Contents

Preface

Foreword

1. The mirage of peace
Illusions of peace
‘Liberation’
Raising the stakes
Bombing in a peace
Losing hearts and minds
New beginnings?
‘Failure is not an option’

2. Identity and society
New values and old
Rooted in Islam
Identity and others
Civil society?
Making decisions, being represented
War and social change
Ethnicity
Closing ranks
Managing the world beyond
Dreaming a past

3. Ideology and difference
Confronting the Taliban
The UN and the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan
An alien way of looking at the world
Could it have been different?
The legacy of confrontation

4. One size fits all-Afghanistan in the new world order
Reasons for war
Early courtship
Changing attitudes
Isolating the Taliban
Aid, rights and the US project
Stitching up a country
Human rights
NGOs-wanting it both ways
Failing the Afghans

5. The makings of a narco state?
Seeding recovery
Or corrupting the state?
Transitional attitudes
Agency responses
Double standards-or caught in a bind?

6. State
State and nation
A short history
The Taliban state
Aid and the state
The UN and the failed state model
The legacy of centralization

7. Bonn and beyond, part I: the political transition
Inauspicious beginnings
Imagining a state
The political transition
Building state failure
Enduring security?

8. Bonn and beyond, part II: the governance transition
The state: who is in control?
International failure
Letting the Afghans down

9. Concluding thoughts
Who’s who
Parties
An Afghan chronology
Further reading
References
Index