Afghanistan: A Seriously Disrupted State

Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University.

A striking feature of the post–Cold War world has been the dramatic increase in the number of states which, in a variety of ways, can be classified as disrupted. This has constituted a major source of political, social and military turbulence, and has contributed to potential or actual instability in world politics. Of all these disrupted states, Afghanistan stands out as a rare case, as it has managed to survive and maintain some form of sovereignty and territorial integrity, despite numerous wars, invasions and swings between extreme ideological dispositions, especially over the last thirty years.

This article has three objectives. The first is to look at variations in the form of the state, and forms of state–society interaction, and to outline what constitutes a disrupted as opposed to a cohesive state. Since its consolidation as a state from 1747, Afghanistan has continuously been classified as disrupted (except from 1930 to 1978) in one form or another. It has had a turbulent historical course of development, remaining almost chronically vulnerable to domestic instability and foreign intervention as well as ideological extremism.

The second is to examine the internal and external sources of “disruption” in Afghanistan, more specifically since the successful pro-Soviet communist coup of April 1978, followed by the Soviet invasion twenty months later, and since the United States–led intervention in October 2001 in response to the al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., a month earlier. The US-led actions have resulted in a serious ideological struggle for the soul of the nation between the forces of political pluralism and religious radicalism in Afghanistan, with important implications for liberal governments in the Western alliance. This struggle, along with the fragmentation and dysfunction of the governing elite, an international presence, and government legitimacy crises, has generated “disruption” in nearly all of its forms. Afghanistan has now climbed to its ranking of sixth in the 2010 Failed States Index,¹ even in the midst of a huge international effort to rebuild and stabilise the country.

My third objective is to touch on some responses which are still available to the parties on the ground, drawing on lessons learned from the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. While the window for success for anti-Taliban forces is narrowing, with a good number of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) contingents planning their withdrawal from the country, the stakes for the Afghan government and international community are only getting higher. Success in Afghanistan is critical for the legitimacy of the United Nations; for the lead military actor on the ground, NATO, which has defined Afghanistan as a test of its post–Cold War cohesion and effectiveness; and for the United States, which has made the country the blueprint for its democratisation project in the region. For President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, failure may entail not only the fall of his government, but the break-up of the state.

Disrupted States

Today, the international system comprises states which range from the extremely cohesive to the highly disrupted. Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a steep rise in the number of disrupted states, in both the political–administrative and territorial meanings of the word. Afghanistan has been only one of many such states, the transition to post–Cold War politics revealing previously suppressed cleavages and differences in a large number of countries.

A disrupted state is what Georg Sorensen refers to as the “post-colonial state”, that is, the unconsolidated state in the periphery, often in an ongoing state of entropy.² The degree of “disruption” within such a territorial unit can be further measured by an assessment of such variables as the personalisation of politics, national divisions, the arbitrary imposition of ideologically driven values and practices, as well as the extent to which the state is incapable of reflecting the complexity of society and managing pressure from above and below. Such a state is also often unable to “maintain a monopoly on the internal means of violence”.³ It is therefore vulnerable to being politically and physically ruptured, ending up in a situation of open civil conflict, subjected to foreign intervention or even occupation, with the collapse of administrative and organisational arrangements, its sovereignty either strained, eroded or divided. Disrupted states need not be suffering from complete state “failure” or “collapse”, where “the basic functions of the state are no longer performed”;⁴ rather, they are marked by varying degrees of incapacity, possibly leaving the remnants of the state as a significant player with which international actors may need to engage. It follows that disrupted states can come in different forms, of which four prove to be fairly common today.

The first comprises those states which have erupted into open conflict but are still accepted as independent units within the international system, such as Somalia since 1991. The second comprises those which are contested by their neighbours in such a way as to thwart their attempts to secure a high level of consolidation. Examples of such entities are South Ossetia and Abkhazia, over whose political status and destiny Russia and Georgia have waged war. The third comprises countries occupied by external forces that are under challenge from segments of the local population, such as Iraq under the US-led occupation. The fourth comprises states which are not in a situation of open disintegration but are gripped by strong undercurrents of instability and are held together mainly by the military as the most potent unifying force in the country. Pakistan, with its pre-eminent military and security apparatus, is a prime example of such a state. These forms are not mutually exclusive, as disrupted states can often fall under more than one of these descriptions. What is rare, however, is finding a state that either is or has the potential to be defined by all four. Afghanistan is such a state.

A History of Disruption

“Disruption” has, in one form or another,