Atlantic Community:Open Think Tank Article "Afghanistan's Uncertain Future"

Term Paper: Afghanistan's Uncertain Future

Reza Kateb: Ten years after the Afghanistan intervention, Afghani civil society and state infrastructure is still quite weak; significant challenges include imposing a rule of law, tackling the drug economy, and rampant government corruption. To stabilize Afghanistan, the US and its allies should encourage regional partnerships that form economic and political ties between Afghanistan and its neighbors.

The current process of ongoing reconstruction and state-building in Afghanistan has been seriously questioned by policy-makers, academics, and experts. Ten years since the International intervention, Afghanistan still remains one of the poorest countries in the world and faces serious challenges in regard to insecurity, international terrorism and the drug economy, and ordinary Afghans are losing hope in their country' future.

In light of the current debate on the withdrawal of NATO and its forces from Afghanistan, serious challenges remain to be overcome, such as the weak and corrupt Afghan government, ineffective Afghan security forces, a dependent Afghan economy which relies heavily on donor aid, and a growing insurgency that has proven difficult to defeat.

Reza Kateb is studying an MSc in Public Policy at the University of Bristol in the UK. He has worked for twelve years with different international and national organizations in Afghanistan.

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January 8, 2012

Patrick Edwin Moran, Wake Forest University, Platinum Contributor (201)

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NATO, India, the U.S., and other nations willing to be helpful can serve as resources for Afghanistan. All of the things that individuals want and need can be the objects of competition for the interest groups that make up any community. The problem for everyone concerned must be how to mediate among these interests. The successful polity does not function as a zero-sum game played by the members of that community. Paradoxically, there is no member of a polity who fails to be a member of one or another of the factions that contend for wealth and power within the nation. To be a leader of humanity, to be a true statesman, the individual must be able to transcend his or her individual and group identities. Perhaps more than any other nation in the world today, Afghanistan needs leaders of this caliber. The problem is that there is no curriculum designed to produce such individuals. Even if the raw materials are all available, there is still no guarantee that leaders will emerge. Individuals must feel a motivation to serve, and then they must prepare themselves for their work. In the absence of the ideal, many imperfect individuals will have to band together in the understanding that they can form a self-correcting group to achieve a proper mediation among all interest groups. There is no way to impose such a harmony from the outside. It must come from the inside.