Introduction: Building Bridges 1
J Alexander Thier




The Transformation of the Afghan State 13
Barnett R. Rubin




The Future of Security Institutions 23
Ali A. Jalali




The Long Democratic Transition 35
Grant Kippen




The Politics of Mass Media 45
Amin Tarzi




A Human Rights Awakening? 55
Nader Nadery




The Arrested Development of Afghan Women 63
Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam




Culture and Contest 73
Jolyon Leslie




Afghanistan and Its Region 81
William Maley
10. The Intertwined Destinies of Afghanistan and Pakistan




Marvin G. Weinbaum and Haseeb Humayoon
Contributors 105
About the Future of Afghanistan Project 109

About this Book :

© 2009 by the Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace. All rights reserved.

The Future of Afghanistan, J Alexander Thier ed., US Institute of Peace, January 8, 2009.

Afghanistan sits at the intersection of an array of conflicts, including the War on Terror; the India-Pakistan rivalry; Afghanistan and Pakistan; the Sunni-Shia conflict; complex U.S. relations with NATO allies; Russia’s relations with the U.S. and NATO; and the U.S.-Iran feud. This new book from USIP identifies weaknesses of early approaches and outlines a vision for success going forward. It brings together leading thinkers and policymakers in a new collection of ten essays, the culmination of the USIP-sponsored Future of Afghanistan project. It also explores how Afghans and international stakeholders can face with these and related challenges over a ten-year horizon.

The Future of Afghanistan Project was launched in 2008 by the United States Institute of Peace in response to the need for a unified, strategic, long-term vision for Afghanistan. More than seven years into the international intervention in Afghanistan, there is a sense of backsliding and a loss of focus. Most assessments and prescriptions focus on the near term, analyzing what is happening now and what must happen over the next twelve to eighteen months to “turn things around.” At the same time, most commentators note that there is a broad lack of unified strategic vision between and among the Afghan government and their partners in the international community.

US policy toward Afghanistan will require a fundamental change in order to achieve long-term stability in that country, according to The Future of Afghanistan, a new U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) collection of essays written by some of the world’s top South Asia analysts. “A focused, coherent, and long-term approach to Afghan and regional stability is necessary to get Afghanistan out of its vicious cycle of insecurity, insurgency, impunity, and corruption” says the Institute’s J Alexander Thier, who edited the volume.

Authors’ Biographies

J Alexander Thier, Editor
“Building Bridges”
Mr. Thier is director of the Future of Afghanistan Project and Senior Rule of Law Advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he co-chairs both the Afghanistan and Pakistan Working Groups. Thier was a member of the Afghanistan Study Group, co-chaired by General James Jones and Ambassador Thomas Pickering, and was a member of the Pakistan Policy Working Group. Thier is also director of the project on Constitution Making, Peace-building, and National Reconciliation and expert group lead on the Genocide Prevention Task Force, co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. He is also responsible for several rule of law programs in Afghanistan, including projects on establishing relations between Afghanistan’s state and non-state justice systems and constitutional implementation. Prior to joining USIP, Thier was the director of the Project on Failed States at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. From 2002 to 2004, Thier was legal advisor to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul, where he assisted in the development of a new constitution and judicial system. Thier also served as a UN and NGO official in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1993 to 1996, and has written extensively on the region, appearing regularly as a commentator in international media including BBC, CNN, and the New York Times.
 
Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam
“The Arrested Development of Afghan Women”
Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam is consultant currently working on links between community level organizations and sub-national governance in Afghanistan. She has worked in Afghanistan for thirteen years and is a fluent Dari speaker, although her recent work has mostly taken her to work on local perceptions of civil-military relations in the Pushtun-speaking provinces of the south and east. She is primarily a rural development specialist with long-term experience with civil society and social exclusion issues in the Afghan context. She has worked for a range of donors and donors as well as the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and NATO-ISAF. She holds a BA in Persian and Old Iranian from the University of Oxford, a Masters in Rural Development Sociology from the University of Birmingham and a diploma in anthropology from the University of Aberdeen. She has published numerous articles and papers on Afghanistan and has frequent media appearances in relation to Afghan issues.
 
Haseeb Humayoon
“The Intertwined Destinies of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” co-author
Haseeb Humayoon, a native of Afghanistan, is in his final year of undergraduate studies at Middlebury College. During the summer of 2007, he studied the planning and convention of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Peace Jirga of August 2007 in Kabul. Previously, in the summer of 2006, he researched the history of the rivalry between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the role of negotiations between the two countries in times of crisis. Prior to and during his time at Middlebury College, he has also worked as a consultant to nongovernmental groups in Afghanistan.
 
Ali A. Jalali
“The Future of Security Institutions”
Ali Ahmad Jalali is a Distinguished Professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. He served as the Interior Minister of Afghanistan from January 2003 to October 2005. Prior to assuming the ministerial post in Kabul, Mr. Jalali served as the Director of the Afghanistan National Radio Network Initiative and Chief of the Pashto and Persian Services at the Voice of America in Washington D.C., and as a top military planner with the Afghan Resistance following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He graduated from high command and staff colleges in Afghanistan, the United Kingdom and the United States and is the author of numerous books and articles on political, military and security issues in Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. He frequently appears in the news media as a commentator and has taught and lectured at numerous institutions of higher education in Afghanistan, Europe, and the United States.
 
 Grant Kippen
“The Long Democratic Transition”
Grant Kippen has spent the past 28 years involved in electoral politics and democracy strengthening activities in Canada and internationally. Grant has worked for a number of different organizations including the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Elections Canada, IFES, the National Democratic Institute and the United Nations, and his country specific experience includes Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Jordan (in support of the 2005 Iraq elections and more recently with Iraqi parliamentarians), Pakistan, Timor Leste and Ukraine. In 2003 and 2004 he was the Country Director in Afghanistan for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. For the 2005 parliamentary and provincial council elections he was the Chairman of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), the first independent election complaints commission in the history of Afghanistan, which through the ECC HQ in Kabul and 34 provincial offices, investigated and adjudicated close to 7,000 challenges and complaints. Mr. Kippen has a B.A. from The University of Western Ontario and an M.B.A. from the University of Ottawa.

Jolyon Leslie
“Culture and Contest”
Born in South Africa and trained as an architect, Jolyon Leslie has since the early 1980s managed post-war and disaster recovery programmes in the Middle East and central Asia for the UN and international NGOs. He has lived in Kabul since 1989 and published a critical assessment of the political transition (‘Afghanistan: the Mirage of Peace’, Zed Press) in 2004. He currently manages the programme of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan.
 
Nader Nadery
“A Human Rights Awakening?”
Ahmad Nader Nadery is a Commissioner at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. He represented Afghan Civil Society at the UN peace talks for Afghanistan in the Bonn Conference 2001. Mr. Nadery works also as the Chairperson of Fair and Free Election Foundation of Afghanistan, he is a member of the Steering Committee of Citizens Against Terror and member of advisory board to Open Society Institute (OSI) Afghanistan programs. He has written extensively on politics and human rights in Afghanistan and is a member of the Board of Editors of the Oxford Journal on Transitional Justice. He served as Spokesperson for the national assembly (Loya Jerga) in 2002. Prior to his appointment at the AIHRC he worked as country director for the international human rights law group (Global Rights). Mr. Nadery won several international awards and was recognized as an “Asian Hero” by Time Magazine in 2004. He was recognized as 21 Young Asia Leader’s by the Asia Society and the World Economic Forum recognized him as Young Global Leader (YGL) of 2008. He studied law and political sciences at the Kabul University and earned his masters degree on International Affairs from George Washington University.
 
William Maley
“Afghanistan and Its Region”
Dr. William Maley is Professor and Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University, and has served as a Visiting Professor at the Russian Diplomatic Academy, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford University. A regular visitor to Afghanistan, he is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006), and The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 2009); co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992); edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press, 1998, 2001); and co-edited The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Russia in Search of its Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995); From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and Military Responsibilities in Disrupted States (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003); and Global Governance and Diplomacy: Worlds Apart? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
 
Barnett R. Rubin
“The Transformation of the Afghan State”
Barnett R. Rubin is Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation of New York University, where he directs the program on the Reconstruction of Afghanistan. During 1994–2000 he was Director of the Center for Preventive Action, and Director, Peace and Conflict Studies, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Dr. Rubin received a Ph.D. (1982) and M.A. (1976) from the University of Chicago and a B.A. (1972) from Yale University. In November—December 2001 he served as special advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement. He advised the United Nations on the drafting of the constitution of Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Compact, and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy. He is currently chair of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (a program of the Social Science Research Council), a member of the Executive Board of Human Rights Watch/Asia, and the Board of the Open Society Institute’s Central Eurasia Project. Dr. Rubin is the author of Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002 and The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (2002; first edition 1995). Dr. Rubin has written numerous articles and book reviews on conflict prevention, state formation, and human rights which have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Orbis, Survival, International Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books.
 
Amin Tarzi
“The Politics of Mass Media”
Amin Tarzi is the Director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. In his position, Dr. Tarzi supports the University by providing a resident scholar with expertise in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf region. Previously, he was with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Regional Analysis team focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Dr. Tarzi’s latest work, entitled Taliban and the Crisis in Afghanistan, is a co-edited volume with Professor Robert D. Crews of Stanford University and was released by Harvard University Press in January 2008.
 
Marvin G. Weinbaum
“The Intertwined Destinies of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” co-author
Marvin G. Weinbaum is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and served as analyst for Pakistan and Afghanistan in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 1999 to 2003. He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC. At Illinois, Dr. Weinbaum served for fifteen years as the director of the Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. After retiring at Illinois, he has held adjunct professorships at Georgetown and George Washington universities. Dr. Weinbaum’s research, teaching, and consultancies have focused on the issues of national security, state building, democratization, and political economy. In all, he has written upwards of 100 journal articles and book chapters, mostly about Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, but also on Egypt and Turkey. Dr. Weinbaum has his doctorate from Columbia University in 1965.

Project – The Future of Afghanistan