New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. x, 371 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$140.00, cloth; US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780231200493.
The United States intervention in Afghanistan from October 2001 to August 2021, supported by its NATO and non-NATO allies, and which did not achieve its original objectives to defeat the Pakistan-backed, Al Qaeda-allied Taliban and to help transform Afghanistan into a stable and secure state, has generated an avalanche of literature. Many academic and popular books, articles, and reports that narrate and analyze Afghanistan’s complex landscape and America’s and its allies’ failures in nation-building in Afghanistan have been published since the return of the Taliban to power in mid-August 2021. These publications have been very diverse in their coverage and quality, reflecting on what transpired on America’s watch and what has unfolded as an Afghan tragedy under the Taliban rule. Most of them have presented the situation through the lens of outside specialists, policy makers, and observers of Afghan politics and society and America’s policy approach and actions.
Waiting for Dignity stands distinct in its claim that it reflects the voices of the Afghan people. Florian Weigand conducted extensive fieldwork involving numerous interviews with not only officials and functionaries but also ordinary Afghans in rural and urban areas across four of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces between 2014 and 2019.
Weigand describes the purpose of his book as redirecting “the focus of attention from external assumptions on legitimacy to the people in Afghanistan.” The book “investigates whom [the Afghans] consider legitimate or illegitimate and for what reasons, shedding light on what strategies of ‘building legitimacy’ work. It proposes that what matters is interactive dignity, which requires authorities to treat people equally as citizens on a day-to-day basis” (4).
The author blends and adjusts Max Weber’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s overlapping views of authority and legitimacy to the dynamics of Afghanistan as a conflict zone in order to unpack the fundamental reasons for the failure of the political order that was generated during the two-decade-long US-led intervention. He examines the Afghanistan case with reference to three analytical ideal types as sources of authority: “coercion, which achieves obedience through force, violence, and threats; instrumental legitimacy, which “buys” obedience by responding to needs; and the traditional, more substantive understanding of legitimacy, which is underpinned by shared values and a belief in rightfulness” (6). Beyond this, he examines whether people’s “expectations and perceptions relate to authorities’ actions, history, or the idea the authority stands for” (6). He argues that “the Afghan state and the international community failed to construct a monopoly of force in the country” in both physical and what Bourdieu calls “symbolic” terms, primarily because “multiple authorities competed for influence in a fragmented country where human rights violations occurred daily” (3).
Within this framework, Waiting for Dignity provides a compelling explanation of what went wrong with state-building in Afghanistan under the aegis of the United States and its allies. The book descriptively and critically covers the evolution of the state, authority, and legitimacy in the country with an eye on what had traditionally played a key role in shaping Afghan political order and societal relationships with them. It demonstrates perceptively and cogently the shortcomings of the Hamid Karzai era (2001–2014) and the Ashraf Ghani period (2014–2021), which included the Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah National Unity Government (2014–2020), in connecting with the public through various forms of legitimacy, especially instrumentally, that is in meeting the diverse needs of the mosaic population of Afghanistan, at different levels. The central authority could not substitute the strength of various strongmen or ‘warlords’ who drew their legitimacy, in one way or another, from having the power of extraction, dispensation and protection in various traditional and cultural forms in the areas under their jurisdiction. Nor could it replace community authority, to which the people referred for settlement of problems in the absence of an effective judicial system and administration of justice. Along with this, the book also stipulates that the Taliban drew their legitimacy from their interpretation of Islam, which proved resilient in the face of the central government’s incompetence and kleptocratic nature (chapters 2–5).
Overall, the volume attributes the failure of state-building to “Afghanistan’s political order … consist[ing] of distinct authorities”; the multifaceted nature of authority in the country; a lack of defined functions of the political order relevant to the peculiar conditions of the country; not only a “low level of monopolization of the legitimate use of physical force” but also “the legitimate use of symbolic violence—the ‘gentle invisible form of violence’”; and a “lack of uniformity in terms of whom people considered to be legitimate” (chapter 6, 273, 274).
Waiting for Dignity is well written and argued, reflecting people’s diverse perceptions of what constituted sources of authority and legitimacy. It is conceptually and empirically enriching. Yet, given the composition of Afghanistan as a tapestry of many ethnic, tribal, and cultural micro-societies, its solidity in terms of a collective representation of the Afghan people’s views and perceptions is questionable. Also, while claiming to animate the voices of the Afghan people, the book is largely written for academics, informed policy makers and students of Afghanistan studies. It is the only book of its kind that provides a study of theories of legitimacy and how they are relevant or not relevant to a conflict space and, for that matter, an understanding of the Afghanistan case.
Amin Saikal
The University of Western Australia, Perth