Remember Afghanistan?

Afghanistan rarely makes front-page headlines anymore. American combat there officially ended on January 10, 2002, when the Taliban fled Kabul. Yet, since that day, American troops have sustained six times as many casualties as during the war. Today, 12,500 'coalition' troops are stationed in Afghanistan, and they include 10,000 Americans. Major battles have erupted in the country every month since June.

Who's responsible for all this violence? "Taliban remnants" usually get the blame. But that phrase optimistically suggests a single organized entity, of whom the last few are now being killed. Actually, the violence stems from structural instabilities that keep generating new militants as fast as (and partly because) the old ones are killed.

The instability starts at the core. The government is a contraption cobbled together at a U.N. conference in Bonn in 2001. There, cabinet and sub-cabinet posts were doled out to various factions according to their strength and numbers. Power ended up in the hands of several groups who share little except mutual hostility and suspicion. These wary forces still circle around President Hamid Karzai, whose constituency is not any Afghan faction, but America (where he lived for many years.)

Fractious as it may be, this government is grappling -- heroically actually -- to restore a shattered society. Lacking an army, its only mechanism for extending it authority is through patronage. By controlling the flow of reconstruction money, it can draw various rural leaders into binding networks of obligations. Unfortunately, the government doesn't have much money to control the flow of. It can barely pay its own bills.
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  thanks to Body and Soul