On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington, interviews Prof. Jennifer Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh. This episode features her latest book Land, the State and War, published by Cambridge University Press. The book employs a historical narrative, extensive fieldwork and a national survey to explore how private property institutions develop, how they are maintained, and their relationship to the state and state-building within the context of Afghanistan. This episode also discusses the long running governance challenges in Afghanistan, and the recent problems associated with the actions of foreign powers.
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The Guest
Professor Jennifer Murtazashvili is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and is also the Director of the Center for Governance and Markets. Her work operates in the field of political economy, and draws from diverse research methods, including field experiments, public opinion surveys and ethnography. Her focus is on governance in Central and South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. She also has extensive experience advising for the US Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Program and UNICEF.
Transcript
Mark Pennington
Welcome to the Governance Podcasts from the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society here at King’s College London. My name is Mark Pennington, and I’m the Director of the Centre. If you followed our work in the past, you’ll be aware that a key focus of that work is on the relationship between formal and informal institutional rules. And how those relationships either facilitate solutions to various social dilemmas or block or thwart solutions in ways that exacerbate conflict. Know where these issues are more pressing than in the problems facing What are sometimes, rightly or wrongly described as failed states.
One country often described in these terms, and that has been the subject of considerable attention in the recent past is Afghanistan. So I’m delighted to have with me today, Professor Jennifer Murtazashvili. Jennifer is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she’s Co-Director of the Centre for Governance and Markets. She’s the author of ‘Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan’ with Cambridge University Press 2016. And most recently, this summer, co-author with Ilia Murtazashvili with ‘Land, the State and War’. So Jennifer, it’s great to have you with us today.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
It’s a great pleasure to be here.
Mark Pennington
So you’ve written two books on Afghanistan, you know a great deal about that society. Obviously, it’s been in the news a great deal in the recent past, because of the events following the US and coalition forces’ withdrawal from the country. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your perception of what’s going on there at the moment, because certainly my impression is that, although it was very much in the news a couple of months ago, it’s somewhat sort of fallen off the radar screen, certainly here in the UK.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
I think it’s fallen off the radar screen for a lot of people. And, and, you know, unfortunately, this is just part of a cycle that we see with this country is that it falls off the radar. And until it doesn’t, until something happens. And even what’s happening right now is that the Taliban are working to consolidate power. And as we all know, the government of Afghanistan fell in mid August, it is now mid October. And it’s really remarkable what just in the course of two months, how little we hear about what’s going on. So the Taliban right now are facing a dire economic crisis.
About 70% of the economy was dependent upon foreign aid. And that money has been shut off. And the country is in the midst of, you know, one of the worst droughts that they’ve seen in decades. So this is affecting it, and it’s harvest season right now. So this is affecting, you know, everything. It’s just a massive humanitarian crisis, massive hunger, and the rural population is actually quite used to dealing with this kind of thing. Unfortunately, the state really hasn’t been around to provide very much, I hate to use this kind of resilience in this context. But we do see a kind of resilience in rural areas. It’s the urban areas where you have government employees, bureaucrats, NGO officials, you know, office workers, they’re the ones who are seeing their salaries cut off, and there’s real hunger. Right now in cities, the Taliban are facing this, they don’t have much experience governing or administrating. And now they’re saying, you know, give us time, give us time, it takes time to build state. So they’re jockeying right now for international recognition, trying to get some of those eight flows to return to the country, but it’s not going to be easy.
So one of the things that they’re doing is, you know, one of the things that we do here about Afghanistan is that they that they’ve cut schools off, for example, for women, they announced that if you’re above middle school, you can’t return to school. There have been conflicting reports about universities, being, you know, girls no longer being able to attend University. My sense of this is they’re using this as a bargaining chip with the international community because they know that the one thing the international community cares about is gender issues. And so they’re using this to get access to that aid, to get the United States to open their bank accounts. You know, the United States controls the Federal Reserve, the Reserve Bank, so all of the currency, the United States shut all of that off so that the Taliban government can access it. So the US does have a bit of leverage, and others, you know, the Europeans, of course, in terms of the Afghan economy right now.
Mark Pennington
So when I say interesting when you make the distinction between the urban and the rural areas, I mean that one of the issues is that people in the urban areas are actually less well placed to actually deal with the people who are populating the new regime, as opposed to people in the rural areas. So it’s not just the disturbance to, you know, food supplies and things like that. It’s actually the procedures that are sort of very different for these different groups of actors. I mean, there’s certainly an urban – rural divide in the country, you know, with the Taliban, representing at least historically, a more rural voice. And but something that we also have to recognise is that Afghanistan has urbanised significantly over the past 20 years. So although these are urban dwellers, many of them actually have deep roots in rural areas. And conversely, the Taliban over the past 20 years have actually urbanised.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Not to a significant extent, I don’t want to overstate it. But when they were fighting this campaign with the US and with the Afghan military over the summer, I was really struck how well the Taliban understood grievances in urban areas. And this was really reflected in their use of social media, it was very, very sophisticated. You know, they would talk about things like, you know, if you have access to money and power, you can get a special electricity line put into your house, in cities. And so one of the first things they did is they went to the electricity authority, and they said, Oh, equal electricity, for all, we are not going to play these games. And if you have money, you can get a power line to your house, electricity will be available for everyone. And to me, that was really capturing some of those urban grievances that were really distinct from rural grievances.
Mark Pennington
Yeah, now that’s, that’s really interesting. I mean, you’ve got a very in depth appreciation of what’s going on in this country in a way that, you know, sort of many, perhaps media common commentators or superficial commentators don’t. But before we get into the details of, you know, the wealth of knowledge that you have in the sort of perspective you bring to it, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what stimulated your interest in Afghanistan in the first place. And, you know, what, what prompted you to actually go and do the kind of really in depth research that you’ve conducted over recent years.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
So it was actually quite by accident. I had spent five years studying Russian as an undergraduate and because I did lots of, like, post Soviet studies and because I spoke Russian, or at least tried to speak Russian, I joined the, I was sent to the Peace Corps. I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Central Asia, because it was a post Soviet region, and specifically, I was sent to Uzbekistan, and I learned Uzbek and and then I was sent to serve in a city called Samarkand where I lived for about two years. Some of our content is a Farsi speaking city, Tajik speaking city in Uzbekistan. I ended up working for USAID, the US Agency for International Development for three years managing democracy and governance work. And I was working in the US Embassy on 9/11, and was helping the first batch of humanitarian assistance get into Afghanistan at that time. So it was really interesting to see the beginning of that war.
But when I went back to grad school in 2002, I was actually pretty frustrated with international aid and assistance, and especially some of the work I was doing in Central Asia. Very authoritarian, I was trying to promote democracy in this really difficult environment and didn’t really have a lot of knowledge about why I was doing this. So I had intended to write a dissertation actually focused mostly on post Soviet Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and I got interested in what was happening in Afghanistan, because I was interested in local governance. And even in these really authoritarian states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, I experienced a lot of self-organisation, people able to do so many things on their own, despite the state. And there was a political uprising in Uzbekistan in 2005, which prevented me from returning to that country, and actually for about 15 years until about three or four years ago. And so I use those language skills that I have because Tajik and Dari, one of the most prominent languages spoken in Afghanistan, are mutually intelligible. I studied literary Farsi when I went back to graduate school so I could get into, just sort of this regional comparison.
And so political issues sort of prevented me from returning, I decided to focus almost exclusively on Afghanistan over these past several years. And the other thing I wanted to do is that I wanted to tear down some regional studies boundaries that we have. If you study the post Soviet countries, I really hate that term ‘post Soviet countries’, it’s been 30 years already, right? When are we gonna, you know, these countries are right next to each other yet, from an academic perspective, studying them together is almost unheard of. It’s really difficult. There’s huge institutional barriers to doing it. So that’s another thing that I wanted to tear down in my work.
Mark Pennington
And if you could just, you know, let our listeners know, how much time have you actually spent on the ground in the country? And what kind of work have you been doing? You’ve done quite a lot of really close up quite ethnographic types of work, they’d be interesting, I think, for people to know about.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Sure. I mean, I’ve probably spent a total of about three years in Afghanistan, not as much time as I would like, especially in the last several years. But I was just back in the country. Last year, I’ll talked to you a little bit about what I was doing. But for my dissertation, and my first book, and parts of this book relies on ethnographic work that I did from probably about 2005 to 2012. And there were months of really intense field work in rural areas where I was trying to understand rural governance. And so I spent a lot of time in villages. I probably did research in more than 30 villages across six provinces of the country. And so that was really quite remarkable. And to do that work, given the security situation, I did this without any security accompaniment. I did it with a team of Afghan scholars, researchers who were learning how to do research at that time. You know, just showing up to villages, knocking on doors, and never being turned down. Can you imagine that? Never being turned out and being welcomed with open arms into people’s homes for hours and hours, where they would share really personal stories, you know, about their life during war and conflict. And it was just so deeply inspired by the people who I met, the people who I talked to, even people who yelled at me, you know, because I was American, it didn’t happen as much as I thought it would. It did increase, though, over the past several years. But just really remarkable, open, open minded actually.
Mark Pennington
I mean, that’s a really interesting point, isn’t it about the importance of ethnographic type work, because they’re kind of perception. The way you’ve just described that situation, the way that it challenges the common external perception that it just wouldn’t be possible for someone like you to go and research that is really interesting in and of itself?
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Yeah, you just have to be, I think what field work does, it forced me to change my mind on lots of things, it forced me to reevaluate so many of my assumptions. Everything that I went into looking at in terms of my research was wrong. I mean, I was a big champion of international aid when I started doing that work. And what I realised very slowly was that just about everything that I had read in these donor reports was wrong. A lot of the academic literature that was so focused on what the international community was doing was to me just empirically incorrect. It gave me insight into the fact that we study what’s easy for us to know. And so there’s volumes written, you know, you can feel libraries written about the intervention in Afghanistan, about military strategy, donor strategy, because it’s easier for us to understand that than to understand what you’re, this internal perspective, and not that I nail it by you know, I try, but it’s really hard and you know, I will always be a student of the country to say that I can explain it is wildly it’s just an, it’s an exaggeration. There’s so much I don’t understand and I speak two main languages of the country. I speak Dari and Uzbek. You know, because I lived in Uzbekistan. I understand that, you know, it’s probably spoken by about 10% of the population. Dari is spoken probably by another 30%. I don’t speak 40% depending on who you ask. It’s a very contentious issue. There actually has never been a census done in recent years.
Mark Pennington
Great. So okay, let’s move on to think about, you know, the sort of substantive framework that you use to understand the challenges that there are in Afghanistan. So throughout the book, you’re very much focused on, you know, what we could call a loose tender sort of institutional centred theory, looking at the role that property rights institutions play in either facilitating cooperation, or where they can actually lead to situations of conflict. And the framework they use emphasises that property rights institutions can be provided, either through sort of bottom up structures through community groups, religious organisations, business associations, what are often referred to as self governing structures, or they can be supplied more through formal state structures. But in the book, what you’re arguing is that it’s really not a question of deciding that bottom up or top down, institutions are more or less appropriate, in terms of facilitating cooperation or creating conflict, it very much depends on the close up institutional details of how those institutions actually operate. So I think I read, your work is challenging the kind of black box theories of institutions where people talk about the state, or the market or private property, or collective property without really understanding what those institutions actually look like on the ground.
And your work brings out in this case in Afghanistan, how varied those kinds of institutions can be. I wonder if you could speak a little bit towards the importance of that?
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Absolutely. And this was, a lot of this was driven by the first book that I wrote that was called ‘Informal order in the State in Afghanistan’. And what I, what I did in that book was, I heard so much, you know, people talking about traditional authority in Afghanistan, how it’s bad, it’s bad for women. And then there are all these comparisons to, you know, Africa, Sub Saharan Africa, and tribal systems and tribal leaders. And then I heard people refer to tribal leaders, and, and, and feudal lords. And this got me into anthropological literature, because I’m travelling around these villages, not knowing that literature, and I’m not seeing feudal lords, I’m not seeing these ruthless leaders, I’m actually seeing a very participatory system, a very egalitarian system. Yes, it doesn’t include women, but it includes every household. So I did find some women leaders, but every household ostensibly has the right to participate, which if you compare that, you know, we could talk about later you compare that to the state building effort, give very few people the right to participate, right. So every household has the right to participate in this process. And I realised that we weren’t actually looking at the rules that govern these organisations, these traditional systems, for example. So in the case of Afghanistan, I said that I opened up the black box, I looked at the rules, and I tried to explain why there seems to be so much participation, why there is so much this, these organisations persist, why they seem to be providing a lot of public goods.
And what I found, you know, both in terms of the property rights work, and in terms of my earlier work is that there is no one single body that dominates a village and Afghanistan. So there isn’t a feudal lord, there’s a confluence of three organisations, you have village leaders who are leaders, Primus inter pares, they are first among equals, they are appointed to this position, because they come from an established household that has a reputation for fairness, that has someone that’s literate that can represent the community to the outside world. And people will often describe this individual as the bridge between the people and the government. And then you also have these village councils which are ad hoc, they meet up when issues arise. And once again, every household has the right to participate in deliberations. And then you have religious leaders, these are mulas typically and often they come from outside the village, but they play an important role in communal life. And what I found was that there is the separated authority among them, but also checks and balances between them. And these checks and balances and the separated authority actually constrain these leaders, these organisations at the local level, which feed accountability which enhance you know, opportunities for participation, and which generate pretty good outcomes, all things considered. Is it perfect? No. Is it a panacea? Absolutely not.
But to me, this explains why these organisations persist. And when people said, you know, to me, what I first heard was after, this was 30 years of war, 20 years of war, right? 20 years ago, when I first started travelling to the country, oh, these things have been wiped out during the war, they no longer existed. This is why there has to be a strong state. I believe that too, because I had no experience and I was relying on this literature. And what I found was that wasn’t true. What I found was that sort of from an empirical perspective is that people came back to their communities, they regenerated, these organisations that reconstituted them, and sometimes, you know, their expectations of them change. So maybe 30 years ago, 40 years ago, they were living in an under an authoritarian system that allowed you maybe more authoritarian rule, I can’t say for sure, because the kind of work that I’ve done wasn’t done 40 years ago, but but I found them to be much more, you know, generative of participation, and accountability.
So when people talk about the state, people were comparing these really false alternatives at the state that the donors were somehow building Afghanistan as this, you know, democratic state. But actually, if you look at the rules that govern the state, it was far from democratic. Democracy was promised to the people of Afghanistan, but it was never delivered to them. Yes, they elected a very weak parliament. Yes, they elected a president. But those elections, number one, were rife with corruption, and everybody knew it. But the more important elections were to be held at the local level. And that’s what people were promised. And that never happened. So what people experienced, after so many years, watching so much money come into their country, is that if you live in a rural area, and you’re expecting things to change, you find that your district governor, the lowest level of formal authority, is still appointed by the centre, and it through a system of patronage that you can’t quite understand. But you were told that things were going to change, there’ll be more accountability. These people were never elected. There were district councils, the Constitution called for elections for those councils never happened, elections for Mayor never happened. So there was so much that was promised that never happened in terms of participation. So when we’re comparing the state to communities, the communities had much more participation, even though they were informal, even though the women didn’t have the, you know, that didn’t normally I wouldn’t say the right because I don’t know what right means here. Women didn’t have the opportunity to participate in them. As much I did, I said, I did find some women participating. I found women village leaders.
So I think that’s the comparison I’m trying to make. And it allowed me to see things differently. So if you’re thinking about property institutions, and the protection of private property rights, which we talk about in this book, is that okay, well, who’s going to provide those property rights? So normally, we think, Okay, this democratic state is going to be much better than a feudal system at the local level. Well, turns out, there was never feudalism in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was never a peasant society. Land holdings were always pretty egalitarian. There were small land holdings in rural Afghanistan, this goes back to the tribal structures, and the customary systems. And then the central government was always very authoritarian, and that didn’t change. So it made it very difficult for the state to be trusted and relied on to protect property rights. So throughout this whole system, there was a robust system of customary legal titles, and customary land adjudication. And people use his customary systems to solve these problems, because they knew historically, they couldn’t rely on the state to do it.
Mark Pennington
I mean, that’s the way you’ve just described that theme. I mean, that’s something that seems to run through the book in terms of the sort of overall historical narrative he gives others, especially in the earlier chapters with a good deal of historical context that you refer to the way Afghan societies evolved over what several 100 years. And the thing that I took as as running throughout that analysis was the notion that there’s been a constant tension within the country between these bottom up type arrangements and attempts, both internally within the country, but also our into the the actions of external agents. A tension between these more bottom up structures and more top down arrangements. So I think you describe, I’ve forgotten the name of the leader, but there’s certainly a leader from a couple of 100 years ago, who attempted to centralise authority. Then you had, of course, the Soviet invasion. And then more recently, we’ve had various state building efforts. And all those have been concentrated on the state or central actors. And those have constantly been in tension with these more bottom up structures. And that seems to be this theme that’s sort of United, if that’s the right term for the history of the country we have it.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Absolutely, and there has rarely been no one when the country has leaders that respect community rights, the country has generally seen peace. When you have leaders that want to centralise authority and control the population and not give communities the right to participate in managing their own affairs, then you see conflict. And that’s what I would argue actually happened over the past 20 years that this was especially acute in the past six or seven years under the last president Ashraf Ghani, who the West was absolutely enchanted with, he had a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. He worked for the World Bank, he was a technocrat, he called on all Afghan diaspora to return to the country. He repeatedly ruled the country as an authoritarian leader, as a desk bought, frankly. And we know we lamented Hamid Karzai, who seemed to be corrupt and really like a tribal elder, but that actually had a lot more legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people then the Western, you know, educated technocrat who, you know, ruled from a very narrow power base and tried to control everything.
In fact, you know, if we look at them, we wouldn’t, you don’t need to get into it today. But if we look at sort of the military campaign over the past six months, and what happened, it was the president actually, you know, rotating generals and appointing people, only the people he trusted, who were deeply mistrusted among the soldiers who, you know, we’re being asked to fight.
But one thing that we should remember is that, and I’d actually want your listeners to know is that now that the Taliban are in power, they have a choice, they have a choice about how they’re going to rule. And they could use this more accommodating system that was used, actually, for most of the 20th century. Before the Soviet invasion, there was a king, Zahir Shah, who ruled the country for 40 years relatively peacefully. He instituted a constitutional democracy in 1964. In fact, there were more elections in the 1960s than there were in the post 2001 period. And he didn’t try. You know, I had this government official who I interviewed. And I asked him, it was right after the death of Zahir Shah, who died probably 2007. And I was interviewing a district governor and I, we were lamenting the death of Dr. Shah. And he said, you know, Dr. Shah was a good president and a good king, because he said that you can walk slowly, forever, or you can run and fall down, run for a minute and then fall down. And that was sort of his attitude towards progress towards change. And now he was overthrown by flanks to his left, you know, there was a Communist Party faction that was growing, there were leftist factions who wanted more modernization and wanted the state to use its power. And that actually, you know, invited the Soviet invasion. A few years later, but there was this king in the 1880s, who I think this is the one you’re referring to who ruled from 1880 to 1901. Very important, and it’s actually very important right now. His name was the ‘Iron Emir’ Abdul Rahman Khan. He was an Afghan centralising leader, and he said, “Look, my country’s poor. My country has nothing. And it has no government structure, it has very little and I’m going to centralise power. I’m sick of the chaos. I’m sick of fighting.” And there had been the sort of internecine palace coup is happening every once in a while, you know, a cousin of the king, a brother of the king would, you know, try to usurp power because the way that that the royal family worked until that point was you would have a king and then the king would appoint his brothers or his cousins to all provinces. And then these relatives would use their provincial basis to challenge the king. And so you’d see these periods of instability. And the British actually invaded twice the two a, the two main Anglo-Afghan wars happened in the 19th century during this period, and the Brits would try to install their own people.
So what Abdul Rahman Khan did is he says, I’m going to put an end to that. I’m going to create a formal bureaucracy. I’m gonna create a formal system no more, none of my relatives. We’re gonna go run the provinces, but he ruled ruthlessly, absolutely ruthlessly, and he discriminated heavily against minority groups, elevated Pashtun groups he was pushed to and all the kings were pushed soon. And he discriminated against the Shia minorities. So these are the Hazaras in Afghanistan. And he called himself the leader of the Muslims. The leader of all the Muslim world, he declared himself the “Amir al-Mu’minin”, which is the leader of the Muslims, which is what the Taliban have done with, they did this with Mullah Omar. So he declared himself the Amir and persecuted the Shias and confiscated their land. This was really a genocide that he engaged in, he was ruthless, he was bloody, he was, you know, a terrible tyrant. And he was subsidised by the British. So the British said, Look, we can’t, we’ve learned that we can’t control your country. But really what we care about is controlling your foreign policy. So we’ll give you a subsidy in exchange for running your foreign policy. And Abdul Rahman said, Okay, this will allow me to consolidate my rule. These of you rivals, basically, the story there of Abdul Rahman is that there was a sort of centralising effort made internally, which was aided by, in this case, external intervention from the British who were providing subsidies to his regime, provided he sort of adhere to what Britain considered to be an acceptable foreign policy stance. Is that right? Yes. And I think what I was concluding with is this was the beginning of Iran’s dynamics. Right? Right. So these were the subsidies that detach the leaders from the people. And if we want to look at instability in Afghanistan, it’s because of this.
Mark Pennington
That is the theme, if we sort of move through the last century that sort of repeated itself in different guises. So you have the Soviet invasion, bringing about another form of that. And then more recently, you have the external sort of state building efforts following the US intervention in the early 2000s, bringing another form of that. So I mean, it’s fair to say, although I think the book is written in very moderate tones, that external actors do not come out of this looking very, very good, or very favourably. But does that mean that all external intervention in a context like Afghanistan is, is misguided?
Because it feeds into these internal dynamics that the external actors aren’t necessarily fully aware of? Or do you think from your work that there is anything that could be done by external actors to avoid generating these kinds of issues? Or is it just intrinsic to this kind of external action?
Jennifer Murtazashvili
I mean, this is a big question. And it’s not one that I have an answer to. It’s when I think about and I’ve become really sanguine about this, I’ve become increasingly pessimistic, I was young and idealistic. And I did this for a career. And I still try to engage with donors, because I understand their systems. And I always think, you know, if I can help them understand problems better, or, you know, if they had a better understanding of these local dynamics, they could do things differently. But I increasingly come to the conclusion that it’s really just impossible.
Mark Pennington
So let me ask you a question related to education. It relates to what you were actually saying before about the way that, you know, the traditional systems in the rural areas, these quite decentralised systems, they were not, you know, women are not treated equally. But actually, there was quite a lot of participation. And I am wondering, what is your take on the way that external perceptions of women’s roles in Afghanistan are, to some extent, part of the problem? You know, I don’t. I don’t want to minimise the issues of people losing some of the freedoms that they’ve acquired because of the Taliban takeover. But at the same time, it seems to me what you’re saying is that you really have to be very careful about not imposing, frankly, a Western sort of cultural lens to actually think about what participation means for women in this particular country.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Right. And, you know, this is an issue that is a great debate inside of Afghanistan, where you have women in urban areas who will say that this is nothing to be debated, that Afghanistan is no different from any other country in the world. And then you have voices in rural areas that say, you know, if you look at norms, and the way you know, governance works is that women haven’t had such a prominent role and the intervention tried to change that, but you know, those changes were quite superficial. And education, though, was one of those things that didn’t change. And I want to stress this, that one of the reasons why girls weren’t going to school in parts of the country had everything to do with security, is that the war was raging in the villages. It wasn’t being raged in the cities. And so the first people that parents would pull out of schools were their daughters, when there was any width of instability. And so if you look at the south and the east, which are also the Pashtun dominated areas, that tended to have one or more conservative values, in terms of gender and gender segregation, in education, you know, it’s to me the causal relationship is really hard to to untangle because they were so insecure.
But, you know, this is a debate that Afghans are going to have to have. This is a debate that the international community cannot resolve. This is a debate that they need to have. Because obviously, I mean, we could say that the Taliban were just, you know, agents of Pakistan. There is a group of people that are saying this right now. But we could see how much of the countryside that they have controlled, there is indigenous and local support for them. You can debate how big or how small that is. But the problem with the past 20 years is that those debates were crowded out, these debates are going to have to happen on Afghans terms, not on the terms of international powers. And for the past 20 years, I think many of these debates have been crowded out, they have occurred. But you know, this was an international red line, about the role of women. And in fact, the Taliban are using this right now, as a bargaining chip. They have said, I think I mentioned this, that the girls, they have said that if you know if you’re in middle school and above, you can’t go to university, if you’re in university, sorry, if you’re if you’re in high school, seventh grade or above, you cannot no longer go to school, universities have been shut down for girls. And the Taliban seem to be using this gender issue as a bargaining chip with the international community for aid. They know that this is what the international community really cares about the thing that they focus on inside of the country. And so they will probably say, look, we’ll open things up if you give us this aid.
Mark Pennington
Now that’s that, that’s very, very interesting. And it’s not only, you know, looking back on what you’re saying and what you said earlier in the podcast, it’s not only this issue that comes up not only with respect to the role of women, but also to the role of political leaders. And I was struck by the way that you said that, Hamid Karzai, who, you know, if you look at it from the lens that I certainly received from the UK or US media was depicted as a kind of basket case President, on your account, actually, in some ways, though, he was imperfect, was more functional, because he was more embedded in the localised system than the people who came afterwards. So there’s a sort of constant refrain here of external perceptions, not really matching what is going on in the country.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Look at the Karzai period. The United States made a lot of mistakes during that period as well. That relationship didn’t have to sour and in fact, it really soured during President Obama, during his rule, with you know, Joe Biden. Karzai and Biden famously had dinner together, and Biden stormed out. And, you know, a lot of this issue, Karzai said that that issue had to do with bombing rural areas and bombing weddings and civilian casualties. And, Biden said it had to do with his corruption. And, you know, not controlling that. But the United States was in control of the corruption in Afghanistan, and this is something I want your listeners to understand fully is the amount of money that the United States was spending in Afghanistan was a green light to everyone that corruption was welcome. So it’s really hard to blame Karzai for this, frankly, when so much money you know, I’ve worked in aid and other places and other contexts and the amount of money that was going into Afghanistan with very little monitoring with very little care. And there was, you know, the International aid community, the military community, were sort of upping the ante against one another. So there was the civilian community that said, The military is not the answer. And so in response to this, Congress, the United States Congress would say, Okay, we have to give the civilian side more money to counter the military side. And then it just led to a huge amount of money, you know, overwhelming the country that would win anything beyond the absorptive capacity of the economy. But this has been so well chronicled. There are organisations like the Special Inspector General, for Afghanistan reconstruction here in the United States, which was set up by Congress to look at this, and their reports over the past 15 years have been absolutely damning, absolutely damning, we knew this was happening, yet we continue to spend this profane amount of money.
Mark Pennington
And why is that happening? And is that, you know, a problem of basically the ideas that are held by people in the the agencies or the rather than governments where there’s an ideology or worldview, which says that we just have to put more money into make this right? Or is it more of a, I guess, what you call a sort of rent seeking explanation that people might actually be aware that these kinds of interventions are not necessarily productive, but frankly, there are too many people who benefit from them, including people in the agencies themselves that, that this is the reason why the money keeps flowing, even though the results don’t, don’t rise?
Jennifer Murtazashvili
I think both are true. Both explanations are true. So the public choice explanation, right, that this is rent seeking behaviour on the parts of officials, you want to enhance the power of your, and the prestige of your agency, of course, and, you know, has there been a government official who says, you know, cut my budget, we’re spending too much.
But I also think that there was an ideology involved as well, we were, the United States didn’t have a clear mission inside of the country. And there was this idea, we could just make it go away by spending more, right? So let’s fix it. So we just spend more, spend more, we’ve invested so much, it’s not going the way we want it to. But it’s so important psychologically, for the United States. So we just gotta fix it, we just got to hold it. And then, you know, let’s wait for the right person to be in power. And that was good to get rid of cars. I put this new person in power, and then spend more, spend more, spend more with this new person. It just, I think there was ideology, there was pragmatism, I think it was all of the above.
Mark Pennington
Just going back to your point about the Taliban actually using the gender issue as a tool to sort of extract resources potentially from the international community. So if that is the case, what would your advice be to the international community that they shouldn’t be sort of drawn into that, that they should just detach from this regime completely? Or should they be looking for a different form of engagement?
Jennifer Murtazashvili
I mean, this is another really difficult question. And it’s one that frankly, I don’t have an answer to. I, you know, I have really mixed minds about this. And I’m someone who looks at this country for a living, right, so I have many friends who say, don’t recognise this regime, it’s a pariah regime, if you recognise it, you’re only going to reinforce your legitimising a terrorist group. And that’s true. On the other hand, you have a movement that’s taken over a country. And the international community has been working with the Taliban for the past three years, and these negotiations in Doha, they’ve travelled all over the world, they’ve met with the United States, they were deeply involved in negotiations with the US, with China, with Russia, with other powers. So it’s hard at this point to say you can’t recognise them, because we all have recognised them. And then you have the other issue, which is sort of the moral issue of what do you do with 35 million people? So do you not recognise and not help, and I don’t want to use the word help meaning terms of aid. But if the international community decides to isolate the country, the economy will continue to fall. And that’s only going to hurt civilians. Right? The leaders are going to be protected from that. So you’re really hurting people. So it really depends on where you place your values. And I think this gives us a lot of choices. And I don’t see any easy answer to this right now. I’m more inclined to recognise that the Taliban are there. You could put some conditionality on them. I don’t know how effective it will be. I also think that the international community has sort of done with Afghanistan, the US in particular, doesn’t seem to be very interested in what happens there in the long term.
Mark Pennington
Well, I mean, I think I certainly don’t expect you to have answers. And I certainly wouldn’t profess to have them myself. Like, I think the thing that I’ve taken from reading your work and just reflecting on what my previous perception of the country was, and what’s been going on there, it’s the fact that, you know, people just need to step back from the sort of standard perceptions that they have from looking at things through a media lens, that’s the thing that really comes over to me. And you know, it doesn’t necessarily imply you should disengage, but it means you’ve got to be very, very careful about the confidence of the pronouncements that you make about what should or should not be done in a situation like this.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
And I think that’s where I am, you know, I get very nervous when I see strong pronouncements and just about anything, on any side of politics, whether that’s Afghanistan or something else. I think that as a social scientist, I’m filled with uncertainty, more than I’ve ever been in my life. And it makes it hard to affiliate with a political party, with a political movement to have strong political views. I just have more questions, and I want to answer them. And, you know, that’s a blessing that we have in our position as scholars as academics, that we can do this in a really detached way. It is an enormous, enormous privilege, right? that our lives are not so directly affected by the kinds of things that we do. And it’s something that I don’t forget about. But I have just so many more questions than I have answers about so much of this. But I have a very optimistic view, though, I should say, about the people of Afghanistan, for example of their ability to solve problems and their ability to come together of their ability to to address issues, I have seen such enormous creativity, such ingenuity, such openness, frankly, and for for many years, there was a real openness to the United States into the international community. When I would go into villages, you know, especially during those early years and talk to people there was such support for what the United States and others were doing that changed over time, there was definitely a sense that the intervention was fomenting corruption. It was not welcomed by many. And I think that’s something that, you know, in this narrative that we’ve seen, and when we start paying attention this past summer, it’s as if everything was fine in Afghanistan until it wasn’t, things were not fine. Things were very unstable for a very long period of time. And many people were suffering.
Mark Pennington
If we could just close out Jennifer, just by actually reflecting on, you know, you said very clearly that you don’t want to make clear cut pronouncements on what is the right approach to take in this situation. But I think it’s worth it for our listeners, knowing that you have actually been involved in helping people who’ve wanted to leave the country try to to exit in the circumstances that have been unfolding in the last month or two. I wonder if you could just speak finally a little bit about what sort of work you’ve been doing there practically to assist people.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Sure, in early August, the United States announced a new visa programme that would expand the group of people who were eligible to leave Afghanistan. So previously, it was only these military translators. And because I wasn’t really working in the security sphere, I didn’t know many of these people. But we understood that that was a really arduous and bureaucratic programme to get out to get people out. But in early August, August 2, the United States expanded who was eligible to anybody who worked on any US aid project. And I knew a lot of people in this category. And so in early August, I started getting frantic texts from friends and contacts who I’ve gotten to know over the past 20 years trying to leave the country. And basically what they were looking for is they needed a piece of paper from their former employer saying that they had worked for them, that they had worked for this US organisation and these very educated people who are very well connected and they’ve worked for many organisations over the past 20 years. Many of them couldn’t find that person couldn’t find that organisation because over 20 years, organisations come and go, they merge, even big consulting firms that are working in Afghanistan. They merged with others. So people had a real difficult time doing this. So I started helping friends of mine do it, and I got so many requests. I asked some students of mine to help you know, make these connections for these Afghans so they can apply for asylum. And then after we figured this out, I said, well, let’s open this up, let’s see if we can help others, we’ve developed a skill we’ve identified a need, we’re filling a niche that nobody seems to be filling. So I recruited about 10 volunteers. And when we initially opened this up around August 5, we got about 400 Afghans who asked us for help. And this was quite manageable, we were plugging along, taking requests connecting people with their former employers, so they can apply for asylum. And the other thing is that the employers had to forward the visa application on to the State Department.
So it was a very cumbersome bureaucratic process – needlessly. So it was tragic how bureaucratic the US made this asylum process. August 15, the government of Kabul fell, and we were inundated with requests. So we grew to a team of about 80 volunteers, and probably now have more than 5000 requests of Afghans looking for this assistance. We’re not providing legal aid or anything like that, we’re just connecting Afghans with their former employer so that they can apply for asylum. It’s also risky, because it requires paperwork. And there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, in terms of you’re carrying papers with you, if the Taliban find that you have these papers, are you more at risk? So we’re trying to do this in a way that, you know, minimises the risk for Afghans. So now that the evacuation has ended, we’ve sort of scaled to a different phase of this. So we’re working slowly, we’re not actually now we’re going back to see who the people who have asked us for help have left the country. And this was all happening so quickly, that we weren’t able to process you know, check back with people to see what happens, we were just responding to things.
So we’re doing that now, understanding that this is more of a long term effort, we got a very kind donation from a local foundation here in Pittsburgh, that’s helping us pay these students throughout the year, so we can finish up this operation. But the other thing, I think the more important thing that we’re doing long term is that we are creating a Research Centre, here at the University of Pittsburgh at the Centre for Governance and Markets, where I work, and we are setting up a sort of a think tank for Afghan scholars in exile. And so we have scholars who are on their way here, who will have the support of our community to continue working on these issues, to continue the incredible work that they have done and bring diverse issues to the table. And unfortunately, you know, these academics can no longer work in their own country, which is unfortunate. So we want to have them continue to have the important platform that they had. And one of the amazing things we talked about was education. Over the past 20 years, I have seen such a change. such incredible scholarship coming from Afghanistan, such beautiful minds doing really impressive work. 20 years ago, you had to rely on people like me, who were foreigners who were trying to filter these perspectives, because there weren’t opportunities for education. And it’s been so amazing and just inspiring to see the number of Afghan scholars and thinkers who are, you know, leaving the narrative about their own country, which is really welcome and I think really necessary for the kind of sustainable change and stability to emerge.
Mark Pennington
That’s great. Well, I think that is a very inspiring story of what they’ve been doing, but also what you’ve been doing earlier as well in presenting this very detailed account of the history of governance institutions in Afghanistan, and how that history can help us to understand what’s happening in that country today. So just a reminder to our listeners that the book is ‘Land, the State and War: Property Institutions and Political Conflict in Afghanistan’. It comes highly recommended, and we’ll be putting it on our ‘what we’re reading’ bar on the website, in the near future. So thanks very much, Jennifer, for the conversation, and all the best to you and of course, to the people in Afghanistan.
Jennifer Murtazashvili
Thank you so much for having me. These are great questions. I really enjoyed speaking with you.
