02.htm).

14. Cited in Human Rights Watch, ‘Paying for the Taliban’s Crimes’, New York: Human RightsWatch, April 2002, p.49.

15. Ibid.16. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, ‘Afghanistan: Building Stability. Avoiding Chaos’,

Hearing, Washington, DC: GPO, June 2002, p.16.17. Ibid.18. James, Dobbins, After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan, Washington, DC: Potomac

Books, 2008, p.88.19. Ibid.20. Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, New York: Norton,

2009, pp.114–5.21. Douglas Jehl, ‘Afghan Front Heats Up, and Rumsfeld Urges Patience’, New York Times, 8 Sept.

2003.22. Dobbins (see n. 18 above), p.128.23. Suhrke (see n.10 above), pp.37–71.

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24. Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud, London: Hurst, 2008; Giustozzi (ed.), Decoding the NewTaliban: Insights from the Afghan Field, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

25. NATO and UN data show that more civilian deaths were due to attacks by the militants than thegovernment international forces. The international discourse on civilian casualties rarely recog-nizes, however, that victims of Taliban attacks were often ‘collateral damage’ as well; theresult of operations directed against government or international military targets. See (at:www.hrw.org/de/reports/2007/04/15/human-cost).

26. Suhrke (see n.10 above), pp.102–14.27. Ahmad Nader Nadery, ‘Peace or Justice? Transitional Justice in Afghanistan’, International

Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol.1, No.1, 2007, pp.173–9; Emily Winterbotham, The Stateof Transitional Justice in Afghanistan, Kabul: AREU, 2010.

28. Amin Saikal, ‘The UN and Afghanistan: Contentions in Democratization and State-Building’,International Peacekeeping, Vol.9, No.2, 2012, pp.217–34.

29. Mark Shaw, ‘Drug Trafficking and the Development of Organised Crime in Post TalibanAfghanistan’, in William Byrd and D. Buddenberg (eds), Afghanistan’s Drug Industry:Structure, Function, Dynamics and Implications for Counter-Narcotics Policy, New York andWashington, DC: UNODC and World Bank, 2006, pp.189–212; Florian P Kuhn, ‘Aid,Opium and the State of Rents in Afghanistan: Competition, Cooperation, or Cohabitation?’Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol.2, No.3, 2008, pp.309–27.

30. Michael E. Hartmann, ‘Casualties of Myopia’, in Whit Mason (ed.), The Rule of Law in Afgha-nistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

31. Mathieu Lefevre, ‘Local Defence in Afghanistan: A Review of Government-Backed Initiatives’,Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2010.

32. Thomas Ruttig, ‘Another Militia Creation Gone Wrong’, Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network,2010.

33. Suhrke (see n.10 above), ch.5; World Bank, ‘Transition in Afghanistan: Looking Beyond 2014’,Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011.

34. Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining the Relationshipbetween Aid and Security in Afghanistan’, Boston, MA: Feinstein International Center, 2012;US Senate, ‘Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan’, A Majority Staff Report Preparedfor the Use of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington DC: GPO, 2011.

35. Barbara J. Stapleton, ‘A Means to What End? Why PRTs Are Peripheral to the Bigger PoliticalChallenges in Afghanistan’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Vol.10, No.1, 2007,pp.1-49; Kristian Berg Harpviken, ‘A Peace Nation Takes up Arms: The Norwegian Engagementin Afghanistan’, PRIO paper 211 (at: www.prio.no/Research-and-Publications/Publication/?oid=2216694).

36. Bonn Conference, ‘Afghanistan and the International Community: From Transition to the Trans-formation Decade’, Conclusions of the International Afghanistan Conference in Bonn, 5 Dec.2011 (at: http://reliefweb.int/node/463139).

37. Brendan Gogarty and Meredith Hagger, ‘The Laws of Man over Vehicles Unmanned: The LegalResponse to Robotic Revolution on Sea, Land and Air’, Journal of Law, Information and Science,2008 (at: www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlLawInfoSci/2008/5.html); Jack M. Beard, ‘Law andWar in the Virtual Era’, American Journal of International Law, Vol.103, No.3, 2009,pp.409–45; Laurie Blank, ‘Drone Strike Casualties and the Laws of War’, 2011 (at: http://jurist.org/forum/2011/08/laurie-blank-drone-strikes.php).

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