Did we get on the wrong road from the outset?
"The biggest failure of the Bonn Conference was to leave out the discussion on the nature of the state in Afghanistan. The post-Bonn state came in the form of rebuilding what had already been there, a strong unitary state. Despite the fact that historically the structure of the Afghan state had proved to be ineffective against, what Saikal (2005) calls, “micro-societal forces”. In fact, as noted by Goodson (2005), the main immediate failure of the Bonn was to “codify de facto power-sharing” that could resolve elite conflict, which previous four political settlements (Riwalpindi Accord 1989; Peshawar Accord 1992; Macca Accord 1993) had failed to resolve.15 This was a step back to the old highly personalised, where factional leaders dominate through their patronage networks. Consequently, this set into motion fierce internal competition between different elites within the government. As shown by Sharan and Heathershaw (2010: Forthcoming), the post-Bonn peacebuilding has become a contest between the Western educated Karzai network and the Former NA network. The consequence of this has been a further exacerbation of ethnic and patronage linkages in the Afghan polity.
15 Although, there was some serious discussion on the nature state in the constitutional Loye Jirga (on the structure of the state-unitary versus federalism), these discussions were immediately overruled by the UN and US delegates and Karzai team (Suhrke, 2004)."
Source:
http://www.atlantic-community.org/ap...fghanistan.pdf
