Welcome friends of Anthony Hyman, friends of SOAS, distinguished guests and visitors, students and colleagues. What is now amazingly the 19th annual Hyman lecture, first delivered in 2003. I'm Scott Newton, I'm reader in the Laws of Central Asia and the chair of the Center for Deferred Caucuses in Central Asia and the head of the SOAS School of Law, gender and media. I'm here to introduce Dr. Deepali Mukapajaya of the University of Minnesota, who will talk to us about the palace politics of precarious sovereignty, African state building in the era of counterterrorism. I'm heartened to see you all here but I'm disheartened to be doing this only virtually. And the last time in lecture in March last year we were assembling in the midst of industrial action at SOAS and the gathering cloud of COVID on the very eve of lockdown. So congratulations to us all on surviving this plague year and I'm glad to see you all here. The Hyman Memorial Lecture has become an established annual event at SOAS and it's now in its 19th year, bringing together those with an interest in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, and providing an opportunity for leading scholars, policymakers opinion formers to reflect on issues of topical interest. The continuing success of the Hyman Memorial Lectures is a testament to the impact, which Anthony had on thinking about Afghanistan and the infection in which he was held by his many friends and associates. He was a SOAS graduate and expert on Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia, a commentator for EBC World Service for more than 20 years. He was a linguist historian, bibliophile art lover and traveler and we're gathered here again tonight as every year to share his memory. Just to remind you all the lecture series is sustained on the strength of donations as well as a contribution from SOAS. So please do consider making a donation to the Anthony Hyman Memorial Fund, which was established to help cover the costs of the lecture now and in future the lecture series is equally a labor of love and fundraising, or perhaps of love manifest by fundraising, as well as attendance and support. So please do bear that in mind. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Mukambajay tonight and we couldn't have been more fortunate than having agreed to invite her in the first place and then her having accepted the invitation. Dr. Mukambajay is an associate professor of global policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the relationships among political violence, state building and governance during and after war and she's currently serving as senior expert on the Afghanistan peace process for the US Institute of Peace. She's a professor of a monograph on Afghanistan from 2014 warlords strong man, strong man governors and state building in Afghanistan, and a new book just out this year on Syria, Good Rebel Governance Revolutionary Politics and Western intervention in Syria with Kimberly Howe, as well as a broad range of both scholarly and policy-oriented publications. When learned from the Pali's first book, governing labor is divided and shared far beyond the state in context like Afghanistan of historically, problematically, incompletely and only ever provisionally and conditionally asserted central authority. There's a lot of governing but the talent and the ability and the know-how and the wherewithal for governing. Whence arises the need for governing coalitions in a sense, far more radical and analytically adventurous than, for instance, in the case of the conservative liberal Democrat coalition government we can now but dimly recall at this pre, at this post Brexit moment. Co coalitions get brokered and negotiated and stitched together with peripheral authorities who conventionally get tagged as warlords, and indeed much of the conventional understanding of coalition governments could be usefully and provocatively applied to Afghanistan as an instance of a precarious coalition state where the state itself is eternally falling apart and falling out and falling victim to no confidence motions of a particularly vigorous sort, more like no confidence actions or attacks. There are repercussions far beyond beyond Afghanistan. This is a general point about graduate states exemplified in a particularly instructive way by Afghanistan, but it's no accident that Pali has just published a new book with that to publish a new book on Syria. All of these points are, in a sense, sharpened and aggravated and radicalized and I can borrow that overdone term in the context not of terror but counter terror, the suite of policies and associated pressures forced upon precarious states by the US as instigator leader and chief enforcer of the worldwide alliance against terror. Now two decades old about as old as the lecture series. So how does Afghanistan as a fragile and coalition based state contend with these multiple emergent pressures, particularly when the peripheral governing authorities warlords, maybe the direct object of those pressures when the states in question are supposed, not just to make do without Afghanistan but to oppose and subordinate if not vanquish them. So, the perennial challenge to state building in Afghanistan which is a good candidate for the world's most protracted case of state building an eternal work in progress has been made massively more complicated in the age of counter terror, which for me at least is the much more opposite term in the age of terrorists. To me this this suggests a complex recursion in the face of new forces and imperial formations rather than a simple reversion to recurrence of historical imperial patterns and efforts to manage or facilitate or technically advise. The state building from the 19th century on down a manifestation of what Anna Laura Stoller has called imperial duress with the connotations of both relentless pressure and durability. Without further ado and hoping I have neither anticipated nor travesty or talk I'm going to turn things over to the Polly who will speak for about 40 minutes, after which my colleague, Professor Jonathan good hand of development studies will moderate the Q&A and please everyone to use the chat space to pose your questions. Once again, thank you all for attending and thank you to Polly for agreeing to give the talk. Thank you so much Scott what a marvelous and rich introduction, it perfectly, I think sets me up. It's a profound honor and privilege to be invited to deliver a lecture in memory of Anthony Hyman, a scholar and a great friend of Afghanistan. I didn't have the chance to meet him, but I have the sense I would have learned a great deal from him. So a humbling moment for me to follow in the footsteps of many of my best teachers who have given this lecture in past years, and to do so in a year of momentous import for a country that I have come to know and love so deeply. I, in addition to thanking Scott for that very generous introduction and thoughtful introduction I want to thank Jonathan good hand, who will join us after my remarks, his work has shaped my thinking on Afghanistan and larger questions of political violence and state formation in very meaningful ways, and it is a real delight to be here at his invitation. I want to share some thoughts today that are part of a new book project of mine, and for that I wish to thank my dear Afghan colleagues for their support as well as the US Institute of peace the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. In his writing on liberalism and empire, the political theorist Uday Mehta recalled how Britain's liberal thinkers saw India as, quote, the promised land of liberal ideas, a kind of test case laboratory, unquote. For Mehta, the civilizing mission at the heart of the imperialist project has always involved a bewildering paternalism, one he understood as intrinsic to liberalism itself. At the heart of Western military intervention today there remains the production of a politics that claims to introduce freedom to its subjects but only to the degree it serves the intervener's interests. Liberal encouragement of governance implies a notional future, when those who are not quite ready now to manage their own affairs will perhaps claim autonomy once properly groomed. There is a presumed destination of somewhere better to which interveners will guide those into whose worlds they have inserted themselves. As anthropologist Lila would look good, put it, quote, when you save someone you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something, unquote. And so a kind of liminality ensues one in which the foreign patron ushers the indigenous client into what Mehta described as quote the modalities of governance that exist in between in the morally politically and rationally justified ambivalence of liberalism for the time being remaining imperial, unquote. In fact, this work of tutelage produces compromised forms of sovereignty, as powerful outsiders set the terms and tempo for the politics of less powerful insiders. In her writings on statelessness political scientists Nora Laurie argued that governments employ what she calls precarious citizenship to manage migrants and refugees. The legal bureaucrat and bureaucratic invention of quote, structured uncertainty, a means of avoiding larger dilemmas about the boundaries of the nation, unquote, and relegating those dilemmas and the people who provoke them to a kind of perpetual limbo. Analogously, I will argue that powerful states deposit weaker states into geopolitical in between spaces marked by what she called structured uncertainty. Since September 11 2001 the United States and its allies have involved themselves in matters of governance abroad, not out of an altruistic commitment to the spread of liberal democracy, but rather as a function of concerns about the presumed nexus between weak statehood and globalized violent extremism. These interventions have engendered a kind of precarious sovereignty, one that sustains anemic forms of statehood, while the possibility of less tenuous standing remains perpetually on the horizon. So to do the threats of either a tighter foreign stronghold or precipitous withdrawal. This precarious form of sovereignty includes a weak state in the larger community of states but not on its own terms. The military campaigns of the so called war on terror of which a friend son remains the paradigmatic case have proved profoundly challenging. Their failures are often ascribed to the weakness and corruption of new regimes meant to usher in stability and liberal politics. The politics of these new regimes are understood in other words to be an existential obstacle to the effort at hand. Today, I wish to challenge this near axiomatic characterization. I want to argue instead that state building in the shadow of counter terrorism is an unprecedentedly constricting form of intervention, in which a regime's venality is not a bug, but rather a feature that stems from the exceptional limits interveners place on the very regimes they claim to embolden. Terrorists tend to compare contemporary cases of state building encounter insurgency to those from the Cold War and post Cold War eras, but the age of terror is novel with respect to both ends and means, because of the perceived threat at hand. Intervening states concern themselves as before with regimes and rebels but a paramount concern are the so called terrorists who represent a defining distinct actor in the site of intervention. The outsiders with their counter terror agenda articulate the parameters of warm making and state making, even as the ultimate responsibility to manage the threat is thrust upon the insider. In other words, regimes birthed as a product of this meta campaign exist in the service of a mission that at once necessitates and constricts their sovereignty within these constraints pals politics become one of the few means for regime to lay claimed the surrounding political landscape. Now students of the developing world have long pointed to the outsized impact of the international system on modern state formation. Mark Jackson and Carl Rosberg wrote decades ago about African state formation and said, quote, external factors are more likely than internal factors to provide an adequate explanation of the formation and persistence of states, unquote. The synergistic relationship between warm making and state making intrinsic to European state formation proved neither necessary nor possible as a function of the imperial and then post colonial delineation of states as juridically sovereign whatever their empirical status. The United European rulers to grow military fiscal and legal institutions, the imperative to compete effectively in the community of other states has not been at the heart of the modern state building project, nor is it a necessary condition for state survival in the 21st century. And like most of its counterparts in the developing world Afghanistan never came under direct colonial rule, but its history as around to a state dates back to the late 19th century, when the British crown entered into relationship with Abdulrahman Han. New King the country's premier state builder settled on terms that foreclosed his government's control over foreign affairs, in exchange for a steady source of international income and recognition. So commenced Afghanistan status as a buffer state situated in a kind of international in between, filling the space between rival powers and extracting a former strategic grant for this geographic labor. Abdulrahman received British funds and weapons that positioned him to commence the work of state making. He conscripted troops and raised revenue through taxation and because he had a free rent right hand to rule internally as he saw fit. The new king pursued an ambitious series of campaigns to lay claim to the lands and people beyond his initial writ. He undertook state making in much the terms that sociologist Charles Tilly described this common to early Europe. Quote a mixed strategy eliminating subjugating dividing conquering cajoling buying as the occasions presented themselves unquote. The new king's approach to state building what Louis Dupri called a kind of quote internal imperialism unquote, was exemplified by his 1891 conflict conquest of the hazard jet Central Highlands, which involved torture, rape, forcible displacement and even enslavement. This was this campaign that Hassan Kakar likened it to the warfare that an Islamic ruler might have deployed in territories inhabited by non Muslims. This ferocious brand of consolidation was not only permitted, but in fact enabled by his British patron. His regime's methodology and more involved more than naked aggression. Instead, the iron Amir as he came to be known co opted a range of defeated and potential rivals, drawing those with the capacity to threaten him into the fold. His rule combined brute force and appeal to divine legitimation patronage politics tribal maneuvering and a novel form of subnational administration. This is what Barney Rubin called a quote consolidated if terrorized state unquote, foreign support became the foundation for a new authoritarian bureaucracy that enabled his regime to administer extract police and promote as needed. More than a century after the iron Amir's rule to in 2001, Afghanistan's new president, Hamid Karzai found himself in the midst of a novel exchange with the foreign patron of his own, the United States. But this time the country's ruler would not have the freedom and flexibility to take on his sundry competitors on the take same terms as his predecessor head. The black on case represents the pilot for this latest version of international clientelism, which short circuits the so called extraction coercion cycle through the influx of foreign aid as rent. This particular configuration of run tears ship conceived in 2001 predicates Western support on the host regime sustained provision of access to the country's territory for the pursuit of violent extremist actors. The perceived link between ungoverned or ill governed space and terrorism justifies regime change, foreign led reconstruction and ongoing kinetic military activity. The Afghan campaign the first in the Bush administration's global war on terror underscored the variability and fungibility of state sovereignty that still mark the international system. Hasner described modern sovereignty as a kind of quote organized hypocrisy, whereby stronger states can pick and choose among different rule rules selecting the ones that best suit their instrumental objectives, unquote. Andani articulated this double standard as quote the right to punish unquote, a prerogative the world's stronger states can exercise vis a vis those incapable of resisting intervention. The war on terror exemplified the bounty ability of modern Westphalia and sovereignty as the United States and its allies set about remaking state society relations in Afghanistan in response to an attack on the American homeland. In his writing on the quote imagined in material geographies of terror and response unquote Stuart Elden described this newer era of intervention as one in which quote states that are unable to govern effectively within their territories have been recast as global dangers unquote. This conjuring cleared the way for what Stuart Patrick called quote the rise of a nascent doctrine of contingent sovereignty. Derek Gregory underscored the conceptually indeterminate reach of the threat and therefore the ever expanding possibilities for intervention, describing a battlefield which far from a field resided across the quote wild zones of the global south. It remain unbounded by clear temporal or territorial edges having arisen out of a set of geographies that became at once interconnected and presumed capable of perpetual metastasis. The link between governance and counter extremism once established justified regime change and state building legitimized by Security Council authorization and the invocation of article five of the NATO Charter. Within months of September 11 the Taliban regime fell and Hamid Karzai assumed the leadership of an interim government co constituted by the Afghan victors and their new foreign patrons. The new regime noted its existence as the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan to this military campaign, and in exchange commenced a new chapter of state formation, all the while unable to claim my not monopolistic control or even influence over large swaths of the country's territory. Justice foreign militaries donor agencies and international organizations brought resources to empower Afghanistan for its reconstruction they also imposed a series of binds. In post 2001 Afghanistan this precarity meant the Karzai government and its successor the Ghani government would remain perennially and deliberately unable to control many of the basic fundamentals of power and politics, even as they face blame for governing poorly. This young government's Western benefactors complicated the country's already crowded warscape through a series of strategic decisions. To collaborate with the warlord commanders of the Northern Alliance in 2001. Next to exclude the decimated Taliban from politics thereafter. And third to employ the kinetic use of force ongoing in their own terms. Each of these decisions disadvantage the palace of in Kabul and meaningful and lasting ways. In time the normative scaffolding of 21st century state building imposed a set of so called good governing requirements and restrictions on the Afghan state that further limited its room for maneuver. These constraints and the precarious sovereignty they produced help explain the reliance of both administrations on a form of palace politics anchored in the centralized management of rivals in the service of regime preservation. In my first book I considered the implications of these tight conditions when it came to President Karzai's engagement with Mujahideen commanders. I made the argument that under certain conditions the government was able to transform otherwise threatening strong men into valuable governors. By drawing on them for the informal forms of power they had access to while manipulating the competition between them in order to have greater influence over their behavior. Here the highly centralized design of the Afghan state proved very useful as the president could wield his formal authority of appointment in order to tame the periphery as best he could. Introducing actors with real strength into the empty shell of formal government at the time. Although these appointments undermine many of the principles associated with good governance I argued they allowed for the emergence of provincial government just the same. Government became a space within which a number of strong men reimagined their political futures in new terms. Not only did they have much to gain from being part of the state but they did not have to give up everything in the process. In my new research I have stepped back from the 10 years of particular governors to consider the larger subnational political map as a function of center for free relations more generally. I argue that within the competitive space that was post 2001 Afghan son Karzai and his clique leveraged his formal authority of appointments in the struggle to remain just above the fray. His approach to gubernatorial appointments commonly criticized as a reflection of bad governance could instead be understood as serving the vital purpose of managing competition. A task at the heart of regime survival in a weak state tasked with rebuilding itself under severely restricted conditions. I argue that President Karzai used amongst other things his power to make subnational appointments as a means of maintaining unpredictability, balancing and redistributing power dividing and conquering, rewarding clients punishing spoilers and managing donor expectations. His political choreography read as corruption to some but for me this was what the sociologist Joel McDowell has called the politics of survival. Karzai could assert the center's influence in an otherwise unwieldy periphery. Ultimately a closer look at his pantheon of governors close to 200 appointments reveals the degree to which he spent his 12 years in office managing power through politics. He utilized appointments to shape dynamics at the periphery and to protect his own turf in the center. His experiments evolved as his presidency progressed and these appointments represented a reliable means by which to shift course. The dynamism of the system and his significant authority to maneuver within it enabled Karzai to exercise a far greater amount of influence over politics than might otherwise have been the case. Karzai's successor Dr. Ashraf Ghani was cut from a very different cloth. He built his scholarly and political career on the philosophy that failed states can be fixed through the construction of an independent and law bound bureaucratic architecture with little room for shady backgrounds or agendas. The conception of the Afghan state was a technocratic one based on a direct relationship between government and population, a kind of social contract that would make foreign entanglements a needless dependence of the past. It was a vision for sovereign Afghan government. And yet those of us who have been watching Afghan politics since 2014 recognized little of this vision in Kabul. The comparisons and contrasts can be made between the two administrations and I am in the midst of pursuing my own analysis therein. Ultimately the two presidents had very different approaches to politics on account of their distinct assets experience temperaments and the geopolitical context around them. Both in their own ways consistently privileged keeping the throne over building the state, and that impulse has perhaps never been stronger than in the current moment. Let me turn that in my remaining time to the peace process and explore the current moment from this vantage point, the vantage point of precarious sovereignty. I'm often struck by the certitude with which Western observers declare their views on the current peace process. While some seem certain that talks between the Taliban and the government are not only necessary but will prove productive. Others are unprepared to entertain them as a viable option at all. For 20 years of studying Afghanistan and its surrounding geopolitics, I remain entirely uncertain as to the prospects for a negotiated resolution to the conflict between the Afghan government and the Taliban insurgency at this time. But I think I am beginning to understand why I remain so uncertain and that understanding derives from my conception of the persistent precarity of Afghan sovereignty. I am certain to stems in particular from the fact that the Afghan government has never had the opportunity to engage with the Taliban on its own terms. While the Karzai government had little choice after 2001 but to incorporate strong men on account of their collaborative relationships with the Americans. It had little choice but not to engage with members of the defeated Taliban regime. During freedom brought the Taliban to an astonishingly quick demise as a regime and with limited preparation for the days to follow, the US government continued to frame the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban government as synonymous. Then CIA director George Tenant reportedly said quote the Taliban and al-Qaeda are really the same, unquote. The Taliban were excluded from the bond process precluding the possibility of an internationally mediated peace agreement between the various Afghan factions in 2001. Many would look back on this decision and the subsequent systemic exclusion of regime remnants as a significant misstep. Dr. Brahimi who led the bond process on behalf of the UN Secretary General has repeatedly lamented his own failure to convince those opposed to Taliban inclusion of the wisdom of engagement. Shortly after bond a cohort of senior Taliban leaders reportedly reached out Karzai to acknowledge his anointment as the country's new leader and to surrender themselves in the face of imminent defeat. The US Defense Secretary had vetoed the proposed truce. Those leaders were subsequently captured or escaped over the border into Pakistan to fight another day. Had Karzai been given the political leeway to pursue his own modes of accommodation there may have been few Talibs interested in serving in his new government. One must consider the possibility that appointments of more former Taliban members might have at least blunted the eventual insurgencies virulence. Instead and in coherent victor's agenda meant an often haphazard approach toward remnants of the defeated regime, with some detained in Guantanamo, others slipping back into still civilian life, still others crossing over to the border into sanctuary in Pakistan. Not only was the Taliban offered no opportunity to officially surrender there was nothing in the way of a deliberate reconciliation effort. Instead as Tom Barfield put it American soldiers and their Afghan proxies quote scoured the countryside in search of bad guys unquote. The coalition forces pursued steady kinetic activity on the ground from airstrikes, night raids and clearing operations to detention militarized development and militia proliferation. By the fall of 2018 Netta Crawford estimated that nearly 40,000 Afghan civilians had lost their lives on account of the conflict with a host of other devastating collateral effects including injury, property damage and displacement. Under such circumstances the Afghan government could make no claim to control its territory as a means of guaranteeing security, justice or peace for its citizens. The American pivot to peacemaking was made with the same strategic schizophrenia that had marched much of the war fighting before. United States continued to support and defend the besieged government, even as it began to negotiate with that government's sworn enemy on said enemies terms. On February 29 2020 the US government signed two different agreements one with the Taliban and the other with the Afghan government. Now the so called Doha declaration between the Americans and the Taliban has received more attention it is worth recalling the commitments laid out in the simultaneous US joint declaration with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In particular this portion of part two clause two quote consistent with the joint assessment and determination between the United States and the Republic of Afghanistan United States its allies in the coalition will complete the withdrawal of their remaining forces from Afghanistan quote. Clause three signed the Afghan government up for a US facilitated discussion with the Taliban that was to include quote determining the feasibility of releasing significant numbers of prisoners on both sides on quote. According to these provisions it would be the US government that would dictate the terms of both the release of Taliban prisoners and then the withdrawal of remaining American forces terms that suited the Taliban just fine. The Taliban decided that the time for war was over the Afghan government if it wished to receive ongoing support for its security forces had no choice but to join a peace process over which it had no real control. In a last ditch diplomatic push a draft interim government proposal surfaced a few weeks ago, offering up proposed architecture for Afghanistan's political way ahead. The Russian and Kabul seemed mixed, some appreciated the introduction of much needed fodder for a productive intro Afghan discussion. While others worried that it included elements of theocratic rule that undermine the current constitutional order from the start, barely able to digest the details and their implications. The parties woke up to the news that US troops were leaving unconditionally by September 11. The US ambassador Khalilzad's notion that quote nothing is decided until everything is decided on quote that evaporated. And it became clear that the US decides everything had been the true mantra all along. As remaining American soldiers begin their withdrawal this week. There is an irony that cannot go unaddressed. The fears of being constrained from every direction the Afghan state now has been pushed now into a new kind of independence at a time when it is most vulnerable from within. President ghani noted this point in his foreign affairs essay published just yesterday. Quote the withdrawal also represents an opportunity for the Afghan people to achieve real sovereignty. A few thoughts in closing on how Afghan politics and American policy could determine whether or not this opportunity is seized. The question in Kabul as I see it now is this, can the imperative for regime survival actually overlap with that of state building. The idea of building at present more like state preserving will require some deft combination of war making and peace building that cannot afford to privilege the palace over the Republic. President Karzai's management of competition at its best was expansive and accommodating. There are possibilities for local governance for elite consultation and popular participation for conflict management and for a politics of solidarity in the face of suffering. President ghani's approach has had its own episodes of expansive engagement, but it has largely been one of limiting rather than expanding the political circle, an approach that risks collapsing onto itself in this new chapter. As Americans leave competing political elites will be further incentivized to conspire to their own ends to double down on their parochial basis of support. That centrifugal impulse jeopardizes the one great advantage the Afghan state should have in any contest with the Taliban. The American model of government, which while deeply flawed in practice represents the will of the Afghan population in terms that the Taliban's eminent model could never hope to achieve. Leaders of even the weakest states have spheres of choice and autonomy, moments where they can define their country's future in meaningful terms. There are two kinds of palace politics that stabilize and make room, and others that exclude and alienate the latter forms only further the precarity of the weak states reach and standing in the surrounding society. Meanwhile, the means by which the United States frames its military withdrawal and the next chapter also matter profoundly. Trends if left unchecked that risk pushing the Afghan state from a position of precarity into one collapse. To start this campaign has been marked from the beginning by the weaponization of democratic norms and values. Consider the sphere of women's rights. Afghan women have been sequestered in both discourse and policy making their place in society framed in narrow, reductive terms that stripped them of their political complexity and ironically often take away their voice. As Laila Abu-l-Rod has argued, they do not need saving nor as my friend Moqadessa Yawrish says, do they represent gains to be haggled over at the negotiating table. More generally Western powers have wrapped themselves in the cloaks of human rights procedural democracy and justice, while routinely privileging idiosyncratic personalized and predatory forms of politics when it has served their aims. Can the United States government and recognize and engage with the Afghan people as citizens in a rowdy imperfect Republic in some ways not different from their own and respect them on those terms. This war has also been marked by the securitization of humanitarian assistance and development programming. There is little evidence that hearts and minds were won through the counter insurgent co-optation of aid. What we do know is that these interventions introduced profoundly distorting effects on local political economies. Two forms of civilian assistance absorb the countless lessons learned from the past decades and might more predictable sustainable forms of aid encourage better behavior on the part of those Afghan leaders and trusted with delivering badly needed goods and services to the Afghan people. Finally, this war has often been guided by the rule of gun rather than the rule of law. In addition, night raids enhanced interrogation targeted killings and paramilitary tactics have unfolded in the shadows, thriving in one Anna Leander called quote a political unaccountable military markets unquote. These instruments have been invulnerable to political debate checks and balances and the international regimes designed to regulate war. The administration is removing American boots from the ground, but there remain many ways of fighting. Will the US military and intelligence complex wage a new war from quote over the horizon unquote, without genuine debate and oversight, or will it come into the American public scrutiny and engage the Afghan government as the entity with jurisdiction over its territory and the use of force therein. As scholars and policymakers alike reflect on what has become America's longest war. There's much we can learn from it about the larger relationship between state building and counter terrorism in this new chapter of international relations. The evidence from the Afghan case reveals the degree to which this latest version of state building has been held hostage by the imperative to fight extremism, arguably undermining both agendas as a result. Naive democracy promoters counter insurgency enthusiasts and counter terrorist strategists must therefore revisit the assumptions that underpin their projects, especially as they relate to one another. The reality also raises a number of questions for scholars and practitioners of foreign intervention about the relative merits of different institutional designs and processes that structure relations between a political center and its peripheries, especially in settings written by conflict. The Afghan case did not the much aligned maligned architecture of the government centralized in the extreme, offer the head of state, some room for maneuver in an otherwise highly constrained political context. While in the absence of formalized rule based administration may be mistaking a kind of masterly in activity as Noah Cobra interned it for meaningless talk or indecision might this kind of neo patrimonial rule actually afford besieged precisely the kind of innovation, unpredictability and agility required to survive in the face of relentless competition, even as it falls far short of our technocratic fantasies. Had those concerned with countering violent extremism relaxed the pretense that liberal democracy was around the corner, and instead committed themselves to the genuine creation of a government in control over the use of force territory and politics. Might that government have been better positioned to build a state in more effective terms. The prevailing scholarly critiques and policy prescriptives avoid a hard look at the premise upon which this latest generation of state building has unfolded. Sadly managed resources unrealistic goals and elite self interest are undoubtedly challenges endemic to governance promotion efforts in cases ranging from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya Somalia the Palestinian Authority and the so called moderate opposition in Syria. And yet none of these concerns reflects the fact that the fundamental problem for weak states or aspiring states is that more powerful states encourage them to stand on their own and govern effectively and democratically. But those powerful states also impose their agendas interests and constraints on them. The result is a kind of neo imperial condition in which the cost of receiving foreign support is loss of control over one's own land and politics. As such many of the very weaknesses interveners attribute to bad regime behavior reflect the ends and means of the intervention itself, and the limits that intervention places on those it claims to interest. As American troops commenced their withdrawal this week the opportunity exists for what my colleague Helen can sell and I are calling a just exit. One that acknowledges the US interest that drove this intervention takes responsibility for mistakes made and maximizes the possibility for a genuine piece to take hold an exit on those terms could also be the beginning of a larger reckoning. Because unless intervening states come to terms with the profound and workable contradiction inherent in this effort, which demands both loyalty and legitimacy, they will likely fail to produce regimes that can perform either. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to buy that was a tremendous, tremendous talk it was both sobering and forensic. And I was reminded of the, the talk that Astri circuit gave some years ago in its critique of external intervention but this talk brings us very much up to date, and I really like the way you have kind of critiqued the, what you call the technocratic processes. And you have that your your talk is forensic in the sense that it's called politics, Afghan politics politics as it actually exists rather than some idealized version of what we think it ought to be. And I think your, your final point about what a just exit might look like is is very opposite at this current time and people may want to come in with questions about that. So the audience please there are some questions coming into the Q&A now so I'll, we'll move on to them, and we'll try and get through as many as we can so please type in away as and we'll go through them so the first one I'm going to go on to straight away from Daniel, who asked, do you see examples of similarly a dependent states overcoming the precarious form of sovereignty you identify in Afghanistan. And are the foreign powers that are ostensibly there to facilitate the building of a client state able to step back and allow the indigenous actors the indigenous actors to play the state building game without foreign judgment and intervention. Do you want to have a go at addressing that one first. It's a terrific question as I would expect from Daniel thank you. You know this is a very depressing question because my my short answer is no I don't. I don't see examples I mean I think one of the cases in which I have a great deal of interest in looking at now is the case of Bosnia. I think enough time has passed that we might have the chance to get a sense of the degree to which some degree of greater sovereignty has arisen in that case. I think even there the kind of tension between the wish to control through international trustee ship. And the often competing imperatives I think if we're honest between maintaining something that looks like stability. At the expense of really resolving the underlying political tensions at the heart of a conflict. The privileging of stability over genuine conflict resolution. My guess you know as a only a very cursory student of the case is that likely that Bosnian politics is still at the mercy of that. The other case that always I think is it is an important one for us to think about is the non case case of Somali land and the ways in which politics, including violent forms of bargaining. Emerged and unfolded and allowed for a kind of consolidation of power but also different forms of political participation and institution building and constitution. And institutional politics to emerge in part as a function of the fact that Somali land has not received international recognition, and therefore exists outside the bounds of sovereign interstate interactions, and has not been the object on the scale of countries that are recognized as states. And so, you know, economists like Nicholas you bank have made this argument that in fact the absence of aid has allowed for the kinds of internal bargaining dynamics, and frankly, sort of neglect, maybe a kind of benign neglect on the part of international actors and a kind of non interference as a result that has allowed for a type of state building. In that context, of course the trade off there is that Somali land, presumably the thing that many in that country seek, which is recognition as a state, they continue to have not received. So it feels like a real catch 22. In that sense. Thank you to Paulie so I'm going to a question here from William Crawley, and he says the most acute dilemma for international analysts and policymakers is that Western military disengagement from Afghanistan may involve a reversal of much of the social disengagement, especially for women that intervention under what you call the Afghan government's precarious sovereignty is help building into the country's governance is this false. Is it an incomplete merely an incomplete dilemma. Yeah, this is a great question William and one, you know which I alluded to two at the end with respect to women's rights in particular, I think one of the real cruel ironies of US intervention in Afghanistan is of course that women and not just women and children and minorities had been suffering under the rule of the Taliban for many years before their suffering really made it on to the radar of Western audiences what after the attacks on September 11. And as part of the justification for going to war. The plight of women was routinely instrumentalized frankly in the service of justifying the intervention. It doesn't change the reality that you allude to which is that after 2001 women in Afghanistan have experienced remarkable opportunity as have men as have young people as have members of minorities, people who are living outside of Kabul etc and the kind of opening for the society in general that unfolded after 2001 really cannot be understated. And so I think part of what I meant about a just exit and what Helen can sell and I are really trying to think through and in a piece that actually come out this week is what are the ways in which an engagement between Western governments and the international community more generally is an engagement that recognizes its sovereignty. What are the ways in which that kind of engagement can actually create more space, rather than less space for all of Afghanistan citizens to be able to continue the project that they have been pursuing for the last years of creating a Republican form of government and also of developing in their own terms their conception of what things like women's rights mean to them in their particular context. I think the, what I referred to as the kind of schizophrenia of in my mind and unconditional withdrawal, having dangled the possibility of real a real commitment to the peace process. What I'm really hoping is that the commitment on the diplomatic side, the commitments on to continuing to support the Afghan security sector to continuing to engage with our partners and our collaborators in civil society in a way that we don't let go of those commitments. I believe those commitments can sustain, even without American forces on the ground, but we, but they are certainly at risk, if we don't take responsibility for our role. Thanks to Pali. There's a question here from if the car Malik. And he says, our speaker preambles her lecture with a case for liberalism as a possible rationale for intervention, which certainly has not been the case in the post 911 invasion. How can an invasion be justified, even for so called liberal reason with state building. Just a few years before this invasion, why was this righteousness absence during the catastrophe catastrophes in Bosnia and Wanda. So I guess it's a question also about the unevenness of international interventionism. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with the premise of the question, which is, I think liberalism, you know, one of what I so greatly appreciate about they made this work on liberalism and Empire is precisely this contradiction at the heart of the justification, is the notion of liberating, but only on the terms of liberator, and only at the pace of the liberator, and with a set of justifications in the interim for actually restricting and imposing and confining and constraining the society. The intervener claims to be engaging in benevolent terms. And I think that so within the Afghan invasion in and of itself that contradiction and that hypocrisy exists, and also between interventions of course it exists to your point in raising the cases of Bosnia and Rwanda and there are many examples that we can find more recently we can look at the the case of intervention in Libya, and then we can look at the case of non intervention in Syria and that's not making an argument on behalf of and all of these cases at all. It's to say that the very arguments that are mobilized in from the liberal internationalist corner reflect a set of internal contradictions and inconsistencies that I think are implicit in your opinion and it's why I think you know as as was made clear in the introduction to my to my talk that it's important to understand all of the arguments that have been made all of the programs that have been deployed all of the discourse has that have been mobilized with respect to democracy promotion and women's rights and human rights that all of them flow fundamentally from the attack on September 11 and the articulation of a threat of terrorism to which the response would be military and it's not possible to divorce the two and you know as my my colleague bill Birgit bird at USIP and when we were having a conversation about these remarks that there is a real circularity then to the current moment of withdrawal right where we come back again to the very reduced aims of counter terrorism and also as I caution where we have to think again about what counter terrorism affords Western powers in terms of wage in war in terms that don't look like war. So so much of the focus is on troops and troop numbers and whether they will be there or not but it's very important to be clear that the arsenal of counter terrorism is far broader than that and undeniably is at odds with liberal with liberal values with liberal norms and with conceptions and with the vision of what liberal interventionists claim to advance. Thanks to Farley there's a question here from Zainab Azizi which was I was thinking about asking this question a similar line anyway and this is that taking US interventions into account could we say that Pakistan has been similarly involved or will be involved in Afghanistan by engaging with the current peace affairs through the proxy war that's been running for the last 20 years. Could we say that it's not only the superpowers but any government with strong political and military interests could engage in Afghanistan for their own interests while the state building issues ongoing on the government side.  Yeah I think Zainab is absolutely right Jonathan that there is no question that ultimately sovereignty as hypocrisy you know as as organized hypocrisy as Steve Krasner calls it makes itself manifest in very stark terms in in the regional context and you know Barney Rubin in in his work on the 90s talked about the Rante state building and then Rante state wrecking as he called it right that regional actors identified clients within Afghanistan and supported them to their own particular ends in terms that devastated any semblance of government as it could exist in the Afghan case and you know I think I what I would say about Pakistan's involvement is that even in that case we cannot divorce the American project from the Pakistani project right there is no question that one of the elements of the schizophrenia of the American strategy has been the this incredibly complicated and dysfunctional relationship between the United States and Pakistan. And the fact as many have commented on and many know the details better than I do but the fact that the military and intelligence complex within Pakistan which is has long been supported by the United States has been a sponsor of the Taliban has provided sanctuary for the Taliban and you know this is also the week in which we acknowledge the anniversary of the killing us of Osama bin Laden who we can't forget was found and killed in Pakistan and that the I don't want to minimize the challenges involved for Western powers in forging a productive relationship with Pakistan as a nuclear power but I do think and with its very complex relationship with India but I do think there is it's not possible to just detach the regional dynamic from the American posture I think we can talk about Pakistan we can also talk about Iran and the ways in which the American relationship with Iran has come at the expense of Afghan security has come get the American engagement in Iraq came at the expense of Afghan security so these are these are sort of different you know problems nested within problems and because again if it's geographic position and because of its plural multi ethnic multi sectarian composition internally there's no there this is this is a very complex challenge for Afghan foreign policy right how to manage relationships with all of these neighboring countries but I don't think we can understate the degree to which more powerful countries and then countries even more powerful than those countries are continually interfering with the Afghan state formation project that there's no question about that Thanks to Pali there's another question here anonymous and it mentions your book in which you argue that Karzai was successful in managing competition. How did this change in the subsequent Ghani presidency and I mean you didn't really have time to expand upon this in the talk so maybe a little bit more about the shift in kind of the strategies around coalition management and the external relationships between these two different kinds of regimes. Yeah, this is a terrific question you know you and I Jonathan I've both used the work of Douglas north and his colleagues to think about limited access orders and the notion that states that are coming into being or coming back into being or moving into new chapters out of conflict. It's not a pretty picture but often one of the ways in which the shift from violence to order emerges is as a function of elites finding rational economic reasons to cooperate rather than to fight with one another. And one of the premises of that model is that the more actors there are seeking a slice of that pie, the more difficult it becomes to create a coherent kind of elite clique because the competition becomes fierce. And so one of the challenges for the national unity government, which must be acknowledged is that, rather than a single head of state, and then, you know, the, the administration that flowed from underneath at least in theory this was meant to be a coalition president and then with up to love to learn the position of chief executive and part of the. So there's a structural challenge there already and that's one I think that bears noting that makes for those at the top, it's more difficult than to manage politics downward while sharing across a broader elite coalition. That being said, just two things that I will say that have been interesting to me about observing president on these approach, compared to President Karzai is one of them is that in certain ways he did enact this kind of technocratic vision that he had, you know, in his approach to Kunduz, for example, early on after he became president in his focus on large projects that have to do with like long term development. And those, they, those have produced very mixed results in other ways he actually drew quite a bit from the playbook, I think of President Karzai bringing on strong men not only in his immediate circle including his first vice vice president General Dostam, but also brokering a deal with Gulbuddin Hikmatiar and bringing his base, let me into the fold. These are the kind of accommodations of strong men that we associated with the Karzai's time in office, even in his appointment of Governors. You know, we can see that initially he appointed more individuals who didn't come from a strong man background who had higher education degrees but over time the mix moved closer to a composition that looked like the average of President Karzai's administrative appointments. So, these trends are interesting. I think the, the final thing I will say is that for both President Ghani and President Karzai, the shifting of the frame by Western powers of from warm making to peacemaking from a focus on the central government to concerns at the district level from a counterterrorism to a counter insurgency back to a counterterrorism paradigm. These shifts are profoundly constraining and that is not to take responsibility away from or to take agency away from Afghan political leaders, including the presidents for the choices that they have made that they are responsible for those choices and in many cases there were different choices that they might have made that I think would have served the Afghan people better. But I think my core thesis is that it's impossible to divorce our critique of the regime's behavior, whether it's related to governing or war fighting or making from our understanding of the intervention itself and the logic and illogic of the intervention and the means and the ends therein. Brilliant, thank you. Yeah, a nice easy question for you. The question is from for Marius, I think, is what will be the future of Afghanistan after the US Army withdraws in your opinion, is it, is there a possibility of the, the Naji bullet scenario of a return to civil war which is clearly something we all are concerned about. It's obviously an impossible question to answer but in the light of your analysis, what, what, what are your thoughts about that kind of scenario playing out. Well, it may, may surprise people that I'm actually a long term optimist, a genuine optimist about the scenario after withdrawal. A few reasons. I, let me start with the, with the immediate question about the Naji bullet comparison. I would commend to you a new book that has been published. Many of the folks in this convening have contributed essays to a new book published by the Kakar Foundation, which is 22 essays by Western and Afghan scholars, and, and South Asian scholars as well, thinking about the, the Naji bullet moment as a function of a series of letters exchanged between President Naji bullet and President Hassan Kakar. And so that of course is the most obvious alarming parallel or alarming historical case that comes to mind. And the unconditionality of the withdrawal as it was described, made that parallel more salient to me in ways that I that were I do believe that the possibilities for a just exit of troops will mitigate against that outcome. I don't believe that outcome is inevitable. There, there is no reason why the United States, its allies, the international community more generally need to abandon Afghanistan. That is not a corollary to the withdrawal of American troops. And I think they're my sense, for example, from listening to the hearing on the hill that Ambassador Khalilzad had with members of US Congress on this made clear to me that there are many within the US government at least that are very aware of the risks of abandonment and are thinking through all of the different ways in which that can be mitigated now that this decision of troop withdrawal has been made. In the interim, I think that the, we're all already seeing moves by the Taliban to take districts to take attempt to take provincial capital in the south, and these are alarming, but not unexpected and here I think the relationship between Western governments in the Afghan security sector is going to be determinative in a lot of ways, as are I believe the decisions that are made by members of the Afghan government as to the degree to which they are prepared to come together in this existential moment as I said to put palace above, to put republic above palace. I think my optimism in the long term comes from what I said in my talk about the compelling nature of the republican model in Afghanistan. It has been flawed in for a variety of reasons that many folks in this room, you know, have have studied in great depth. The model of government, it has roots in Afghanistan historically, which is often a fact Western audiences ignore. And it has generated remarkable uptake within the population and we can see that in a variety of ways we can see that in the media as a sector we can see that in higher education as a sector. We can see that in the kinds of commitments to voting, even when it may cost Afghan citizens their lives. And I think that the challenge then is one for the political elite to recognize the remarkable benefits that they have accrued as a function of this new model of government they are all doing better. Than they were in the 1990s. And so if they can cohere around a commitment to articulate a compelling defense of the Republic to engage to negotiate with the Taliban as a united force. The possibilities then for the international community to support them, the possibility for regional actors to undermine them is diminished and the possibility for the international community to support them only grows. And I am hopeful that the the political elite will do that important political work now and I believe it is incumbent upon their foreign sponsors and supporters to as much as possible enable that kind of co hearing and that has to do with how we think about aid going forward it has to do with how we think about kinetic military activity going forward how we think about security sector support going forward about support for Afghan civil society, etc. I'm going to try and sneak in four questions here and cluster them in a question. I mean, if you've got the energy, we're doing in groups of two and so we, you know, we've got 10 minutes basically. And so there's one from bill bill bird, and it says, rather striking difference between cars and Ghani has been the degree to which they focus on controlling ensuring loyalty of the Afghan army any thoughts on that and possible reasons behind this rather striking difference. So another question from Daniel. Look, and I have to kind of paraphrase here looking items like the stabilization assistance review and the global fragility, fragility act it seems is a good both a great deal of angst but also a desire to do more of the same. So you've commented favorably on the GF, the GFA is long term approach, while acknowledging that the internationals fell into an unprecedented 20 intervention Afghanistan. And similarly the SAR says there's presently no appetite for open ended foreign intervention when it doesn't appear that ever was such an appetite. How do you see the current state of this field on, you know, on this topic. And do you have hope that there'll be a reckoning in light of these less than satisfying recent interventions so quite big questions. Have a go short, short responses. Bill, I think you're probably better position than me to speak on this, in particular with respect to the security sector but I would say more generally. I think the impulse. One of the things that's very interesting about the way the Americans think about partner regimes is that they often are seeking actors that fit their conception of what a good leader looks like and part of being a good leader is being a good client. And that in and of itself is a constraint on regimes and political elites in terms of the kind of support that they can build and one of the challenges then becomes that institution building and building strong capable institutions filled with other strong capable actors within the state can be seen as a threat to one's power, rather than as an asset. And, you know, scholars have talked about this in the context of coup proofing and we know this in in the literature and authoritarianism. And so I think this is, this is part of that, that bind that happens in, in context of precarious sovereignty. And one of the really interesting dilemmas going forward I think will be for the Afghan, for Afghan state builders of all sorts is how to think about the security sector. As one very long time scholar of Pakistan said to me many many years ago that it concerned him that the Afghan security sector was the best developed set of institutions in the country because of course having studied Pakistan that raised concerns for him. I have been really heartened by the moments of political crisis when the security sector might have involved itself in those politics and hasn't. But I don't think that that should be understood as a guarantee going forward and I think it's really incumbent on political civilian political elites to manage that dynamic again in terms that think about the state rather than the regime but very hard to incentivize to Daniel's question about the the current state of play. I'm not afraid I'm not terribly optimistic about the kind of learning that has been done. That's partly because I've been, you know, I'm finishing a book on Western intervention in Syria and it's really striking to see how many of the practices norms, logics just got transferred in reduced form in a kind of minimalist version, but still maximalist in terms of ambition, political ambition, and still quite schizophrenic, frankly, in their sort of implementation.  And let those messed up countries figure out their own problems. It's just it's a it's a revisionism that is empirically false and ethically deeply problematic but it's also would be very strategically short sighted I think there are ways of engaging with with those that are struggling with their own governance questions as sovereign states that we haven't done enough creative thinking about how to do that. And that in fact that kind of thinking may end up being strategically beneficial for all involved. I think we I'm afraid we have to take just one one question here because I think we're running against the clock, and I take Charlotte's shorter question and it's about trade offs. There's a trade, you mentioned trade off between supporting things, such as women's rights versus stability. What do you think at the current moment, there is a need to explicitly, you know, make that trade off to prioritize stability over nice state building, including human rights, women's rights, good governance and so on. I mean, I think this is a false trade off that we're so often, you know, presented with as a kind of inevitability I think stability is not what has stability has never been what is actually emerged when these kinds of trade offs are made. What actually emerges is addressing the short term interests of outsiders. But that addressing a short term interest of outsiders which undermines most often the short term interests of most insiders, including for example, you know, the majority of the population in Afghanistan which is female. So long term interests of outsiders in the process. So, there isn't some sort of stable outcome that exists at the expense of the sovereign capacity of a government to respond to and take care of its own population on its own terms with that society. It compromises that and actually produces stability. My, you know, my arguments I think and this is the last thing I'll say Jonathan is that, you know, I think sometimes people have misconstrued for example my arguments about strongman governors as an advocacy on behalf of actors that don't respect human rights, for example, it's that's not the argument that I'm making the argument that I make is, first of all that these individuals exist within a kind of complex politics in which they, they have violated human rights. They have also defended their communities advocated on behalf of them taking care of large swaps of people, they, and they have been emboldened by actions by outsiders that cannot go ignored when we call for their marginalization. So it's about, I think the first step being honest about the outsiders interests the outsiders actions the outsiders responsibilities, and then from there, really engaging with states and societies other than our own on their own terms that that to me that's not a trade off. That's what I believe we could have and should have been doing all along. Thank you. Thank you. That's an excellent final answer. The party I'm going to hand over to Scott, but I just say thank you very much for the brilliant answers very thoughtful answers and also very comprehensive answers to the questions. And they've also been some very positive comments which haven't been questions in the in the chat so obviously your talk has gone down very well. Thank you very much. I look forward to continuing the conversation to Polly and I'll hand over now to Scott. Thank you, Jonathan. Well, I'm equally pleased now to bring these proceedings to a close. I'm sure all of us have benefited greatly from this opportunity to hear to Polly and we will now, those of us who haven't yet read her works will immediately go out and acquire them and read them. The new book out yet. No, the book is forthcoming. The new book is forthcoming. I hope it will be out. Gosh, it's hard to say it's up to Cambridge to decide, but it's coming. Okay, well do let us know. I certainly will. Thank you. We eagerly look forward to his publication and to the opportunity to read it. So once again, thank you all for coming at least virtually. Nepali, we very much hope that you come to so as. Thank you. But we appreciate you're having come astrally, you know, nonetheless. So all the best, and we look forward to seeing everyone again a year hence, and a recording of this will be made available and posted to the website to everyone to stay tuned. Thank you so much. All the best then. Take care.