Afghanistan's Parties in Transition

[ICG logo. Image from crisisgroup.org] [ICG logo. Image from crisisgroup.org]

Afghanistan's Parties in Transition

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG) on 26 June 2013.]

Afghanistan`s Parties in Transition

Overview

Political parties are developing slowly in Afghanistan, discouraged by electoral laws and fragmented ethnic politics, but starting to shed their legacy as armed groups. Their newfound legitimacy will face its most serious challenge during the 2014 presidential election and 2015 parliamentary polls, as parties scramble to ensure their place in the new order that will follow the end of President Hamid Karzai’s constitutional mandate. Many obstacles remain, as the outgoing government threatens to revoke the licences of many, if not all, political parties, and introduce tough regulations on political party activity. The jostling for power could inflict lasting damage on the political system, because the government’s effort to curtail the number of parties, while a popular measure among many Afghans, could shut out moderate political movements and emerging youth organisations, leaving voters with limited choices among only the biggest of the tanzims, or former mujahidin parties. For its part, the international community should condition financial assistance on further government efforts to promote multiparty politics.

Some parties with roots as northern militias are preparing to rally their supporters for street demonstrations that could turn violent. This comes as all the major political players are leveraging pre-election displays of strength in negotiations over slates of presidential and vice presidential candidates. Major opposition players, including traditional rivals such as Junbish-i-Meli-Islami, Hizb-e Islami and the Jamiat-i Islami factions – leading representatives of the Uzbek, Pashtun and Tajik ethnic groups, respectively – are showing unprecedented unity in their calls for electoral reform. However, their activism, albeit for commendable goals, could lead to further destabilisation in the transition period.

Indeed, any profound disruption in Kabul politics would leave an opening for the armed insurgency. Failure to see an understanding emerge between the Palace, parliament, political parties and civil society on remaining electoral reform issues or another veto of the reform law approved by parliament would undermine hopes for a stable transition and play even more directly into the hands of the insurgency. Irrespective of political parties’ technical progress, if there is again manipulation in the manner of the 2009 and 2010 elections, the 2014 winner may lack the credibility and legitimacy the new era will require.

For their part, the Taliban do not seem prepared to launch a political party. Despite recent announcements to the contrary from ex-Taliban figures and the successful entry of another armed opposition group, Hizb-e Islami, into mainstream politics, the insurgents’ primary mode of political expression in the near future will remain fighting, not party politics. Nor does the opening of a political office in Doha offer any likelihood of a change in Taliban strategy in relation to entering politics. The overall implications for the coming elections – good or bad – remain unclear.

This briefing builds on earlier Crisis Group reporting on Afghanistan’s political parties to provide an overview of their current position and analyse their ability and willingness to shape the transition to the post-Karzai era, after a decade of government efforts to restrict political party functioning. It is based on interviews with political party and other stakeholders in Kabul and four regional centres of Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Jalalabad. Without undertaking a detailed assessment of the insurgency, the briefing also includes interviews with insurgents to assess Taliban attitudes toward the party system. Its findings include the need for:

  • Greater transparency in the implementation of laws and regulations on political parties to improve perceptions of impartiality.
  • Greater independence of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) and Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), and consultation with parties to achieve an accord on electoral laws and a more transparent electoral process.
  • Kabul’s support for pluralistic political development by providing funds for basic functions of parties that meet a threshold of popular support in elections.
  • Deferring implementation of the requirement, in the 2012 political party regulations, that parties maintain offices in at least twenty provinces. Additional time may be required for parties to establish themselves, and for security conditions to allow party offices in remote provinces. The deferral period should at minimum extend beyond the 2014 presidential and 2015 parliamentary elections. If the requirement is not deferred, Afghan security forces should offer physical security for party facilities where requested by party leaders.
  • Support by donor countries and the UN Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) for these reforms, including conditioning continued economic and military assistance in the coming years on credible electoral reforms that allow for political pluralism.

 

[Click here to read the full report.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412