The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System

427 Pages·2002·42.84 MB·English

by  Barnett R. Rubin

The Fragmentation of Rfghanistan
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Yale University Press Hem Dauen and London
Barnett 1. lubin
The Fragmentation
of flfghanistan
State Forindtion
and Collapse in
the International
System
Second Edition
Second edition fifst published by Yale University Press in 2002.
First edition published by Yale University Press in 1995.
Preface to second edition copyi^tt © 2002 by Yate University.
Copyright © 1995 by Yale University.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law
and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number 2001098990
ISBN : 978-0-300-09519-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
To Susan.
Without the rose, there is no mirror for spring.
NT
You have painted a veiy ugly picture of the situation in Afghanistan, but I must admit
that what you say is true. My father used to quote an old Persian poem, "If you do not
like the image in the minor, do not break the mirror, break your face."
Letter from Nejat Khalili, February 12,1992.
The people of one of the poorest countries in the world successfully resisted a super-
power. They had to fight for their lives in a world system imposed on them by others.
If the situation in Afghanistan is ugly today, it is not because the people of Afghanistan
are ugly. Afghanistan is not only the minor of the Afghans; it is the minor of the
world.
From my reply, March 26,1992.
Contonts
Preface to the Second Edition ix
Acknowledgments xxxvii
List of Abbreviations xliv
Political Map of Afghanistan xlvi
1. Afghanistan, Mirror of the World 1
Part I / The Old Regime: State, Society, and Politics 17
2. Social Structure under the Old Regime 22
3. State, Tribe, and the International System: From Gunpowder Empires to the
Cold War 45
4. Rentier State and Rentier Revolutionaries 81
piii / [outfits
Ptet II / The PDPA in Power: From the Second Cold War to the Collapse
of the USSR 107
5. Failure of Revolution from Above 111
6. Under Soviet Occupation: Party, State, and Society, 1980-1985 122
7. Soviet Withdrawal, Political Retreat: State and Society, 1986-1991 146
Part HI / The Islamk Resistance: Mujahidin, Society, and the International
System 177
8. Origins of the Movement of Jihad 184
9. International Aid, War, and National Organization 1%
10. International Aid, War, and Local and Regional Organization 226
11. Mujahidin after Soviet Withdrawal 247
12. State Collapse after the Cold War: Afghanistan without Foreign Aid 265
Appendix A: Note on Sources 281
Appendix B: Political Actors in Afghanistan, 1973-1994 285
Appendix C: Financing of Government Expenditure, 1952-1988 295
Notes 299
Glossary 343
Bibliography 349
Index 367
Preface to the
Second Edition
No one I knew personally died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or the
plane crash in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, though friends and colleagues
suffered great loss. In the next days and weeks I saw my city become a shrine,
with photocopied notices of the missing everywhere, and firehouses, above all,
turned into memorials to—what else can we call them?—the martyrs of Septem-
ber 11. But unlike most New Yorkers, I had witnessed similar scenes before, and
certain images and phrases came back to me, like the quotation from the Quran I
once read at the bottom of a list of hundreds of civilians slaughtered in Kunduz
province, Afghanistan, in the winter of 1986: "We come from God, and to him we
return."
I remembered the posters and photo-book memorials of the martyrs everywhere in
Peshawar, the grief of the widows who gathered in Haripur refugee camp, and the
bent, gray-bearded man whose shaking hand passed me a crumpled slip of paper
bearing the names of his martyred sons through the half-open window of my car as it
slowly jounced over the rocky ground. I remembered riding for hours in the winter of
1996 from Taluqan to Pul-i Khumri in northern Afghanistan, past ruined villages one
after another, with no sign of life but the long-unpruned fruit trees poking over
shattered walls. Above all I recalled my tour of Kabul in June 1998, as my embittered
driver showed me one ruin after another—the pockmarked and burned-out palace of
Darulaman, the pulverized main street of Jada-yi Maiwand—exploded, flattened,
burned, as completely as the World Trade Center, and with munitions partly supplied
by the U.S. government. Far more innocent civilians died in Kabul than in the United
States on September 11. Although it took longer than one day to kill them, the agony
of those burned, mutilated, and shattered, and the endless grief of their survivors, is
just as real.
The transition from shock to analysis took some time, but one evening, after the
journalists had stopped calling, I opened the earlier edition of this book, published in
1995, to its concluding paragraph. In the book I had demonstrated that Afghanistan,
far from being an unchanged "traditional" society living in a different time, had been