Mukhopadhyay Discusses Afghan Elections, New Book on Warlords and Governance

Four days after the Afghan presidential election on April 5, the SIPA professor Dipali Mukhopadhyay—author of the new book, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State of Afghanistan—sat down with Barnett Rubin, director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, to discuss Afghan politics.

Professor Mukhopadhyay has been conducting research in Afghanistan since 2007, studying the role of warlords in post-2001 Afghan state-building. Her book was the outcome of over 200 interviews with warlords, provincial governors, and those who worked with or against them. Barnett Rubin, who has long studied Afghanistan and has recently served as senior advisor to the U.S. State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, opened the discussion with a central question to the book:

How do we understand the dilemma of accepting warlords, who led armed groups during war, as governors while the country transitioned into greater stability?

Mukhopadhyay said it comes down to the definition of warlords.”

“If you define warlords as predatory spoilers who are seeking gains at the expense of the state-building project, then it’s very difficult to make the argument that they should not be marginalized,” she said.

However, if one defines them as leaders at the national and sub-national level, with power and ties to their communities, as well as access to resources, it is possible to consider them as competitors and participants in the state-building project.

Mukhopadhyay’s book focuses on two provincial governors, Atta Mohammad Noor and Gul Agha Sherzai, who demonstrate how a warlord could make the transition from “strongman” to “strongman governor.” Looking at how strongmen interacted with one another, with the state and with other states, Mukhopadhyay observed that while warlords benefited economically and politically from their connections to governments, these relationships also gave the central government some control over remote areas.

Asked to clarify why incorporating these men into political legitimacy was contentious, Mukhopadhyay reminded the audience that many viewed these individuals as responsible for having dragged the country into a civil war.

The strongmen had “made clear that they were interested in profiting from illicit economic activities which didn’t serve the development of the country… and to bring these people back after 2001 [after the U.S.-led intervention] was to take the country back to a dark time, to ignore an enthusiasm about a different kind of politics which would be democratic, accountable and representative,” she said. “So why would you want these old characters with legacies of abuse and predation… to be the main players in this new, promising time in Afghan politics?”

After the Bonn Agreement, however, which provided provisional arrangements for governance before re-establishing permanent government institutions in Afghanistan, some of those strongmen who were appointed to positions did not behave as people feared they would.

There was no renewal of a civil war, and as Rubin said, “the protagonists of civil war became powerful figures in government.”

Mukhopadhyay said this transition could be explained by understanding that not all warlords are the same in terms of power and their local competitive environment, and “under certain circumstances, it’s actually valuable for them to be part of the state-building project.”

Governor Atta Mohammad Noor of Balkh Province, for example, was a powerful commander but had major competitors in his region. This was an incentive for him to engage with the central government, and when Afghan president Hamid Karzai appointed him governor, he was able and willing to act as an effective governor on behalf of the state.

In the case of Gul Agha Sherzai, who was governor of Kandahar and then of Nangarhar, it was his intimate relationship with the U.S. military that boosted his influence and legitimized his power as he won construction contracts to pave roads and bring visible changes to his region.

Professor Mukhopadhyay said these two profiles—which she examines in her book—were the more successful ones in becoming incorporated into politics after 2001. She also noted the pragmatism and agility in Afghan politics, observing that no animosity based on political position seemed permanent to any strongman, and this limited the ability to predict future political dynamics in Afghanistan.

— Doyeun Kim MIA ’14

This talk will air on C-SPAN2's Book TV on Sunday, April 27, at 4:45 p.m. Visit Book TV for information about repeat airings.