Introduction

This thesis describes the creation of a warlord democracy in Afghanistan, a formally democratic system dominated by local warlords and their proxies. I argue that five enabling conditions supported the creation of such system: (1) the specific socio-historical conditions and events in the country, (2) the economic situation of harsh poverty and high demand for security and income, (3) the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan, (4) the paradigm of transition to democracy focused on institutions, and (4) the global pattern of emergence and sustenance of “new” wars (Kaldor 1999) with a distinctive gain-maximizing feature.

The five enabling conditions are connected by a common micro-pattern of blending of violence and profit. I use this pattern to define warlords as “militant entrepreneurs.” The concept of militant entrepreneurship developed by Thomas Gallant describes a category of societal entrepreneurs whose differentiating feature is provision of the commodity of violence and its counterpart, security. I analyze five contexts of occurrence of militant entrepreneurship in Afghanistan (electoral, military, economic, socio-historical, and global contexts), where the ability to deliver or withhold violence appears cross-contextually as a commodity in societal contracts.

This thesis attempts to demonstrate how the fundamental paradigms, whence from the five enabling conditions stem, are utilized in the case-country in procreation of violence and profit. I show how the shortcomings of the paradigms enabled them to be manipulated toward consistently contributing to the creation, institutionalization and legitimization of a warlord democracy in Afghanistan.

The following text presents a qualitative single-case study, based on my observations and empirical research of Afghan power-relations in the period of 2004-2005. The motivation for research draws on what I perceived in Afghanistan as a discrepancy between intended policy outcomes and unintended consequences in field practice of the democratization paradigm. I argue that post-conflict strategies are in deficit of appropriate theoretical concepts and, consequently, in deficit of functional policies and practices for approaching warlordism. As John Mackinlay observes: “The international community has not yet developed a language and an approach to tackle the warlords… [They] fall beyond the language of Clausewitzian writers and communicators whose only concept of violence is as an instrument of policy.” The oxymoron “warlord democracy” is a symptom of this linguistic and theoretical deficit. This thesis attempts to contribute to the development of a theoretical language which approximates the phenomenon of warlordism, and hopefully, it may in turn enable political analysts, scholars and policy-designers to attain an alternative critical perspective for understanding actors, behaviour and events specific to our age.

Thesis Outline

Chapter 1 formulates a definition of warlords and warlordism. A warlord typology is developed, based on distinguishing relational features of Afghan warlords. This part discerns the presence of warlords in appointed governmental offices and elected parliamentary posts, and it shows elections as an enabling condition for legitimization of warlords. An analysis of the Presidential and Parliamentary Elections of Afghanistan 2004-2005 follows, showing how tradition, militancy and international influence shaped the electoral outcomes. Chapter 2 shows the economic aspect of militant entrepreneurship in Afghanistan based on opium trade. The market value and the trajectory of poppy growing and opium production is estimated, in comparison to the GDP and international aid to the country. The nexus between poverty and violence is discerned. Chapter 3 examines the cultural model of the traditional Afghan communities, and its deterioration over time due to the effects of the Cold War and rising warlordism.

Chapters 1-3 examine the case-specific conditions for emergence of formally legitimized militant entrepreneurship in Afghanistan, while chapters 4-6 refer to more general conditions of its establishment. Chapter 4 tests and confirms Stephen Watts’ thesis that democratization brought by foreign military intervention leads to institutionalization of warlord democracies as the economically most viable outcome of interventionism. Chapter 5 researches the state-building and democratization paradigms to find out that the focus and limitation to institution-building of policies based on these paradigms render them open to manipulation by militant entrepreneurs, who use democratic institutions to further establish themselves in power, gaining legal inter/national legitimacy and state resources.

Chapter 6 shifts the level of analysis to some of the negative consequences of the processes of globalization which support the blending of violence and profit symptomatic for warlordism. I develop four models of societal organization (pre-modern, modern, post-modern and post-modern/warlord model), with variations in relations and mutual embeddedness of society, state, economy and militancy. This part of the thesis revises the symptoms of Afghan-specific conditions discerned in the previous chapters and reformulates them as distinctive symptoms of a post-modern era. Chapter 7 distinguishes two main groups of strategies for approaching warlords and analyzes their actual and plausible consequences. The conclusion of the thesis offers a critical perspective on approaching post-modern wars and actors, relevant for scholars and policy makers involved in post-conflict interventions.

Sources

Country-specific data used in this thesis is drawn from reports by the Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB), the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) – Country Office in Afghanistan, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (ODC), and various Afghan and international no-governmental bodies and organizations, such as the Human Rights Watch (HRW), Afghan Justice Project (AJP), Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), etc. The theoretical basis for this thesis draws on two lines of thought: on the concepts of warlords and warlordism (Susan Strange, Mary Kaldor, Richard Friman, Peter Andreas, Josiah Heyman, Alan Smart, Thomas Gallant, William Reno, et al.), and on the democratization paradigm and post-conflict state-building (Thomas Carothers, Giovanni Sartori, Wolfgang Merkel, Robert Dahl, Amitai Etzioni, Stephen Watts). The analysis of Afghanistan is based on works by Barnett Rubin, Ahmad Rashid, Marina Ottaway, Sven Simonsen and Whitney Azoy, as well as on personal observations and numerous interviews with Afghans by the author.

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