Although Afghanistan has made significant gains over the years, vulnerabilities remain. The economic program Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) has been developed to sustain democracy, reduce poverty, and improve growth. ANDS, an important milestone in the rebuilding and development of Afghanistan, serves as its Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and uses the pillars, principles, and benchmarks of the Afghanistan Compact as a foundation to achieve its MDGs. It has given high priority to the security sector for implementing security policies and strategies and also for building an Afghan National Army for the country's security.
The Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) is Afghanistan's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Implementation of the ANDS is highly dependent on donor assistance. The main general objectives of the ANDS are to improve the quality of life of Afghan people and to reduce poverty. ANDS will play a key role in improving aid coordination and aid effectiveness. The first draft of the ANDS chapter on implementation, monitoring and evaluation and the policy paper on how to improve aid coordination and aid effectiveness has been prepared.
According to the national household survey conducted during the summer and autumn of 2005, poverty in Afghanistan (headcount rate) is about 33 percent. Economic performance since the fall of the Taliban regime has been strong, and macroeconomic stability has been maintained. During 2002–03 through 2006–07, real GDP growth has averaged 15 percent per year, reflecting a recovery in agriculture, donor-funded postwar reconstruction, and initial yet promising growth of a range of private sector activities. The macroeconomic policy framework is broadly in line with the authorities’ economic program.
The relationship between aid and state building is highly complex and the effects of aid on weak states depend on donors’ interests, aid modalities and the recipient’s pre-existing institutional and socio-political conditions. This book argues that, in the case of Afghanistan, the country inherited conditions that were not favourable for effective state building. Although some of the problems that emerged in the post-2001 state building process were predictable, the types of interventions that occurred—including an aid architecture which largely bypassed the state, the subordination of state building to the war on terror, and the short horizon policy choices of donors and the Afghan government—reduced the effectiveness of the aid and undermined effective state building. By examining how foreign aid affected state building in Afghanistan since the US militarily intervened in Afghanistan in late 2001 until the end of President Hamid Karzai’s first term in 2009, this book reveals the dynamic and complex relations between the Afghan government and foreign donors in their efforts to rebuild state institutions. The work explores three key areas: how donors supported government reforms to improve the taxation system, how government reorganized the state’s fiscal management system, and how aid dependency and aid distribution outside the government budget affected interactions between state and society. Given that external revenue in the form of tribute, subsidies and aid has shaped the characteristics of the state in Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century, this book situates state building in a historical context. This book will be invaluable for practitioners and anyone studying political economy, state building, international development and the politics of foreign aid.
Introduction : the impact of four decades of war and violence on afghan society and political culture / Nazif Shahrani -- Technologies of power-competing discourses on national identity, statehood, and state stability -- Afghanistan : a turbulent state in transition / Amin Saikal -- Afghanistan's "traditional" Islam in transition : the deep roots of Taliban extremism / Bashir Ahmad Ansari -- Language, poetry, and identity in Afghanistan : poetic texts, changing contexts / Mohammad Omar Sharifi -- Lineages of the urban state : locating continuity and change in post-2001 Kabul / Khalid Homayun Nadiri and M. Farshid Alemi Hakimyar -- Webs and spiders : four decades of violence, intervention, and statehood in Afghanistan (1978-2016) / Timor Sharan -- Merchant-warlords : changing forms of leadership in Afghanistan's unstable political economy / Noah Coburn -- Borders, access to strategic resources, and challenges to state stability / Ahmad Shayeq Qassem -- Brought to you by foreigners, warlords, and local activists : TV and the Afghan culture wars / Wazhmah Osman -- Personal and collective identities, gender relations, and the trust deficit -- "The war destroyed our society" : masculinity, violence, and shifting cultural idioms among Afghan Pashtun / Andrea Chiovenda -- Engendering the Taliban / Sonia Ahsan -- Anticipating discontinuous change : Afghanistan in retrospect and prospect / Robert L. Canfield and Fahim Masoud -- Adapting to a new political ecology of uncertainties at the margins -- Badakhshanis since the Saur revolution : struggle, triumph, hope, and uncertainty / M. Nazif Shahrani -- Hazara civil society activists and local, national, and international political institutions / Melissa Kerr Chiovenda -- Adapting to three decades of uncertainty : the flexibility of social institutions among Baloch groups in Afghanistan / Just Boedeker -- Party institutionalization meets women's empowerment? Acquiring power and influence in Afghanistan / Ann Larson -- Violence, social services delivery, and the rising trust deficit -- Childbirth and social change in Afghanistan / Kylea Laina Liese -- Signatures of distrust in contemporary Afghanistan : more than a decade of development effort for vulnerable groups : the case of disability / Parul Bakhshi and Jean-Francois Trani
This volume sets out a strategy for raising rural incomes which emphasises the creation of diversified rural economies with opportunities within and outside agriculture.
Afghanistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia, has improbably been at the center of international geopolitics for four decades. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1980, Afghanistan descended into an unending conflict that featured at various points most of the world's major powers. In the mid-1990s, the country entered a new phase, when the Taliban took power and imposed order based on a harsh, repressive version of Islamic law. Infamously, the sheltered Osama bin Laden, whose attack on 9/11 Towers ushered in the Global War on Terror, drew tens of thousands of American troops to the country, where they remain today. In Afghanistan: What Everyone Needs to Know®, leading scholar Barnett R. Rubin provides an overview of this complicated nation. After providing a concise history of Afghanistan, he explores the various peoples and cultures of the country and its relations with neighbors like Pakistan and Iran. He also provides an authoritative overview of the conflicts that have plagued the country since the Soviet invasion. Both wide-ranging and pithy, this book explains why Afghanistan matters and what its possible future might look like.
