Elevating the Role of Socioeconomic Strategy in Afghanistan Transition: INTEQAL, Loya Jirga, Opium, Planning and Monitoring Transition Progress, Nation-Building Efforts, Afghan Institutions

Professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction, this book deals with the role of socioeconomic strategy in the ongoing Afghanistan transition. Afghanistan is attempting to move beyond the status of a failed state. It meets many of the criteria established by experts and used by donors to begin intervention. Afghanistan has weak state institutions, is poorly governed, has been at war for nearly 30 years, and continues to have low-intensity conflict; its people are impoverished and its economy is immature. Afghanistan is also responsible for flooding the international market with opium and drug cartel "spill-over" effects that threaten global security.

The goals of the international community (IC) have been to create a stable Afghanistan, eliminate terrorist safe havens, reconstruct the state, and reestablish the economy, but things have not proceeded as envisioned. The stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in November 2001 has proven more difficult than initially anticipated. After the initial ousting of the Taliban, the question arose as to whether the country needed only state-building or whether nation-building is required as well. Indeed, decades of foreign domination, invasion, and civil war have left Afghanistan in need of both state- and nation-building efforts.

Creating socioeconomic development, stability, and security in Afghanistan that will enable transforming the war economy to a peace economy will require good governance and time. This is critical since more than 40 percent of post-conflict, low-income countries that maintain peace fall back into conflict within a decade. Paul Collier, professor of economics at Oxford University and leading expert on African economies, argues that coupling external peacekeepers with a robust economic development effort has proven more critical than political reform in preventing a return to conflict.