Quote Originally Posted by Entropy View Post
I agree but still say it's a pretty big factor. As I've said many times now, Afghanistan isn't merely an insurgency - it's still in a civil war. And the Taliban aren't merely insurgents - they are the former power looking to regain what they once had.
I certainly agree that it is a civil war--as was Iraq for a time too.

However, the Afghan constitution per se has lots of wiggle room if the national leadership wanted to use Chapter 8 (especially Articles 2-3) creatively to devolve power and coopt local elements. That it doesn't do so is a function of both leadership choice and the (preexisting) social-political distribution of power.

Moreover, it is entirely possible for centralized administrations with centralizing constitutions to effectively coopt into the periphery in a decentralizing way--Morocco would be a case in point. The problem with Afghan patron-client structures may not be that they exist, but that they exist in such an inefficient, corrupt, and predatory manner.

As I've argued elsewhere, I don't think the development/peacebuilding/stabilization/COIN crowd has a good handle on this:

...conceptually, the peacebuilding and reconstruction community has largely failed to deal with this, and that as a consequence there is a current and potentially growing disconnect in both theory and practice. How is it that patronage politics can be limited, contained, channeled, or attenuated in ways that create maximum benefits in terms of stability and legitimization, and the least damage in terms of corruption, inefficiency, inequality, and delegitimization? How is it that we encourage countries emerging from conflict to look more like Jordan and less like Yemen—both places where neopatrimonialism has played a key role in domestic politics, but with strikingly different developmental and institutional outcomes?