Building Peace, the State, a Nation:

External Governance of
Security & Development
in Afghanistan

Dr. Bojan Savić

University of Kent - BSIS
Security, Development and Governmental
Power in Afghanistan

Dr. Bojan Savić

University of Kent - BSIS
 (External) Governance of Afghanistan:
ACTORS
• International (supranational) actors: NATO (ISAF/Resolute Support), UN, UNAMA, UNDP, UNOPS
• NATO & Non-NATO governments [Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, India, Georgia,
Armenia… (Pakistan & Russia – specific roles)]
• International trans-governmental actors: USAID, USDA, DoD, DoS (United States), PCRU, DFID,
FCO, MoD, FCO (United Kingdom), etc.
• Transnational NGOs: HRW, AI, ICG, Oxfam, IRC…
• International/transnational private security companies: AEGIS Defence Services, Academi (Xe
Services/ Blackwater), SCG International Risk, DynCorp, Raytheon, Project Resources, Inc., etc.)
• Transnational companies in agriculture & food industry: Chemonics Inc., Construction Design
Management, CGIAR-led Future Harvest Consortium to Rebuild Agriculture in Afghanistan, etc.
• Central government of Afghanistan and ministries(Kabul)
• Afghan National Security Forces (Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, etc.)
• Regional & local government structures (national & hybrid): provincial governments, district
authorities, District Development Assemblies
• Traditional regional and local governance actors: tribal elders, religious leaders, local “power
brokers” (warlords)
And let us not forget…
 Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and
Legacy
• Key vehicle of security governance (first deployed by the US
in Dec 2002)
• Civil-military cells: security-development nexus and the
“comprehensive approach”
• Objectives: (1) expanding the reach of central government,
(2) SSR, and (3) reconstruction
• Three “models” based on (a) civil-military balance, (b) rules
of engagement and operating environment, and (c) nature
of projects & activities (US, UK, Germany)
• Expansion of ISAF & PRTs across Afghanistan (UNSC, Oct
2003): various (divergent?) rationales
A Governed Afghanistan
(NATO-ISAF PRTs, 2009)
 Security Governance (SG)
• Security provision involving state,
interstate, supra-state, sub-state, non-
state and trans-state (transnational)
actors who share the benefits of
increased legitimacy and cost efficiency
of such collective endeavors (Krahmann,
2000 & 2003; Webber et al, 2004)
 Governance as Pacification

• Duffield (2007) Kienscherf (2011)

• Governance as postcolonial power (Duffield

and Hewitt 2009, Duffield 2007, Hönke and
Müller 2012)
 Strategy of Governance
• Conflating local and global security; associating enemies, threats, and
allies everywhere to the “instability” of “failing’” or “failed” states.
Inserting Pashtun militants into global politics (nuclear proliferation),
thereby inflating both. Making violence in Afghan and Pakistani towns
threats to global peace by embedding them in “globalization” and
“interconnectedness” even as real Afghans struggle to access drinking
water or arable land.
• Recasting global security as always threatened and, therefore, required
from the well-governing West, NATO and the US, reinforcing them as
Afghan caretakers. While the experience of safety has varied significantly
in Afghan towns, technologies of postcolonial security have included
military-civilian structures (PRTs, ANSDF, TAACs, etc.) with associated
development schemes (e.g. the National Solidarity Program), as well as
warlords and insurgents (fought and allied with).
 The Deception of Governance
• Governance discourses deceptive insofar as
they appear “normal”, “commonsensical”,
“natural”, merely “descriptive”.

• Deceptive as they assume and implicitly argue

that governance is rational and distributes
mutual, reciprocal benefits across the range of
participating actors
 The Deception of Governance Cont’d

• The dominated and oppressed do not

participate in SG, but are excluded or included
by force (“collateral damage”, victims of night
raids, drone attacks, and arbitrary detentions,
homeless, etc.)
• How rational is SG to them? How beneficial?
• How are benefits “enjoyed upon” subjects of
power?
 Something to Question?
• Rationality, strategies, apparatuses, and legacies of US
and NATO’s security & development governance of
Afghanistan
[Representations of Afghanistan as “unstable”,
“turbulent”, “hungry”, “vast”, “violent”, “segmentary”,
“acephalous”(Noelle, 1997), “underdeveloped” and
with “educational needs” (Watkins, 1963) as permissive
narratives, and the War on Terror as an efficient
narrative that directly enables “comprehensive”
military‐civilian strategies of security & development.]
 Possible Questions
• How have the United States and NATO secured
and developed various social spaces in
Afghanistan?

• Who are the subjects of the economies and

circulations of power endogenous to Afghan
security and development?
 A Course of Critique?
• NATO and OEF have established and amplified
spatially and functionally comprehensive
apparatuses of security and development
since 2001.
• Apparatuses: Provincial Reconstruction Teams
(PRTs)/their legacies, Afghan National Security
Forces (ANSF) and a network of associated
agents, MNNA status, etc.
 A Course of Critique Cont’d
• In overlapping and often mutually conflicted roles (farmers, security contractors, ANSF
recruits, insurgents and agents of illegal economies), ordinary Afghans have become a
constitutive element of security governance in Afghanistan in at least two ways,
framed as: a target and resource population of PRTs and ANSF, integral to a
contingency calculus that understands them as political constraints and opportunities.
• By engaging and enlisting with PRTs and ANSF, ordinary Afghans reinforce their
surveillance and intelligence gathering purposes.
• Afghan civilians become instrumentalized in the production of knowledge about
themselves regardless of the motives behind their involvement (insurgent infiltration,
pursuit of income, etc.).
• By combining coercion, financial incentives, surveillance, and intelligence gathering,
the US and NATO have created technologies of counterinsurgency and
counterterrorism that have failed to address the concerns of safety and wellbeing of
Afghans – the nominal beneficiaries of NATO and US-provided security and
development.
 The Rationality of Security Apparatuses
• Rationality: operational efficiency in reaching pre-defined types of stability, security, growth and development.
• Efficiency concerned with appropriate deployments of financial, technological, and human resources
committed to int’l coalition. How is its political capital used? Interoperability of different agencies that make up
and are networked with the intl coalition
• Inward, intra-organizational calculus private to the US & NATO, calibrated against the criterion of what is best
for troop and aid contributing governments (as opposed to indigenous individuals and communities said to be
secured).
• Aggregate, project, time and space-specific inputs-costs & outputs-benefits.
• Risk as risk for intl coalition troops and civilians – political subjects to be protected from peril and want.
• Methodology of coalition “progress” & “success”: quantitative targets and indicators – a self-enclosed system
that largely disregards the attitudes and needs of its target population and fails to include local realities of
safety and wellbeing (a sporadic and incomplete variable in the security-development calculus)
• Biopolitical (Foucault, 1990; Foucault, 2003) underpinnings of the rationality of SG in Afghanistan: bodies,
injuries, lives and deaths that count and that are factored into the calculus of sustainability of
counterinsurgency & counterterrorism. SG renders the calculus of social costs of the Afghan war effectively
private to NATO, while externalizing the cost itself.
• Questions beyond what this rationality includes as to what it excludes.
• The spatial aspects of this rationality effectuate a sovereign gaze that sees a nationally & internationally
competitive economy otherwise incongruous with local agricultural and trading practices.
 Afghan Resistance Beyond the Taliban?
• SG has reproduced political subjects (Afghan farmers, military and police recruits,
drug dealers or insurgents). YET…
• Through extensive practices of violent, economic and intellectual resistance, Afghan
political, social elites and ordinary citizens beyond the Taliban have rendered
coalition troops and their governments, civil servants and development experts
subject to “hidden” modes of power.
• NATO’s and US dependence on local social, topographic and language expertise and
manpower, as well as financial incentives used in counterinsurgency have generated
opportunities for indigenous resistance to external governance by engaging with its
strategies and apparatuses.
• Self-empowerment beyond armed resistance: local communities and individuals
rendering themselves indispensable to the operation of the very apparatuses and
policies that have sought to subject them to the rationalities and technologies of SG.
• Pursuing financial, security and other benefits as a form counter-exploitation and
nonviolent resistance.
 Road Ahead?
• Troop reductions by the end of 2017?
• Talk & fight: combining Special Forces, drones,
military advisers, access to military bases + working
out/ maintaining a political settlement
• Withdrawal =>
– “takes the wind out of insurgency” (Suhrke, 2012) =>
(a) fragmented, contained, localized conflicts; (b) political
settlement, Afghan reconstruction & development; (c) mix
b/w (a) & (b)
– returns Afghanistan to the 1990s and re-triggers a civil war