Customer Reviews

The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, Second Edition

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Barry Rubin's account of the fragmentation of Afghanistan and the failure of the state is a very detailed in-depth account of the different parties involved, and the cobweb of international and national actors. I especially appreciated the new post September 11 preface to the second edition. It is a great book for the academic or those looking for a serious book on Afghanistan, however I would not recommend it for someone with little knowledge of the region and its and religous political struggles. Without an understanding of the region, the reader is not likely to get past the first chapter.

Afghanistan, in the perceptions of many, is a small, seemingly inconsequential country. It has experienced encroachment from the Soviets, Pakistanis, Persians, Mughals, Mongols, Ottoman Turks and has been on the receiving end of a mixed positive and negative American presence. The people of Afghanistan have endured governmental incompetence, nepotism, torture, murder, political Islam, political negligence, state formation and collapse, ethnic and tribal strife and civil war. Afghanistan has been affected by all major international economic and political crises and as Rubin suggests is "The Mirror of the World" as the first chapter is titled.

Barnett Rubin clearly knows his subject and gives the reader a masterful analysis of the social and political realities of Afghanistan and how those played out in the (many times lack of) governance of the country. The analysis includes the interrelationships and rivalries of tribes, the communist party, political elites, and fundamentalist Islamic clerics and their supporters. Rubin also discusses the origins as well as the failures of the state system to administer to even a small portion of the citizens. The state, unable to withstand the factional vying for power of those groups as well as those more on the margin of Afghan politics, collapsed.

There was little if any legitimacy to the state in much of recent Afghan history. In fact, most of the funding for social programs, infrastructure, as well as government employee paychecks were from international aid. There was exceedingly little investment in industry, which prevented the Afghans from repayment of loans. The feudal relations of tribes and khans many times held strong even through short sighted goverment incursions and policies enacted to assert its own hegemony. The reasons for the collapse of the Afghan government become quite clear when one reads such a compelling account of political failure.

Soviet control and manipulations are treated comprehensively and are well documented.

Rubin presents a thorough, nuanced, very well researched piece of sholarship and deserves much credit for teaching us the intricacies of state and political policy formation.

The one negative element I see is that it can be dry. However, that is usually a quality assigned by non-academics to academic writing. Although this is not light reading it should be clear that the book is highly informative.

Afghanistan, in the perceptions of many, is a small, seemingly inconsequential country. It has experienced encroachment from the Soviets, Pakistanis, Persians, Mughals, Mongols, Ottoman Turks and has been on the receiving end of a mixed positive and negative American presence. The people of Afghanistan have endured governmental incompetence, nepotism, torture, murder, political Islam, political negligence, state formation and collapse, ethnic and tribal strife and civil war. Afghanistan has been affected by all major international economic and political crises and as Rubin suggests is "The Mirror of the World" as the first chapter is titled.

Barnett Rubin clearly knows his subject and gives the reader a masterful analysis of the social and political realities of Afghanistan and how those played out in the (many times lack of) governance of the country. The analysis includes the interrelationships and rivalries of tribes, the communist party, political elites, and fundamentalist Islamic clerics and their supporters. Rubin also discusses the origins as well as the failures of the state system to administer to even a small portion of the citizens. The state, unable to withstand the factional vying for power of those groups as well as those more on the margin of Afghan politics, collapsed.

There was little if any legitimacy to the state in much of recent Afghan history. In fact, most officials were appointed by someone who simply forced his way into power. Another major problem for the political elites (and ultimately the citizens) was that most of the funding for social programs, infrastructure, as well as government employee paychecks were from international aid. There was exceedingly little investment of that aid in industry, which prevented the Afghans from repayment of loans and achieving economic and political independence.

The feudal relations of tribes and khans many times held strong even through short sighted goverment incursions and policies enacted to assert its own hegemony. The reasons for the collapse of the Afghan government become quite clear when one reads such a compelling account of political and economic failure.

Soviet control and manipulations are treated comprehensively and are well documented.

Rubin presents a thorough, nuanced, very well researched piece of sholarship and deserves much credit for teaching us the intricacies of state and political policy formation.

The one negative element I see is that it can be dry. However, that is usually a quality assigned by non-academics to academic writing. Although this is not light reading it should be clear that the book is highly informative.

Barnett Rubin established himself as America's leading expert on Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the total number of academics focused on that benighted country was virtually in the single digits. "The Fragmentation of Afghanistan" was written in the early 1990s, before the Taliban took over and long before a group calling itself Al Qaeda established a presence. There is a 25-page preface to the second edition that sheds some light on this critical phase of Afghanistan's history, but it does not alter the fact that "Fragmentation" is essentially a history of the period of Soviet occupation, with a few helpful introductory chapters to set the scene for the events of the late 1970s and 1980s.

I had the chance to read this book while actually living and working in Afghanistan. There were two distinct aspects that I found especially helpful and illuminating.

The first is an academic argument that forms the foundation of Rubin's thesis. The author maintains that the strife owing to Afghanistan's tribal system and ethnic diversity has been deliberately fomented and the exacerbated by outside influence and internal elements seeking to dominate. The end result has been something close to anarchy. "Where state authority is too weak to provide structure to civil and political society, the objectives of opposition come to resemble those of competitive state building. Without law or political institutions, the struggle for power becomes as unstructured as the wars among the princes of early modern Europe."

Rubin goes all the way back to the period of Ahmed Shah Durrani to develop his argument. He writes that national leadership in Afghanistan - to the extent it has ever truly existed - has always relied on manipulating tribal relations to secure their positions. Furthermore, foreign aid has long played a critical role in enabling central leaders to maintain power - and when that flow of aid runs out for whatever reason, the "national leaders" are left helpless and quickly abandoned by internal allies because they have never developed a foundation of civil society that goes beyond the basic distribution of money and resources.

The second aspect of this book I found particularly useful was Rubin's close study of the history and make-up of the Afghan communist party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and its relationship with the Soviet Union. Rubin provides a meticulous study of where the PDPA members came from (province, ethnic group and tribe), where they went to school (high school and college), which departments they were in (engineering, Islamic studies, arts & letters). Rubin writes that there was no genuine (or at least fundamental) ideological schism between the two main wings of the PDPA, Parcham and Khalq. It was Parcham that saw value in working inside the Daoud government with progressive elements before the Sawr Revolution, while Khalq advocated for a hazily defined revolution. Like the split in the Islamist ranks between Hezb and Jamiat, it was more "political and strategic" than ideological/theological.

Rubin argues that the major fronts in revolutionary Afghanistan - Parcham (urban, close to the old elite, and Persian speaking), Khalq (more rural, tribal and Pashto speaking) and Islamist (mostly rural) - were all products of the new education system brought to the country in the 1960s that depended on outside, foreign assistance to survive and grow. They were, he says, "rentier revolutionaries produced by a rentier state."

Rubin also does a good job explaining the events and motivations behind Soviet intervention and the various phases of their failed counterinsurgency campaign. The author argues that radical social changes sought by Hafizullah Amin and his Khalq faction in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, combined with the high level purges of the army, led to a rapid disintegration of the military, including mutiny, all across the country. Rubin says that it was this disintegration of the army and then the internal disintegration of the state and party that allowed revolt to spread so quickly in late 1978 and early 1979, and it was this disintegration, rather than the military force of the resistance, that prompted Soviet intervention. Moscow could not and would not tolerate anarchy on its soft underbelly, especially when the government ostensibly in charge was a fellow traveler of rather orthodox Marxist-Leninist persuasion.

Even after the Soviets ousted Amin and his Khalqi regime and backed a Karmal-led Parcham government, Rubin claims that the Parcham/Khalq split dominated the entire history of the Soviet occupation. The Khalqi contingent still played a central role in the government and had powerful advocates in the Red Army and military intelligence, the GRU. The author describes the Soviet advisor experience in Afghanistan as similar to the US in Vietnam as different internal alliances developed, often at cross purposes with each other.

In sum, this is excellent introduction to Afghan tribal and ethnic dynamics and one of the most authoritative political reviews of the PDPA during the Soviet era.

This book is excellent. It describes in great detail how Great Britain, Russia, Th U.S. and now Pakistan have contributed to the destruction of the basic fiber of the country and the reasons this happened.

I received two copiesof book and returned one. I did enjoy the book very much.