Hybrid Security: Afghanistan

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on a core pillar of liberal peacebuilding: the extension of a monopoly of violence as part of a statebuilding project. This chapter seeks to draw out the contradictions between the logic of liberal statebuilding and the pragmatism demanded by an environment cursed by chronic war and insecurity. It depicts the establishment of a hybrid form of government and governance wherein various indigenous and exogenous actors, structures, and practices interacted to create new social, cultural, political, and economic activity and spaces. These hybridised activities and spaces represented a significant retreat from the liberal rhetoric used by western states to justify their statebuilding interventions in Afghanistan. The specific focus of the chapter is on the incorporation of warlords and militia commanders into the western-backed post-Taliban government. The warlords controlled private armies, raised their own ‘taxes’, and had limited loyalty to Kabul. While there are limitations to neo-medievalist arguments that seek to draw parallels between post-Cold War civil wars and the medieval era, Anatol Lieven’s characterisation of Afghanistan’s warlords as figures from the ‘Dark Ages’ has much merit (2009: 339; Winn 2004). This chapter considers the implications of the cooperation and cohabitation between a modernist statebuilding worldview and one based on feudal armies.

We are here to try to tame the people by destroying their crops and villages until they give in.

Lt. Henry Cadogan, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, North West Frontier, India, 1891 (Tillotson 2009)

Each man in these parts is his own policeman and looks to his own exertions to safeguard his own property. No matter how poor he may be, he possesses arms of some sort, and has some knowledge of using them.

G. P. Tate (1909: 102)

Afghanistan is not Sweden with bad roads.

B. R. Rubin (2004: 165)