Paul MacDonald has written a generous, thoughtful review of my book. Among the critical questions posed, MacDonald queries whether the book's two main characters and their circumstances were actually comparable cases to consider. These men and the provinces they ruled did have different profiles on a number of counts, but it was a deliberate design choice to study them side-by-side. Qualitative fieldwork in a conflict zone imposes some inescapable limits on case selection, but I advance a model of strongman governance that can travel from one individual to another and from one subnational setting to the next. I argue that a strong warlord-commander who faced local competition was best fit to serve as an effective and loyal governor. Strength and competition could manifest in different forms, and they did for Governors Atta and Sherzai, whose tenures were marked by key distinctions on account of provincial geography and demography as well as each man's political, socioeconomic, and personal idiosyncrasies.
Of course, it was important for my research design that these governors and the provinces they ruled had many important similarities, but I did not shy away from differences in form and function. On the contrary, I explored them explicitly as two different incarnations of strongman governance and would assume that more versions may exist in Afghanistan and beyond. In both of these cases, however, the presence of warlord strength and local competition drove comparable bargaining dynamics between the center and periphery. Karzai treated both men as potential threats and eventual partners in his regimecraft and, through these partnerships, strongman governance arose in northern and eastern Afghanistan.
When MacDonald shifts his gaze to the motivations of the Karzai regime and its bargains with warlords, he rightly asks whether or not one can attribute a “genuine extension of ‘the state'” to strongman governance. Strongman governance does advance the state-building project, but only if one conceives of “the Afghan state” in realistic rather than idealized terms. Regimes in weak states are engaged in a “politics of survival” that is undoubtedly self-serving (Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, 1988). But bargains they strike to manage competition or secure elite gains do not necessarily preclude the creation of governing authority. Similarly, strongmen pursue politics and power to their own ends but, under certain conditions, erect governing infrastructures in the process. It is in this admittedly narrow but tangible political space—where key interests and incentives align—that otherwise venal bargains can advance the state's (re)formation.
In 2001, foreign interveners instigated and then, waded into this messy game in Afghanistan; MacDonald wonders how we can assess their net impact. Here, no satisfying answer exists. In some cases, foreign efforts supported the emergence of governance and in others they undermined it. Intervention was rarely, if ever, determinative and instead represented just one more factor within the subnational political economies that governors sought to master and exploit. The drawdown of foreign forces and aid undoubtedly alters the contours of these ecosystems in significant ways. But, so long as there is a regime in Kabul and strongmen competing with one another in the countryside, we can expect to see strongman-governors come to power as the Afghan state-building project enters its next chapter.
