This article highlights contradictions in the liberal peace that have become apparent in post-Taliban state-building in Afghanistan. It focuses on how warlords have been incorporated into a government unable to achieve a monopoly of violence without their support, noting that some of Afghanistan’s warlords have benefited from both state weakness and state-building. It suggests the need to rethink the relationship between warlords, states and state-building, and to recognise warlords as sophisticated, transnational and modern political actors. The case of Afghanistan illustrates the difficulty of extending the liberal peace in the context of an ongoing insurgency.
‘Warlords’ maintain a private army, use coercion or the threat of coercion, and have the economic means to sustain themselves. Three core components of warlord systems are: 1) resources (such as primary goods, levying ‘taxes’, trading in contraband or soliciting support from patrons); 2) legitimacy and support from local constituencies; and 3) state weakness.
- If warlords are overly ruthless in their extractive policies, they are likely to exhaust the very resources that sustain them. Instead, many warlords have developed sophisticated political economies that allow the careful husbandry of resources.
- As a strategy of pure predation is unsustainable, warlord systems may provide a minimum level of public service or the extension of patronage, and may exploit a shared identity within their constituency.
- Warlords are often depicted as politico-military actors who exploit state weakness. They operate in systems of insecurity.
The persistence of warlordism in the post-Taliban period, and its incorporation into government, can be explained by three interlinked factors: the de facto power and social relevance of the warlords; the peculiar nature of the state-building project; and the continued insecurity:
- The legacy of the war against the Soviet Union and the civil war left a number of well-armed warlords, enmeshed into socio-cultural politics, who derived their status and income from local sources and were sceptical of any centralising authority.
- The state required the support of warlords to survive; yet a transition to a meritocratic ‘modern’ state would require their decommissioning. Western attempts at simultaneous institution-building and counter-insurgency enabled the warlords to profit from both state weakness and state-building (exploiting reconstruction resources, seeking sponsorship from the United States military, and accepting ministerial positions, for example).
- The warlords were both a cause and consequence of the insecurity. They contributed to it by denying the government a monopoly of violence, hampering the development of the Afghan National Army and preying on citizens and reconstruction resources. Yet they also offered citizens protection, patronage and employment.
The Afghan case reinforces the need to update one-dimensional conceptualisations of warlords: they can be adept at political manoeuvring, simultaneously work to undermine and support the state, maintain complex systems of patronage that were often more effective than state systems and exploit ethnic affiliations. The Afghan case also highlights implications for the liberal peace:
- The risk of overlooking the importance of ‘non-standard’ political actors that do not conform to Western-style modes of political organisation and behaviour.
- The need to recognise the heterogeneity of political actors: the proponents, consumers and opponents of the liberal peace may not be discrete categories, and there may be much variety, and some fluidity, within categories.
- The difficulty that many proponents of the liberal peace have in accepting actors and outcomes that do not conform to the liberal ideal. An evaluation and target culture has prioritised the ‘effectiveness’ of peace-building, governance and state-building goals over legitimacy.
- The occurrence of some degree of rollback from a rigid insistence on Western governance standards, and growing interest in ‘hybrid governance’.
- The contradictions within the liberal peace and statebuilding once operationalised in an insecure environment. In Afghanistan, the liberal state-building ideal clashed with the security imperative. Many of the ostensible state-building initiatives served to undermine the state by reducing its legitimacy and authority in the eyes of Afghan citizens.
