Nearly eight years after the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Obama administration is facing serious pressure from all points of the political spectrum on the question of US’ future involvement in Afghanistan. Washington’s NATO allies are wavering more than ever on their commitments to the Coalition, adding significantly to the growing opposition at home. The future of the Afghan nation is now at a crossroads, and the threat of regression into failed statehood appears imminent.

While there is broad agreement that the establishment of a responsive and locally attuned government is essential to winning the favor of the Afghan population, and thus to “winning the war,” the question of what form this system of governance should take has received insufficient consideration. In creating this system, it is imperative that the coalition governments revisit the history of governance in Afghanistan, while avoiding the presumption that, despite thirty years of war, Afghanistan will somehow find the return to the secluded, decentralized tribal structure an easy one. Afghanistan has lived under three distinct systems of governance over time: the maximalist-formal system, seen after the Saur Revolution of 1978, IT brought the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan to power; a failed-anarchic system, which emerged after the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991 as the country descended into brutal civil war; and a hybrid system of formal and informal institutions, which can be seen in its modern reincarnation in the provinces of Nangahar and Balkh. In each phase, Afghans experienced varying levels of oppression, violence, and relative peace. In only one will we find a chance for achieving our dual objectives of eliminating Al Qaeda’s safe haven and ensuring a timely withdrawal.

The strong rise of the Taliban in the late 1990s was not an affirmation of an Afghan predilection for radical Islam but a result of the country’s descent into a brutal civil war and a wide-spread desire for stability. In fact, the movement’s repressive ways and myopic insistence on a strict interpretation of Islam in the daily affairs of its people would later create mass support among Afghans for the American invasion of Kabul in October 2001. The Taliban were swiftly defeated and an opportunity for a US-mediated peace agreement between the warring factions of the state—including moderate elements of the Taliban—had finally emerged. With high hopes that a new system of governance would return Afghanistan to the relative calm of the pre-war years, the Bonn Agreement was signed and President Karzai, a Pashtun, found himself navigating the volatile terrain of a country he had not seen in over a decade. His Western backers, basking in their easy victory, bequeathed to him a technocrat’s constitution before sauntering off to Iraq where their real attentions were focused.

From the writing of the Bonn Agreement in 2001 to present day, the United States has taken a minimalist approach in advocating the creation of a maximalist central government under Hamid Karzai with disastrous consequences, the first and foremost of which is the revived insurgency in the south and east of the country. The Bonn Agreement failed for three reasons: it presented a vision for an impossibly centralized and capable Afghan government without explicitly defining the steps needed to reach that vision; America’s commitment of resources and man-power to rebuilding Afghanistan in the ensuing years would prove remarkably shallow and ineffective, despite the grandiose rhetoric; and, perhaps most importantly, it alienated crucial regional figures and ethnic groups such as the Uzbeks, Heratis, and the Hazara Shia—not to mention the Pashtun Taliban, who were never given the opportunity to accepted defeat under the terms of any peace agreement.

American strategists and policy makers have yet to fully comprehend the significance of this failed experiment with the maximalist-formal state model. Even today, Western commentators show their disillusionment with the failure to erect a maximalist state in Afghanistan; Frank Rich, for example, disparagingly claims that “we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one”—while others call for top-down solutions, such as the call by David Kilcullen for “immediate action from... a legitimately elected Afghan president... on a publicly announced consultation with Afghan society” that includes, among other steps, the “firing human rights abusers and drug traffickers.” Such expectations are unrealistic and myopic, for the regional and ethnic warlords whom Kilcullen and others advocate removing from power only became so under the carte-blanche largesse of American, Saudi and Pakistani governments during the covert war against the Soviet Union, before which the position of the “modern warlord” was filled by many thousands of relatively secluded ethnic-tribal leaders. Bringing these well-armed leaders back into the political sphere is the only conceivable way of mitigating the potential for future rebellion against the Kabul government, a lesson the U.S. should well have learned by now after alienating the Taliban in 2001. By adopting the maximalist model of statehood outlined in the Bonn agreement, familiar tribal methods of rule were rendered illegitimate and excluded from the debate, even when these parallel informal institutions of governance and security continued to exist in remote regions of the country. Legitimizing these leaders with the explicit or tacit approval of the state, thereby granting them the fundamental recognition of their humanity and their existence, would be the first step towards establishing an effective, hybrid model of rule in Afghanistan.

Two provincial strongmen, Gul Agha Sherzai of Nangarhar and Atta Mohammed Noor of Balkh, are evidence that the hybrid model can, in fact, achieve the desired outcomes of minimally functional governance. Both governors derive legitimacy from a mix of personality, patronage, and tribal allegiance that, despite their closeness to what we might call “corruption” and “nepotism,” have proven remarkably effective in the their respective provinces. A counter argument might be made that this model depends too heavily on popular allegiance to individual personalities and contains no effective checks and balances against heavy-handed, autocratic rule. Indeed, while the idea of “contracting out” local self-defense forces to tribal leaders and warlords is gaining currency among western observers, an overzealous call for the complete return to centuries-old systems of tribal rule must undoubtedly be cautioned against. As Eqbal Ahmad noted as early as 1988, “A decade of war has undermined the old Afghan ways of managing and limiting violence. These traditional methods rested on a set of shared values and customs, which have been weakened by revolution, war, and exile.” But the Afghan state’s ability to sustain a 400,000-strong National Security Force will require a significant reliance on local tribal enforcement and justice administration, as both Sherzai and Noor have provided. Contrary to the McCrystal formula, the solution to the Afghan question lies in a reconception of the international community’s interface with the Afghan government, shifting the focus from the center to the periphery.

The international community cannot continue to deliver its financial support of the Afghan people through the failed apparatus of the centralized state; money seen flowing in and not hitting the ground where it is needed most not only negates the impact of international assistance, but alienates the population and fuels the “crisis of popular confidence” that General Stanley McCrystal has deemed inimical to the success of the counterinsurgency. While the corruption of local and regional officials may be no less despicable to Western governments, channeling international development assistance through regional governments will increase the accountability of the governors to the people and remove an extra layer of bureaucracy between the donor and the people, both of which will result in greater aid effectiveness and popular buy-in for our objective.

Once success in Afghanistan has been defined as the establishment of a hybrid government with a reasonable monopoly over state wide force, a strong focus on local governance, and a minimally-acceptable level of trust of corruption, we can engage local branches of the Afghan government in capacity building and development projects. These includes those undertaken by the Coalition’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which have thus far remained far too insulated from the nuanced culture and realities on the ground. As long as the American military commitment on the ground resembles the failed “nation-building lite” approach it adopted from 2001 to 2008, the United States will be unable to bridge the gap between its military mission of defeating insurgents and its civilian mission of reconnecting the Afghan state with its people.

The US’ grand strategy must place a strong focus on the informal mechanisms of state rule that are unpalatable to western diplomats and technocrats but present the only viable solution for the pluralistic, tribal society of Afghanistan. The time that would be required to create a maximalist state in Afghanistan is measurable by decades, not years; American involvement, conversely, will surely be measured by domestic election cycles. This is problematic, but only insofar as the United States falsely believes that it can or must deliver formal Western institutions of governance to the Afghan people. Recent concern over the fraudulent parliamentary elections of August 2009 need not terminate America’s will to proceed; just as an election alone does not guarantee a liberal democracy, a failed election should not end all hope for the establishment of an acceptable government in Afghanistan. While Afghan faith in the Karzai administration has been severely shaken because of the election, its legitimacy can still be reestablished if local and national government bodies rethink their roles in the effort bring security and humanitarian and economic assistance to the Afghan people.