Mike,
So a constitution is a "mere piece of paper"? A Certificate for a million shares of Goggle is "mere paper" as well. President Obama's birth certificate is "mere paper."
Fact is, some paper is more important than others. I know you know that, so I find your position odd.
The "mere paper" of the Afghan constitution vested in one man virtually all Afghan patronage. The King did not have that power in the "good old days" of Afghanistan. No leader before Karzai has had such power to my knowledge has. Perhaps Genghis...
Karzai got "elected" in a process that is perceived globally as being highly fraudulent. Probably not quite as bad as the process the garnered Diem 110% of the vote in Saigon when he rose to the presidency in a US supervised election there, but close.
Then once elected he picks 1/3 of the Jirga; all the supreme court, all the ministers, all the Provincial and District Governors and Chiefs of Police - and they in turn all owe their patronage up to him and his cronies. This is a Ponzi scheme that is the root of the scale of Afghan corruption we all complain about. Everyone who buys a positing in this scheme (good rumors are that the latest minister of defense paid $2 million US for his appointment) are then in competition with each other, not just to enrich themselves and their friends and families, but also their patrons, in hopes of earning even better positions where they can make more money.
This means all of those who had such positions prior to the constitution were immediately kicked to the curb. Entire tribal structures were disempowered, while those they had lorded over stepped up to take their jobs, their farms, their power. This is not the type of turmoil that occurs in DC where one party leaves their appointments to go to think tanks, and vise versa. This is like if every member of a particular party that just lost acorss the country had to surrender they homes, their businesses and their pride.
Just a piece of paper? Hardly. And now, as a price of "reintegration" that we offer to the Taliban is that "all" they have to do to come back in from the cold is to swear allegiance to this "piece of paper." Essentially agree to a life of second class citizenry in a country where there is no second class.
I think the Billy Bean quote in money ball applies in his answer to "what the problem is"
"The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us."
This is the same conversation that formerly powerful people who are the core of the insurgency in Afghanistan have around their campfires...
Oh, and I am curious. When is it that an insurgency becomes a civil war? People like to say that the insurgency in Syria is a civil war; like it is a degree of violence that is the critical distinction. That a civil war is by its nature worse than an insurgency. I think either one can be "worse" than the other, depending on how it unfolds. Certainly historians are very casual about what gets called a civil war vs what gets called an insurgency
For me, it is like cellular biology. if there is once cell, and the conflict is internal to that cell, it is insurgency. When the cell divides, each with all the working parts of a full cell, and those two cells then go into competition with each other to see which will grow to fill the entire space, then it is civil war. Degree of violence is, IMO, moot.
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