Search

This paper argues that the US failed to implement the WPS Act and offers a practical demonstration of how to analyze Afghanistan's security situation from a WPS lens before making three policy arguments regarding what the United States can learn from this error. This omission from the ongoing political debate demonstrates that - despite the United States in the late 2010s being "the first country in the world with a comprehensive law on WPS, and I de facto i , the first with a whole-of-government strategy that responds to such a domestic law"[1] - its government and security communities have not yet fully integrated critical WPS concepts and theories or understood their practical applicability for US security and policy decisions. The US military withdrawal process from Afghanistan brought politicized accusations of multiple foreign policy - military, intelligence, and diplomatic - miscommunications and misconceptions. WPS analyses are critical to understand why Afghanistan destabilized so quickly WPS analyses are critical if policymakers and security professionals truly wish to understand why Afghanistan destabilized so quickly and what the United States should consider for future drawdowns. [Extracted from the article]

Background: Against a backdrop of more than four decades of war, conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan is recognised as suffering from endemic violence and children are exposed to multiple forms of violence, including at the family and school levels. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of school-based peace education and a community-based intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence in conflict resolution, implemented in Afghanistan with the aim of reducing violence against and between children. Methods: The evaluation consisted of a cross-sectional, interrupted time series design with three data collection points over 12 months. Data was collected from students in 11 secondary schools (seven girls’ and four boys’ schools) in Jawzjan province of Afghanistan, with a total of 361 boys and 373 girls sampled at endline. All children were interviewed with a questionnaire developed for the study. Key outcomes included children’s experience of peer violence (both perpetration and victimization) at school, corporal punishment both at home and at school, and observation of family violence. Other outcomes included children’s gender equitable attitudes, attitudes towards child punishment, depression and school performance. Results: Between baseline and endline evaluation points, there were significant reductions in various forms of violence at the school level, including both boys’ and girls’ past month experience of peer violence victimization, peer violence perpetration, and corporal punishment by teachers. There were also significant reductions in boys’ and girls’ experience of corporal punishment at home and observation of family violence, with a particularly strong effect observed among girls. Both boys and girls had significantly more equitable gender attitudes and significantly less violence-supportive attitudes in relation to children’s punishment, and significantly fewer symptoms of depression. Girls’ school attendance was also significantly higher at endline. Discussion: To our knowledge this is the first time that a peace education program has been evaluated in Afghanistan, with or without a community intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence for conflict resolution. The evaluation suggests that the intervention may have led to a reduction in various forms of violence, including children’s peer violence, corporal punishment of children both at school and at home, and in children’s reports of domestic violence against women at the household level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Four decades of conflict has indelibly impacted the lives of Afghans, exposing many to different forms of trauma. The aim of this paper investigate a hypothesis that (mostly war related) trauma is a key driver of partner violence in Afghanistan. Methods: 1,463 women aged 18–48 were recruited into a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate a women empowerment intervention in 8 villages of Kabul and Nangarhar provinces. The women were interviewed at baseline. The analysis uses multivariable logistic regression and structural equation modelling (SEM) to describe relationships between measures. Results: 57.4% of women reported exposure to one of four types of trauma: 23.3% an armed attack, 39.4% had felt close to death, 10.6% witnessed a friend or family member being killed and 21.4% witnessed the death of a stranger or someone unknown. Trauma exposure was associated with being older, Pashtan, madrassa educated, and food insecure. Women who were trauma exposed were more likely to have ever experienced IPV, have hit their children in the last 4 weeks, and be hit by a sibling or relative of their husband or their mother-in-law in the last year. They held less patriarchal personal gender attitudes and perceived the community to be more patriarchal. The SEM showed that all pathways between trauma exposure and IPV were ultimately mediated by either (mostly mental) ill-health or quarrelling, but not both of these. There were multiple paths through which trauma exposure impacted women’s past year experience of physical IPV. One was mediated by childhood trauma exposure and a latent variable for ill health. Other paths were mediated by women’s education and personal gender attitudes and ill-health, or else by quarrelling. Trauma exposure was related to lower educational levels. Another path was mediated by less patriarchal personal gender attitudes and ill health. Community gender attitudes was a mediating variable on a path which was also mediated by ill health and another mediated by quarrelling. It was also a mediator on a path which included personal gender attitudes and ill-health. Food insecurity mediated another path with ill health. It was also connected to childhood trauma, community gender attitudes and educational level. Conclusion: Trauma exposure due to conflict will persist until the conflict ends but the impact on women can be ameliorated. This analysis suggests interventions to reduce women’s exposure to IPV should focus on reducing poverty, changing social norms on gender, providing relationship skills to help reduce quarrelling and supporting women’s mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the implications of James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) for state-building efforts in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In Seeing Like a State, Scott warns of the problems associated with top-down planning efforts to improve the human condition. In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott discusses the 'art' of state avoidance and self-governance. These works have important insights for contemporary state-building processes, and we explore some of the applications in the context of Afghanistan and the DRC. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for current and future state-building efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that feminist (inspired) writings have largely obfuscated the history of gender, violence, and subjectivity in Afghanistan. I contend that western and non-western feminisms - while having served important roles in keeping discussions on Afghanistan alive - fail to adequately relate to war and western imperialism, and therefore fall short of tracing the formations of subjectivity of women in contemporary Afghanistan. In building on a preliminary discussion of my ongoing ethnographic work with widows, I argue that the feminist project needs to more critically engage with notions such as agency and freedom in order to broaden a perspective that is often focusing too narrowly on (and thus perpetuating) under-studied notions of 'gender' and 'culture' in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral systems can be powerful instruments for shaping the content and practice of politics in divided societies, such as Afghanistan; and their design needs to be closely linked to context. This paper explores the suitability of Afghanistan's electoral mechanisms in light of the nation's political system, social divisions, and the process, which led to their adoption. There is no perfect electoral system; and the winners of the country's first-ever presidential election and the subsequent assembly elections face the formidable challenge of transforming Afghanistan from a war torn fiefdom into a nation. Hamid Karzai's victory and Afghanistan's improved, although fragile, security environment appear to represent an important step toward democracy. Yet, elections and electoral mechanisms are a necessary but insufficient means to the introduction and endurance of constitutional democratic government. The legitimacy of Afghanistan's new democratic institutions will rest on the government's progress in producing results, such as disarming the private militias of powerful commanders, some of whom represent sizeable ethnic minorities, and curbing the burgeoning poppy cultivation. An electoral system is but one piece, significant but not the linchpin, of the schema of Afghan political dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socio-economic situation of Afghanistan has been in shambles for almost two decades due to the U.S. invasion on the country. However, with the prospective end of this gruesome conflict, it is imperative to keep in sight and deliberate upon Afghanistan's socio-economic reconstruction which is a shared responsibility of regional countries. In this regard, it is needless to say that rebuilding of the country cannot be left alone to the cliffhanger of the interests and whims of the major world powers without regional support as was done in the aftermath of Soviet withdrawal in late 1980s. The U.S. influence in South and Central Asia is declining in present times and thereby it has become necessary to evaluate the potential role of all the important regional countries around Afghanistan to ensure the rising of an era of long-lasting stability in Afghanistan. In this context, the role of regional countries and organizations, who are the real stake holders in the peace and development of the post-conflict Afghanistan is of paramount importance and carries great potential. Regional cooperation among the regional states and regional organizations for enhancing connectivity, academic collaboration, trade activities and transport corridors through Afghanistan will naturally translate into the socio-economic reconstruction of the war torn country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that wounded military bodies are affective technologies in the production of supportive publics in war. It builds on Elaine Scarry's concept of substantiation, suggesting that the damaged or altered body functions in war as a vehicle for the making material of immaterial beliefs, values and ideas. Scarry's focus on the affective force of the wounded body is elaborated and pushed further, by asserting that the concept of substantiation needs to be supplemented by an analysis of the work that wounded bodies do as political technologies. These arguments are mobilised through two examples of the public staging of wounded military bodies in the United Kingdom during and after recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These examples provide an analysis of the political processes of substantiation: the specific mechanisms through which wounded bodies are rendered visible and through which their affective capacities to compel and grip are mediated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A common means of vaccination coverage measurement is the administrative method, done by dividing the aggregated number of doses administered over a set period (numerator) by the target population (denominator). To assess the quality of national target populations, we defined nine potential denominator data inconsistencies or flags that would warrant further exploration and examination of data reported by Member States to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF between 2000 and 2016. Methods and findings: We used the denominator reported to calculate national coverage for BCG, a tuberculosis vaccine, and for the third dose of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing (DTP3) vaccines, usually live births (LB) and surviving infants (SI), respectively. Out of 2,565 possible reporting events (data points for countries using administrative coverage with the vaccine in the schedule and year) for BCG and 2,939 possible reporting events for DTP3, 194 and 274 reporting events were missing, respectively. Reported coverage exceeding 100% was seen in 11% of all reporting events for BCG and in 6% for DTP3. Of all year-to-year percent differences in reported denominators, 12% and 11% exceeded 10% for reported LB and SI, respectively. The implied infant mortality rate, based on the country’s reported LB and SI, would be negative in 9% of all reporting events i.e., the country reported more SI than LB for the same year. Overall, reported LB and SI tended to be lower than the UN Population Division 2017 estimates, which would lead to overestimation of coverage, but this difference seems to be decreasing over time. Other inconsistencies were identified using the nine proposed criteria. Conclusions: Applying a set of criteria to assess reported target populations used to estimate administrative vaccination coverage can flag potential quality issues related to the national denominators and may be useful to help monitor ongoing efforts to improve the quality of vaccination coverage estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonialism, as a discipline and approach, offers an analytical lens through which to investigate problems in formerly colonized states of Africa and South Asia, along with a poststructuralist perspective on culture and discourse on politics of representation. Pakistan is one such former colony where postcolonial narratives and the persistence of colonial legacies such as the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), on its periphery of Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of FATA, has contributed to growing instability in the region. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is a colonial-era legal framework of exception - created and implemented by the British Raj to tame Pashtun tribes - that is still used by the state of Pakistan to govern the tribal areas. The persistence of FCR's colonial legacy has also negatively affected Pashtun culture and its traditional conflict resolution structure of Jirga, or tribal councils, which now mostly serves as an advisory body for the Political Agent, who is given executive powers under the FCR. The essay concludes by arguing that abolishing the FCR and the mainstreaming of FATA, together with bringing all stakeholders onto the same page, is the only way to rid the tribal areas of a harsh colonial legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on China's growing engagement in facilitating the reconciliation process of Afghanistan. It is mentioned that the country has devised a conflict-management strategy that conforms to its non-intervention policy. The article also adds that the intervening in the domestic politics of other states to promote its own national economic interests and political influence without contravening its traditional principles.

The US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, which deposed the Taliban regime, was followed by a major international effort to stabilize that country. More than a decade later, this effort has yielded neither security nor political stability in Afghanistan. After having been ousted from power, the Taliban reestablished itself in the borderlands of Pakistan and began fighting an effective guerrilla war against international and Afghan government forces. Despite heavy losses in recent years, the insurgency shows no sign of giving up. Meanwhile, attempts to establish a credible and legitimate Afghan government have been similarly disappointing. President Hamid Karzai, once hailed as the country's democratic savior, came to be seen instead as the leader of one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet, a perception that has damaged his government's legitimacy both at home and abroad. Afghanistan's development and human rights indicators have improved, but it remains to be seen if these gains can be sustained as the international effort is scaled back. Finally, although the United States and its partners succeeded in weakening Al Qaeda in the region, both Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan appear to have become considerably less stable over the course of the mission, with untold consequences for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the piracy problem off the coast of East Africa based on a political economy framework. The British Army "Influence" doctrine developed in Afghanistan is extended to an analysis and understanding of the piracy problem, broadening the contemporary nautical view of the piracy threat to the execution of land warfare as well as providing a deeper understanding of the actions of the local populace in conflict areas. The efficacy of counter-piracy operations is also analyzed.

This article seeks to characterise the nature of the post-Taliban 'reconstruction' project in Afghanistan through an analysis of observations and interviews collected in the Ministry of Women's Affairs (MoWA) in 2007. Based on a case study of a 'gender empowerment' training programme administered by the MoWA and funded by an international aid agency, I underline some intricacies in the relationships that are built in development encounters. I argue that the current efforts to include gender issues in politics are part of a broader cultural project aimed at setting up the conditions of possibility for the creation of a modern Afghan state. I show how reconstruction does not simply consist in the formation of a bureaucratic apparatus based on Western models of liberal democracies but primarily involves cultural and symbolic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistan's Afghan policies, so consequential for its neighbour, have also had a deep impact on the country's political landscape and society. This article examines how Pakistan has pursued a two-track foreign policy toward Afghanistan that often encompasses incompatible goals. Pakistan's leaders have also frequently ignored the long-term and wider implications of their policies domestically and regionally. The discussion looks at the consequences of Afghan policies for Pakistan's national identity and social cohesion. The means by which Islamabad governments have dealt with the challenge of Pashtun nationalism and its contribution to the development of ethnic assertiveness and Islamic radicalism are next examined. The article then describes the role of Afghan policies in transforming Pakistan's border regions with Afghanistan and the wider implications for the state's legitimacy and authority. It also points out the Pakistan Government's ambivalence in its relationship toward militant extremists. A subsequent section considers the costs and rewards of Pakistan's Afghan policies internationally; and Pakistan's strategic partnership with the United States, including its impact on the domestic economy and public attitudes, receives particular attention. Finally, the article recognises that, while Pakistan's politics have entered a transitional stage, its Afghan policies are likely to continue to affect ethnic fissures, religious radicalism, and the legitimate authority of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the poorest countries in the world, the people of Afghanistan gained a chance for peace with the collapse of the Taliban. Whether the country can find its way forward from a precarious position to a democratic and peaceful future will depend on how it responds to the challenge of globalization and constructs a viable economic system. The rate of economic growth and integration into the world capitalist economy for developing countries depends primarily upon any given country's political capacities. Afghanistan ranks low on all three indicators of political capacity: extractive capability, institutional credibility, and transparency. Globalization is a multifaceted process. In its ability to compete in the global economy, Afghanistan is beginning the contest in arrears with little political capacity and experience in capitalist, market-based economics. Often buffeted historically by external forces and actors, two global wars are intersecting in the country today: those of narcotics and terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the issues surrounding the constitution of Afghanistan as of spring 2005. Significance of the constitution to the country; Features of the institution created by the constitution; Effect of the statelessness of the country on the effectiveness of the constitution.

This article pursues the question of how the territorialisation of power in the establishment of the Afghan nation-state has affected the spatial perceptions of political actors and the population at large. This question is particularly topical as spatial references are at present the driving force behind an ethnicisation of politics in Afghanistan. These perceived ethnic spaces, so-called ethnoscapes, not only compete with one another, but also contradict Afghanistan itself as a national territory. Thus since the outbreak of the Afghan war 1979 various political actors have been attempting to mobilise their constituencies over ethnic issues in order to use references to the spatial origins and expansion of their ethnic category to legitimise political claims. The principal argument of this article is that the population’s strong identification with the national territory of Afghanistan has to date prevented an ethnicisation of the masses in the Afghan conflict. Furthermore the article argues that the irreconcilability of the various perceived ethnic territories is an obstacle to the currently much-discussed establishment of ethno-federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several nation-building issues related to the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. International support for reconstruction; Management of military and economic resources; Political issues related to failed statehood under the brutal misrule of extreme Islamists and their terrorist allies; National security situation.

Development's policies are based on a set of premises: state-building, state of law, democratisation, accountability and privatisation. The idea is that the Western concept of democracy could be implemented through the development of a 'civil society' of the building from scratch of new institutions. Such a model works when there is political will from the local political authorities and the society to adopt such a model (as was the case in Poland and Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet Union). But in any case a policy of development should be based on political legitimacy. In Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, political legitimacy means abiding with nationalism, Islam and local political culture (often based on clan-ism and networks). In Iraq, the US policy has deliberately ignored the issue of legitimacy. In Afghanistan, because the US intervention was not part of a great design, it relied more on local constraints and thus has been more effective, or at least, less disruptive. The issue is not opposing a Western model of democracy to a national authoritarian political culture, but to root democracy into the local political culture. If not the policy of strengthening civil society, through political and military pressure as well as NGO's, has a disruptive effect and may lead to a conservative, nationalist and religious backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the constitution crafted by the Constitutional Loya Jirga for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Debate over the presidential system of government; Importance of having a mechanism that can guarantee popular review of the constitution after a certain period to countries emerging from civil conflict; Efforts of Islamist leaders to advance their position on the different parts of the constitution; Recognition of Afghanistan's cultural diversity.

Analyzes gender dynamics and social change in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Role of women in countering Islamic radicalism; Impact of gender, the state and economic development on the status of women in Afghanistan; Description of women's civil and political rights in post-Taliban Afghanistan.