Connecting with Kabul

Connecting with Kabul: The Importance of the Wolesi Jirga Election and Local Political Networks in Afghanistan – Noah Coburn, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.

There is a renewal of interest in the lower house of Afghanistan’s parliament, known as the Wolesi Jirga, taking place in both Afghan domestic politics and international discussion about governance in Afghanistan. This is particularly in the wake of the house’s rejection of a significant number of ministerial nominees, its opposition to President Hamid Karzai’s recent election decree and its initial refusal to ratify the national budget. With an evolving relationship with the executive branch, and elections currently scheduled for 18 September 2010, there are many questions about the role of the Wolesi Jirga in national and local politics that have not been considered carefully enough. And despite widespread concern about fraud and corruption during the 2009 presidential and provincial council elections, there is little consensus on what lessons were learned from those elections or what parliamentary elections mean for politics in Afghanistan.

While the international community focuses on procedural aspects of the upcoming elections, this preliminary study suggests that, on a local level, many Afghans are concerned about how parliamentary elections will play out for very different reasons. In fact, interviewees have tended to de-emphasise the role of corruption and questions of government legitimacy and procedure, which dominate much of the current discussion of the election in the international press. Instead, those questioned tended to focus on the role of parliamentarians as important members of local patronage networks who provide some of the few real opportunities for communities to connect with the funding opportunities available in Kabul.

This paper argues in particular that the international community needs to pay more attention to the upcoming parliamentary election—not only for the precedents it will set in attempts to promote representational governance in Afghanistan, but, more pressingly, because of the ability of parliamentary elections to stimulate local political debate and reshape local political networks across Afghanistan in a meaningful manner. It suggest several broad measures that the Afghan government and the international community should take to better concentrate their efforts to support more active, local and democratic political debates…

Read the entire paper the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.