Photo: First mall in Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Tomas Munita)


This too is Afghanistan. Often forgotten in the predictable images that portray Afghanistan as a medieval and militarized landscape, is the other Afghanistan which is rising very slowly and very tentatively.

This mall, which opened in 2005, has about 90 shops and is one of the only fully air-conditioned spaces in the country. It also boasts of having the only escalator in Afghanistan. There is a five-star hotel above the mall with 177 rooms starting at approximately $200 a night.

Given that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth, this mall is mainly a temple to capitalist consumerism... only the smallest minority could afford to buy the iPods or PlayStations or flat screen televisions on sale here. Few could even afford the imported shoes. Apparently, however, the bridal outfits can be rented for that special occasion.

So the real question is who does shop here? Journalists report that some of the shoppers are those Afghans who returned from exile after 2001 to help "rebuild" their country. Others are expatriate contractors and overpaid development workers (St. Petersburg Times, 26 November 2006). The rest are most likely warlords and corrupt government officials (or a hyphenated combination of both) and their family members.

The space of the mall should not be read through a Western lens. This is not a public space for the masses to congregate and perambulate; the average Afghan subject would probably not make it past security. Rather this mall seems to be a zone for Afghanistan's elite which resides behind compound walls. This is a class that seems to be generally alienated from its national surroundings. They seek parity with one another and a Globalized Gulfie elite that they meet mainly through satellite television and the Internet (Statesman, 3 February 2008).

I think it would be fanciful to believe that this mall will bloom or metastasize (depending on your political point of view) to cover every urban area in the country in the near future. It is more likely that this mall will remain a small capitalist shrine for the next decade or so. The mall will continue to serve a sheltered elite that longs to build an alternate future.

Like their Taliban rivals who renamed the country the Emirate of Afghanistan, the Afghan elite also long for a utopia by the same name. However, the elite's vision of an emirate is inspired by the Persian Gulf states rather than a Deobandi interpretation of an idealized Islamic state. In either case, neither group is particularly concerned about the res publica. Nevertheless, while neither the Taliban nor the elite have strong social roots in the country, the elite are far more dependent on foreign financing.

Labels: afghanistan, corruption, kabul, mall, south asia

File Photo: Afghan farmers work in an opium poppy field in Nawa district of Helmand province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan (April 25, 2009). (AP Photo/Abdul Khaleq)


I read a lot of commentary about the war and reconstruction in Afghanistan... far more than I probably need to. So much of what I read treats the problems of Afghanistan as if they originated from within the discrete territorial boundaries of the country. There is often a tone of frustration among Western pundits as if they were discussing the antics of an incorrigible child. This is a highly deceptive mode of analysis.

The three most important issues (i.e., drugs, corruption, and the insurgency) cannot be understood without looking outside the boundaries of the country. The production of heroin would not be such an issue if there were no demand in Europe and America. The crop is grown to earn hard currency, plain and simple. Similarly, the issue of corruption in the Kabul government is in part due to the overwhelming amounts of aid provided by international community. Aid is necessary to rebuild a war ravaged country, but to provide more aid than a developing country can productively absorb is a recipe for corruption. One should also question the neat line drawn between the puppet Afghan government and its foreign supporters. Finally, it is well known that the Taliban were strengthened and supported in their rise to power by the ISI of Pakistan. Even today, the insurgency would have little chance to survive without foreign sources of funding and the permeable border with Pakistan.

I have only read one intelligent article on this issue and not surprisingly it is written by an Afghan, Nushin Arbabzadah:

"As local wisdom has it, there are three types of people in Afghanistan today: al-Qaida (the fighters), al-faida (the enriched) and al-gaida (the fucked). Most Afghans belong to the third category.

From the perspective of Afghans on the ground, the west is part of this machinery of corruption which thrives on the continuation of the current situation. If the Afghan leadership is corrupt and incompetent, so is the western leadership involved in Afghanistan. If Afghan warlords ignore international standards of warfare and engage in torture, so does the US in Bagram and Guantánamo. If the Taliban endanger civilian lives by suicide attacks, so do the foreign troops by carrying out reckless air strikes. The lines between the bad and the good, the problem and the problem-solvers, have become blurred. Moreover, the problem-solvers have themselves become part of the problem; they are costly but ineffective. Every little project, from digging a well to conducting a research project, involves hiring an entourage of armed security guards.

Far from disarming the many Afghan militia gangs, the current intervention has created a new set of armed men who are highly trained and well-equipped. Their daytime job is to protect foreign problem-solvers. But in their spare time, they run their own criminal businesses, robbing and intimidating locals and recently, even killing a government official.

The local population are capable of doing many of the projects for a fraction of the cost (and without a single bodyguard) but they are not being employed. The civilian and military problem-solvers are cut off from the population they are supposed to help. They talk to each other but not to Afghans, unless the Afghans in question are part of the English-speaking elite. In the words of an MEP who I met recently, "We have good ideas; the only thing missing is the Afghans themselves."

From a local perspective, Afghanistan has become a laboratory where a disparate set of international military and civilian problem-solvers and their Afghan colleagues are trying out and dropping various ideas and making a comfortable living out of it. Not everyone is starving in Afghanistan. The al-faida are doing well."

At the end of the day, the Western countries are in Afghanistan not out of charity but because those states cannot adequately sustain their sovereignty from within their territorial boundaries. Unable to control the demand for illicit drugs, they must move to control the source. Unable to demobilize from the second world war, they must find new enemies. Unable to defend against asymmetric warfare, they must root out the terrorists' safe havens. This war stems from the weakness of the West as much as anarchy unleashed in Afghanistan after thirty years of war.

It is important to see this weakness in order to understand that Afghanistan is not just a problem to be fixed by Westerners or a laboratory for half-baked Western ideas on state and society building. The weakness of the West is complicit in prolonging this conflict and re-producing the problems it tries to solve. Weakness leads to underfunded troops, inadequate detention facilities, and opium crop eradication programs. This weakness is, at least in part, why the problems of Afghanistan have yet to be fixed.

Labels: afghanistan, corruption, heroin, south asia, taliban

File Photo: Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, and Deputy Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum on March 21, 2002 (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko). President Karzai's government is widely perceived to be corrupt. General Dostum is accused of committing a war crime (i.e. the mass execution of Taliban prisoners of war) in 2001 which was not investigated by the Bush administration because the General was on the CIA's payroll.


The discourse of corruption and scandal is pervasive in discussions of Afghanistan.

Corruption is visualized as a kind of rot in the architecture of the state. This rot justifies the need to create a new edifice. The idealized image of a fierce sovereign, a new Abdur Rahman Khan, who will come and redeem the promise and potential of the state sustains a glimmer of hope in an increasingly disillusioned citizenry. And the discourse of corruption is useful for the occupiers in justifying the compromised sovereignty of the occupied territory.

Meanwhile, the periodic airing of scandals within the metropole upholds the promise of an imperial occupation cleansed of abuse, exploitation, and depravity. Even the quiet scandal implicit in the change of military tactics to recognize (admittedly for instrumental purposes) the humanity of the occupied civilian population evokes the possibility of a kinder, gentler form of military domination.

These discourses and tactics are well know to the student of empire. In fact, as Nicholas B. Dirks has argued, scandal and corruption are necessary features of a system of conquest, expansion, and exploitation. Thus, it is incorrect to view scandals as aberrations and corruption as a failure in a system of good governance. Scandals and corruption are the system; they can teach us hidden truths about both the occupier and the occupied.

The corruption of the occupied is a reflection of systemic constraints in an ethnocracy. Corruption lubricates and maintains an uneasy and mechanical stability. This corruption could be harnessed for productivity or unleashed to ravage the resources of the state, but it cannot be eliminated or "cleaned up."

The scandals of the occupier reveal a vision of the outside world as a state of exception. There is no recognition of human rights for those outside the Constitution. Only those civilizations which can compel recognition on an equal footing are accorded a sense of humanity. The rest are objects of pity or scorn; they are treated as children or animals.

Labels: afghanistan, corruption, scandal, south asia, us