 Well let's get underway. Good evening, everyone. I'm Scott Newton. I'm reader in Laws of Central Asia here at SOAS and director of the Center for Contemporary Central Asia in the Caucasus. And it's a pleasure to welcome you here tonight to the Anthony Hyman lecture to be delivered by Dr. Rosala Ashraf-Nemot. This is the 17th lecture in the series, which is dedicated to the memory of an extraordinary scholar and an extraordinary individual renowned not just for his Afghan and wider Central Asian regional expertise, expertise which was political, cultural, linguistic, and historical, but renowned as well for his remarkable personal qualities which were equally diverse and humane, his ethics, his politics, and his years of activism, the model of a thoroughly engaged and thoroughly engaging scholar. Anthony was of course a proud son of SOAS and so the lecture series was launched here at SOAS in his honor by his many friends, stalwarts, colleagues, and admirers. We have been gratified over the years to have invited to address this gathering more SOAS-affiliated and SOAS-produced speakers as well as an occasional Afghan national. I cannot tell you how pleased how chuffed we are here tonight. I speak for the center, the school, the development studies department and a number of my SOAS colleagues in our personal and professional capacities to welcome for the first time to this series a daughter of SOAS and a daughter of Afghanistan, a notable scholar of Afghanistan in all senses and a SOAS PhD as well. So this is a particularly auspicious occasion and I want you all to note it. Ozala's life experiential CV is as significant and vital to an appreciation of her unique perspective and academic and policy expertise as her academic and professional CV. She was born in 1977 in Afghanistan and lived as a refugee in Pakistan for 14 years. Ozala was awarded her PhD here at SOAS in development studies in 2015 for her dissertation Local Governance in the Age of Liberal Interventionism, Governance Relations in Post-2001 Afghanistan. She had previously completed an MSc from University College London and had been a Yale World Fellow class of 2008. She followed doctoral studies here at SOAS up with two years of teaching at SOAS and then returned to Kabul serving briefly as the Afghan President's Advisor on Local Governance and assuming the directorship in 2016 of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the AREU. Now, capacity building has long been a focus of donor exertions in Afghanistan and is a particularly fraught and charged term which covers a multitude of sins as well as some virtues as Ozala's research itself has richly demonstrated. But there is no question but that the research capacities of Afghanistan have developed in a notable and formidable way and our speaker tonight is both a manifestation of that trend as well as one of its principal architects. The AREU has emerged as a leading think tank and research institute in Kabul and conducts cutting-edge research across many fronts. Ozala is a frequent guest and commentator in UK academic policy and media circles including Chatham House, BBC Radio 4 and the World Service and The Guardian for which she writes regularly on Afghan affairs. In the last year, Ozala has also played a key role in establishing and launching the seven million pound global challenges research fund multi-institutional project drugs and dis-order dis in parentheses, building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war which is headquartered here at SOAS and led by my colleague Jonathan Goodhand, Professor of Development Studies. This project underway for a year now is exploring pathways of war to peace economic transformation and reconstruction in fragile and conflict affected states reckoning with the economic and social scope and significance of drugs production and trafficking and looking comparatively at Myanmar and Colombia as well as Afghanistan. Ozala is going to speak to us today on the theme connecting citizens with the state, changing discourses, the question mark, changing discourses and programs on community development and local governance in Afghanistan which further extends the analysis so richly developed in her thesis. The last two decades have witnessed a phenomenal wave of internationally mediated and funded governance assistance to post-Taliban Afghanistan, much of it in the form of intervention at the local level. The consequence of all of that has been the unprecedented encounter or confrontation of the structures and dynamics of Afghan rural life with the Afghan state and the international donor community as rural presidents, presences and actors and factors and purveyors of ideas and practices. It will surprise no one to learn that none of this has gone quite to plan but that's precisely what makes donor-funded local governance interventions a compelling object of study. The not necessarily contemplated or calculated impact that donor programs have had on local communities and civic identities and gender and power relations, the vicissitudes of implementation across all the intervening contingencies that departures from script prove to be more instructive than anything else and I'm going to turn this over to Azala in the second to guide us through them. But I would be remiss if I let the opportunity go by without making begging your kind indulgence a brief fundraising pitch. This Hyman lecture series has established its reputation as the most prestigious UK forum for an annual address on Afghan politics, society and economy but owing to the budgetary realities with which all UK HEIs must contend at present, the school will not henceforth be in a position to continue its support at current levels. The center is therefore turning to its public constituency, all of you who have come today and have so faithfully attended these last 16 years to ask you to help us sustain this unique platform in coming years. There was a crowdfunding drive which you can access and contribute to from the Hyman lecture page on the center website and I would urge you please to consider making a donation however modest. Finally I'd also like to acknowledge the contribution of Taylor and Francis, redoubtable publishers of the Redoubtable Central Asian Survey to the event tonight and of course to thank Jonathan and Jane Savery for all of their tireless organizational efforts. Azala? Good evening everyone. What an honor it is to be here among all of you. Perhaps although not as a first Afghan to be here I was having a conversation with my dear friend Denise Kendioti and she told me they were also other Afghans. Mr. Masou, Mr. Kendioti was here in the past but it's even a further honor to be here probably standing besides being a daughter of sorts. I'm honored and humbled to have that recognition but also to be here as an Afghan woman standing and delivering this prestigious Anthony Hyman Memorial lecture of the year. During my studies in London I have been a frequent participant of this lecture series with distinguished scholars and have always learned with a wealth of scholarly work very rich discussions that followed it. I'm humbled to present my research and some of my reflections about what's happening in Afghanistan today with a hope that I also will contribute my share of understanding and knowledge with all of you but as a still fresher to academia into this world I'm hoping that I'm confident I cannot compare with distinguished scholars who delivered this lecture before. I'd like to start with thanking people who bring me to this point. There are many names there are many friends in this room but I cannot start my discussions without acknowledging Professor Jonathan Goodhand my supervisor and my mentor throughout the years of studies particularly in the final stages of my doctorate research which I guess everyone knows how challenging it could be and also Professor Denise Kendioti. I always consider you as my academic mother I hope you accept that sort of title on my side and someone who has continued to give me moral support something that I also needed as somebody who has no family members here and was going through all kind of other challenges in addition to trying and struggling to focus to my studies into my research but somehow my background as was introduced before I came to the stage can also give you a kind of an insight of what kind of a human being I am. I was here trying to focus and concentrate and study and sometimes disappear in the things that I was studying and confess to my professor that I don't know anything about anything especially when I was reading Foucault and in times being so depressed and so worried about the situation back home where most of my family at that time was living that it was very difficult that without systematic and without continuous support of the circle of friends and colleagues I could make this happen to complete my studies. So Louise Dupree the late Louise Dupree the well-known pre-war American anthropologist of Afghanistan once wrote a metaphorical about a metaphorical mud curtain that surrounded Afghan villages and in a situation that the Afghan villages don't prefer or don't feel comfortable with allowing outsiders to intervene or to get into those communities and localities. What I have found in my research and in my studies was that the situation has changed significantly since those years 1960s and 19 in a earlier maybe in those years Afghanistan's localities Afghanistan's villages were surrounded by mud curtains that were not I mean this is a metaphor for the very tall for those of you who have been to Afghanistan who haven't been to Afghanistan very tall walls that we call them kalas or the kalas are sort of surrounding the the localities in the villages and cases. What I found in my research looking into the local or village level governance was that in the post 2001 particularly the years of the post 2001 context but specifically since the war in Afghanistan over the four decades this mud curtain has been torn apart. Afghan villages, Afghan localities are no longer those places completely protected and preserved from the outside interventions and now when I talk about interventions I don't necessarily limit my understanding to the military interventions or invasions that are happening but I also mean here different forms of intervention that in a minute I will come. In today's discussion what I'm trying to highlight is the changing discourse in programs on community development and local governance cases in Afghanistan. So inspiring from those kind of understanding of Afghanistan back in the 60s I'm trying to sort of highlight what are the kind of changing discourses and changing realities of the country. In my analysis of studying this topic I situate myself not only as a student of development studies or as a researcher of development studies but also as an Afghan insider as a former refugee or in that sense a recipient of most of these interventions in my own life and also as a grassroots leader trying to organize the reception of these assistance and these interventions or resources coming through these interventions in my communities and where I was leading. So the reflections, the analysis in my entire sort of thesis is not simply a product of four years of spending time at SOAS in reviewing the literature and trying to figure out through the field research but it is also directly linked with my life in my own sort of life experiences. The continuation of which is also the case as I'm currently leading a research organization who is focusing a lot on who has focused in the past and has been a resource for myself as a student and is now also focusing on these debates and discussions in the policy field. While studying Afghanistan and studying the local governance relations there and the history of sort of interventionism I'm also believing that the sort of these forms of analysis are not unique or they are not on these sort of the interests around it is not limited to Afghanistan particularly in my teaching experience I found out that there are many similarities and there are many other venues there are many other countries or contexts that they could definitely and easily try to connect and learn from the experiences that we have in this country in this particular situation. Similarities are always for sure happening between different countries but what makes Afghanistan's case most unique as a sort of a case study for many many themes that have been sort of experimented there is the multiplicity of interventions happening at the same time at the same localities over the same people and that really is something that goes simply in my opinion beyond only limiting it to Afghanistan. So here I'm trying to sort of by sharing my reflections and my findings from the research I'm trying to sort of highlight this connections or linkages between politics and the way politics works development and peace building or state building and I have looked at these sort of linkages through the lens of looking at the sort of post 2001 context of local governance programs and policies that have been implemented and then and how they have been formulated how they have been sort of who were the actors involved in the formulation and the implementation of these programs and policies and how that actually resulted into changing the local power dynamics. In terms of method a more flexible multi-sided approach helped me to really look into this field because arriving to a locality that I already was familiar to I mean not the specific villages and districts that I have selected but in general being from Afghanistan I was aware of the fact that I had to be a little bit more open minded than going with a predefined questions and predefined hypothesis and try to test that. So my research was mostly qualitative and so in terms of going to the further to the research and what I found I think before moving further I probably need to say when when I talk about local governance and governance maybe very briefly I can give you a sort of sense of what do we really mean by governance what I mean is this the tradition and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised so this is like one definition that covers both both in my opinion the state and also the non-state sources of authority and that's really important to also consider the non-state sources of authority particularly as we are talking about these matters now that we are not much in a situation of you know a very clear situation of where the state is and where the state ends actually in the country or it is authority ends and then in my research the focus on governance is more as a sort of in empirical reality rather than an ideal model that has to be there but this is my understanding of it a lot of practical donor communities and a lot of you know different sort of actors on the ground probably had this idea about governance particularly the term good governance I'm sure most of you are sort of familiar with and so in also on the ground another confusion that exists is this sort of usage of these two terms in a kind of interchangeably the government in governance and particularly talking about the local or subnational government so of the distinction between the two is also important to note and when I talk about local governance again for me it is a set of institutions mechanisms and processes by which people at the local level negotiate their interests their needs they mediate their differences and exercise their rights and obligations of course I borrowed this from Lutz and Lender but it's important to have a clear understanding of what do we mean by local governance we talk so this is the definition I follow and I borrowed the term public authority again by using it in situations where people in or outside of the formal systems are using public authority in order to make decisions within the local level contributes to local conflict resolutions and also in order to set relations with outside their locality for example somebody at the at the village level and the traditional village leader or the modern village leader if they are separate people they use they exercise public authority they are not part of the formal government system or administrative system but they are exercising public authority so now probably and yeah I think I mentioned before the intervening force when I say intervention and interventionism here I have to also be clear that I'm trying to communicate different interventions by different groups so it's the state intervention that comes through the programs and policies it's the donors who either throw the state in non-states such as NGOs or intervening or directly they have programs and it's also military interventions a mix of military interventions that has happened in the period that I was conducting this research between 2010 and 2014 so we were still at that time under a very significant level of influence by international forces and the provincial reconstruction teams were operating in the country and so this whole line between development and security and in government was completely blurred at that time so looking into these kind of interrelations between governance development and that now these interventions happening in the form of programs again I find out that it is important to sort of use a kind of a more kind of a flexible lens to to be able to understand rather than look fitting everything in the throw the lens of liberal democracy and say okay here has to be good governance democratic institutions and layers of governance that we have to move or following a kind of a political economy approach where you just get the sort of agency of people and how local people are sort of making their lives and making decisions and what kind of power relations they have disconnected from each other what I found is that within the localities there is this tendency of sort of preserving their autonomy but at the same time the agency for ensuring their access to resources the agency to ensure their stronger relations with outside world is also like making them more sort of flexible and in a minute I'm going to give you more sort of examples to sort of that are linked to this so before going to the examples what is generally seen as I said before is this huge gap that we see between the western sort of conception of governance in comparison to the what it actually exists on the ground and the ground's relations are not necessarily could be explained in the traditional or typical form of description that's this is completely traditional what I found in my in my research is that it's more of a it's more of a complex power relations that forms or that reflects Afghanistan's localities or Afghan villages than than simply it is explained in a kind of a good governance forum of clear institutions clear functions and clear sort of authority or that is sort of proposed so now probably is the good time to sort of give you some insights on I don't know forgive me if I didn't go too much followed the lens but because of some definitions I added some of the slides in there so to just give you an example here in terms of how these perceptions or these kind of conception conceptual understandings differ is two villages were main sites of my my field research and to this in two districts one in Central Afghanistan in Bamiyan province of the district of Yakaulank and another eastern Afghanistan and Nengarhar province in the district of Besud and interestingly enough the district of Besud is a large district that the Jalalabad city the provincial capital of Nengarhar is also located in in this district in both localities what was seen are lots of similarities in terms of the external intervention so I looked at the national solidarity program the NSP program which is very famous for community development as one form of intervention by by the government that is operationalized by the or facilitated as it was explained by the non-governmental organization or the NGOs as a result of this formulation of this program and operationalization of it at the village level what happens is that the program initially enters the village or introduced in a village for with a purpose of bringing resources from the local for the public of service of public at the local level and I mean to go back to the sort of history of its probably some of you in this room are more familiar than than than others so I would not go too much into detail but one thing that is very sort of commonly known now is that the main persons who have contributed in the formulation in designs of this community development program in appearance in particularly according to the World Bank a very non-political program which has nothing to do with politics or now the two top presidential one is a president and another one is ever a top presidential candidate I'm talking here about current president Ashraf Ghani and currently presidential candidate minister Hanif Atmar Hanif Atmar was at that time minister of ministry of rural rehabilitation and development and current president at that time was minister of finance so both of them under the presidency or leadership of Hamid Karzai come up with this idea that they have to formulate a program that basically bypasses the internal patronage political network at the provincial level and directly connects the village with the center so that was the sort of idea behind it okay the formal explanations may not say it in this way but through you know conversations and sort of collecting the dots in terms of you know different narratives that were gathered this is what we have sort of received and so the purpose of it was to deliver services at a local level at the village level and at the same time politically connect villages with the center in a way of you know relationship of delivering services and then in one day hopefully sort of earning legitimacy from those localities there was also another in a few years ago again in the same similar series I remember a conversation and we had Arne Strand our good friend from from Norway who was also talking about another version of you know another sort of narrative that was shared at that time that it was the program national solidarity program started and before Afghanistan had its first elections so there was also this practice of democracy being used as another objective of this and the practice of democracy worked interestingly at the village level because for the first time probably at the village level there were like people from outside these were not necessarily only the governmental people they were like NGO workers the non-governmental crowd and they were going to the villages explaining rule of the game explaining the rules for the elections and how you know all the village should be divided into for example clusters and they all set rules for the representation and votes everyone directly for one person and secretly for one person to have them as their chief of the community development council so the the institutional sitting at the village level was introduced as CDCs or the community development councils through these councils then the decisions were made based on you know criterias that they set within the council on how to distribute the resources and what programs to sort of implement in there what were the needs first they would do a need assessment and then they would decide about prioritization and what kind of programs they should sort of or projects sorry they should implement in their localities now these were sort of objectives and then one particular side of NSP that makes it more significant at the particularly in terms of community development but also in terms of you know the sort of political evolution of changes in the local power elation was its conditionality the conditionality of the program which is part of I mean I'd so far explained to you as if this was a completely national program of course it was operated at a national level but the the program was funded through a much broader scheme of the world bank known as community driven development and based on that CDD or community driven developments the the world bank was channeling funding to to this program in order to sort of achieve its goals and the conditionality part although it is considered by some that it was a western imposition on Afghans and so forth but it wasn't that much there were like a divisions of you know opinions between facilitating partners who are like mostly the NGOs some of them strongly rejecting this and others trying to accept it and the person who or the individual who insisted most was one of them main political actors today who insisted that's based on based on his particular understanding of Afghanistan or as an Afghan he argued with the rest of the nation's and international's in the team that this conditionality has to be there and without this conditionality the program will not operate in in localities or in villages where women are not taking part and the system was working in this way that's okay in the elections everyone will take part but then the position of chief chief CDC is given to to men the position of deputy should always go to a woman or in particular later on they realized that in some localities it's completely impossible and then they say okay let's go for and rely on separate committees but anyway there in in the course of my research I also come across lots of very interesting stories of how this operated on the in realities and how some places which are still to this date considered conservative and considered a travel making spots within a province within a you know the travel roots they resisted and they rejected the idea of accepting the conditionality but in areas that they all have adopted in in areas that they have adopted first or later or after they saw the development of one particular laboring village there has been varying stories so not every village at the same time automatically accepted this conditionality that tells us a reality that okay not everyone was simply ready ready for their women to take part in a village governance and village decision-making but later on it's really changed and so as a result community development councils were established in most parts of the areas that were covered by the NSP program the NSP program continued to operate in for 13 years more or less and then that really was a program that the coverage was nationwide there were part probably a very very small communities or parts of the communities that were sort of neglected and didn't get their resources but the most of the country managed to get it even till the very last phases of this program was implemented in different phases as well so now I spoke about the community development councils and as one form of the village sort of intervention I take you back to the village itself so what really describes an Afghan village typically a typical village in Afghanistan is and I'm here sharing again like a kind of an anecdotal experience of arriving me as a researcher in a village with a list of you know different councils because I'm told that this village has community development council it has health council it has education council it has this council that council the other council so too many councils so I arrive in the village this is the eastern village I'm talking about and I look for who is the right person to sort of meet and I meet a woman there of course as a woman it's easy to to communicate first with a woman and she also is quite a I should bring maybe instead of these this is the eastern village that I'm talking about so I meet this lady in the picture bottom picture and I try to explain to her to her she at that time was the deputy CDC and she says oh you have to meet the the I said well find me the who is the leader of the CDC and who are the sort of people that are members of the CDC or the community development council so he takes she takes me to the Malik's house and they say oh you're you're talking about Malik's type Malik is the traditional leader so we go and I starts my conversation with the Malik or the head of the or the chief of the CDC and I start sharing my list of people that I want to meet the head of the education council the head of the health council and all the council that I was heading in he looked at me and says I think you are looking for me I'm the person you are free to name any kind of councils I'm the Malik of this village and just tell me what you need what kind of information you you would like to get and there is no other person it's me basically and so I really I started I said okay so I had all these sys of questions what should I ask from the head of the Maaref should I more for the education council and so forth so in one way or form I saw in this village a kind of a strong level of unity the village was not completely homogeneous in terms of its tribal structure very challenging when you when I say this and you have in your mind but what about those Navy Academy who was talking about the tribes and if we take it it takes a tribe visit one one tribe at a time or something like this was a title of it so suddenly these tribes are described in literature as kind of completely homogeneous that the Afghan localities even in terms of the provinces somebody once sent me an email and asked can you tell me the provincial the the tribal composition of each province and I was like laughing and say like forget about the provinces we have 34 provinces but we have over 35,000 between numbers are a bit mixed 28,000 or 35,000 villages and now you're telling me that I give you the composition of the the tribal structures what do you really mean like because I mean you I looked at one locality and there were like five six seven type of tribes so the village was like the most of the men you see in there they are coming from mainly two major tribes he saw size and early size boats originally from south who have been settled here historically very very long time ago but at the same time there were other different forms of communities within the village with different tribal lineages right there were also people from different provinces living there but there was seem to be a level of unity in terms of you know the elders of the village who decided who should be the Malik and the Malik once the Malik was agreed upon and this has gone beyond the intervention of the CDC's and then it was very straightforward for the election process they said okay we know who is our leader and so for outsiders they can label us anything but for us we we know who is the the main gatekeeper and the main person who is like responsible for distribution of resources and channeling the the assistance of different forms coming to the village so as a result the village also had influential political figures living and residing there for example the head of the finance provincial finance ministry also comes from the same village and a security commander a commander of some time mostly the commander when they call it a command on its last like not like a current military commander but as a commander of the wartime also came from that he was serving in the border areas also from the same village and the Mola so the village structure and the main actors in the village were these people the Mola the commander some of the political figures some deputy minister was also from this village and also the elders and not all of the people that I mentioned were part of the CDC so they they had some some of the CDC members who were coming from the elite but most of them were just ordinary you know teachers or village villagers basically who who sat under the leadership of the Malik so this is like one example and they also had make sure that this lady who was the deputy chief of CDC also has the deputy position and although she never succeeded she was fully supported by some of her villagers to become the chief CDC but they say it for us internally we are a very advanced village and it's fine but we just don't know how this will work when we go beyond the village because somebody who comes who takes leadership position in the village has to really deal with police chief office for with in terms of you know criminal activities with you know different other groups so anyway in this form or shape what I try to say here is the internal village actors and also yeah there was a religious scholar in this village as well I think he is he is the second from them from the left with the turbine not with the pacol but with a turbine so he also is an interesting person he also takes part in these kind of ceremonies what you see here is a PRT a lady from PRT who are just inaugurating their school and the entire fundraising for this school through the NSP project partly through the NSP partly through the PRT which is the provincial construction reconstruction team of the Americans it was all fundraised by the deputy CDC this lady who was there Jamila John so what happened in this process as you can see is that the the villagers did not let the woman here is also a kind of a gender dimension in it to be the leader of the village but the woman was an active she was an activist in her time even before the changes and after that like during the Taliban time she was running a school and after that through the elections she got into the councils and from the councils from the local CDC council she became also a member of the district development assembly and became a very active member of her community in addition to doing these kind of representation she was also more active in terms of her position as a woman more able to bring in resources to the village so practically the school that they have called they call it called it after their their village name Kalaijan An Khan so for and because she had her own agenda that the school should not only be boys school so the same building high school in the morning is called the high school of Kalaijan An Khan in the afternoon it's called the high school of Malika Suraya Queen Suraya and it's used for girls so the agreement is made that equally the the building that is built as a result of this particular intervention it is also used in the afternoon for girls so that girls and boys in the village will have full access to education some of you maybe by listening to me at the by this point will say like so what is this how is this linked to what is happening today I'll come to that but I thought it's really important to spend some time talk about villages how much time we often I mean I and I'm also I have to confess here I'm getting a bit tired of talking about peace and how peace is impossible and what is happening in Doha and who is having dinner with home so to me it's really important to also come here and stand and sort of also share this kind of reality in Afghanistan and how we can sort of better understand what is happening so to sort of come back to the analytical sort of aspect of the what I explained in terms of a village so what are the local structures how they sort of take shape and who are sort of the main actors there are difference for different sort of critical sort of components or categories that needs to be sort of considered and these includes for example the international actors and their objectives because you can see that a lady from PRT is in the picture trying to sort of be there next to the man and of course we have also a female representative from the from the from the village a daughter of some probably daughter of one of the Malik's or someone from the village elites who is there but that tells us the direct the direct form of intervention at the very local level so understanding the international actors their objective and their the resources they bring the national level political elite who also have some sort of linkages either lineage linkages of living there residing there or coming from there or kind of linkages through people who are loyal to them and then there are local elites who could be you know people with more land people with more sort of tribal the majority tribal or families that are staying there they could be considered as local elites and then the local population that includes you know people at different in terms of economic status and in terms of social economic status at different levels or theirs it is generally the recalibration of relations between these different elements that can help us to understand the chefs in the local governance relations over time because okay not everyone you see in this picture who have mostly are the members of the CDC where the same level influential the same level powerful as they are under this new and form of intervention as they were before someone was probably having a government job someone was having a private business and not in a unified way the relationship they built within the village and also with outside I was talking about the religious scholar and he then what happens to the same Malik the PRT scheme and says we are making some other Shura it's you know a good Shura and it has some money salary also because this is they all are like volunteer basis and just you know pick one person from your village and send it to the district council or maybe ideally if you send two percent it will be good because a woman and a man is also good to have a male and a female representative at the district level so the woman from the village was automatically the most powerful woman in the village and for the male the Malik himself because he had a full-time job he decides not to go and so he sends the religious scholar so the religious scholar becomes member of the ASOP the Afghan social outreach program which was part of the Afghanistan's stabilization program but much more initiated by by by military by ice PRTs and the sort of the military forces there and that's had a very different sort of objective and at the very different form of working than they the district development assemblies and the CDCs or the community development councils because in both these councils the objectives or the way it worked it was very volunteered based the funding that was going was through a very system of of course I cannot say that there was no corruption maybe there are not maybe there must have been corruption of some form or another but the system of accountability was very clear the funding was not coming individually the funding was coming to the council they needed three signatures to get access to the funding the chief the deputy the treasury they all had to agree to get the funding and it was coming through the very sort of open system whereas in the ASOP situation I had to move from the village to the district to understand what was happening and when I reached to the district the new district governor was in place and so he said yeah the council the this the ASOP council existed but I had to like ask them to leave because they were intervening directly in my work and I said how comes and he says well the the process for selection of the district the ASOP the military funded district council was specifically organized in a way that the district governor was asked that you have to select some kind of you know members that you trust from your community from your district and invite them to become members of this ASOP council so as a result they were loyal only to the district governor now the situation becomes complex when the district governor is shifted the new district governor comes and they are not his buddies so that's why that they he had to like basically dismiss most of them and also that program was experimental so it was stopped very soon practically what happens as a result of this is you know for the villagers it was a very strategic decision who to send where how to attract resources and how to sort of maintain also a kind of a neutral system between two different forms of intervention one providing salary the others not providing and so they said okay if I send anyone else from the CDC membership I will cause a lot of trouble because people will start saying how come he gets salary and I don't get salary so they found a very you know strategic way of dealing with it so in terms of my other experience which was Bomyon I come across a very sort of in some ways as I said similar in some ways different experience in Bomyon the village that in Bomyon by the way I have to give a very brief sort of background of the two villages that I the two villages that merged in order to meet the requirements of forming a CDC a community development council because on their own they were too small to form a CDC so and also historically the two villages have the history or the background of being a victim of this very tragic massacre during the Taliban time so a lot of younger generation or mid-level at that time then a mid-level but age generation of the village were no longer there or the elderly completely not very much younger generation much younger people in their 30s and then their 40s were residents of this village and so two villages combined to form a CDC and there was one village relatively larger than the smaller one and so they said okay if we are two villages and we merged to form a CDC then we have to come up with a kind of arrangement who will be the chief of CDC because anyone will vote for their own villager right so the larger village secured the position of the chief CDC now for this smaller village they had no choice but to have a woman to vote for and this village is called it's a village that's a very influential religious leader who probably passed away in in Najaf also comes there the followers of the Najaf side of the Shia population so and they also have a madrasa within the village that they have created so the village is known for its madrasa in mosque and a very large madrasa that is existing there in I will not bore you with the similar story of how they created but this part was an interesting for me that's in this in the in the combination of two villages because of the conditionality of the intervention from outside they had to rely on a woman and the lady here with a notebook and glasses is the one who is who was the deputy CDC of the two villages and also not only that she also represented at the district level five villages from the neighborhood of where she was coming from so gatekeeper basically for the entire resources regarding women's children assistance to the villages and regard to women and children would come through this lady by the way I have to tell you she cannot read and write so I was just asking her how come you are not reading and writing you have glasses and you have a notebook in a UNICEF notebook in a pen he says it's fine that I don't write everything else is saved in the memory and when numbers are discussed I make sure whoever is sitting next to me to write the numbers for me so I have no problem to read and write in my arguments in my discussion sometimes when people are kind of pitying for women in the rural areas that they are illiterate they are poor they are helpless they don't know anything when I go very strongly and I argue I see this kind of examples are coming to to my head like how can you say this woman is not empowered she cannot she didn't go to any school or she cannot read and write but she makes sure to make note of numbers so yet she also at make me write my phone numbers in the in the notebook and she showed me the notebook was full of numbers and says this is the budget for the chicken farm that we have this is the budget for that so fully fully functional and fully authoritative in her locality the photos are an issue by the way principally so it's not that's only this kind of meeting in the mixed meetings they she also sets but I didn't feel comfortable taking a lot of photos so I just have this very like and I told them I'm going to at least keep this for my research and they they agreed to to have it in this way so at this stage what what I was kind of trying to say here in this relation to the village in Balmian similar process in terms of what happened there in terms of you know overall processes but one thing became an issue at the later stage when the one round of election over the second round of election then the two verges did not did not agree on the same CDC chief because that they had to switch now and make the chief CDC from one village and the deputy from the another one so they as a result then here brings me to sort of a conversation on another form of intervention that was also happening and that is the the policy interventions from the from another institution in Afghanistan in Kabul named as ideal G they are independent directorate of local governance up to now I was talking mostly about the community development invention the mix of it with international militaries and how they are operating so in situations where there are disputes and lack of unity within the localities then there are also other situations are linked to this that also provides people with taking sides in different you know directions and here what happened in the Balmian case was that because in the second round they didn't get along and they didn't have an agreement or consensus on who should be elected they decided to look for another solution and that was to go and to register themselves to each village separate again because they jump they merge they have two different names two different histories so they they separated again and they both to the to one department at the district level called the majority of the cariajot like the village affairs the departments and they registered themselves each one each village to registered a separate Malik or as in the Balmian context they are not called Malik they are called our Bob which is the same the sort of local representatives of our leader so our bombs were registered there and the idea for our Bob registration although at the center no one from ideal G would confirm to me but it was much more kind of a it was a form of a sabotage in terms of the village leadership or leadership ownership at the center level in terms of two institutions so now the solution for the Balmian is was okay we will have two separate Bob's and we don't care about if tomorrow there is another rule we will fit but otherwise everyone goes their own way now competition on the ownership of village was mostly between ideal G and between M or D the two institutions at the center level I have covered most of the MRD story in terms of you know what happened and how what kind of developments were there on the ideal G part there was a different story in terms of its establishments ideal G as an institution that I have looked at in terms of you know the policies of subnational governance was formed under around this particular narrative of you know elections the national level elections the presidential and the provincial councils or the parliamentarian elections and as a result someone who was leading ideal G at the time comes with an idea that okay give me a small group of people an institution with some level of authority over the provinces and districts and you are just sure about the elections and ideal G became more significantly more involved in the elections of 2009 which was one of the first of course that as we move ahead we had more troubles with more elections but that was the beginning of what we faced and then as a result of its ideal G was formed as a split between two from two ministries the Ministry of Interior had a deputy ministerial on subnational affairs that moved to to this institution and one part of the presidential office which was taken care of them subnational or provincial affairs also formed the ideal G and the role of ideal G one role of them at the subnational excuse me provincial and subnational level they have multiplicity of roles and functions but one their leadership is different from the from the ministerial leadership because the minister has to take its approval from the parliament whereas the ideal G directorate is directly reporting to the to the president in terms of the functions of what they are looking at at the village at the subnational level they are taking care of provincial governor's appointment they facilitated of course appointments are all done by by by the president himself the appointments of the district governor's the appointments of the mayor's and the provision of support for provincial councils these are the main four sort of functions of ideal G the institution historically in the formation of it as I said I can go into more details but probably time will not allow it was more basically a kind of a rather a conflicting sort of mission for the creation of this which was the purpose for the purpose of strengthening the sort of patronage based politics because the patronage based politics will secure elections and re-elections of figures at this at the national level and it was used also it was established for that purpose and it was successfully used during 2009 elections and to some extent during the elections that came after that I cannot say in during the 2018 last years because last year's election was anyway we had parliament re-election last year so but then generally the function of ideal G as an institution although it was interestingly framed the way ideal G was funded by donors because let's remember that it was not entirely a government funded was also donor funded institution the government officials will describe ideal G with the very nicely done paper work work through explaining that this is an institution where created for the purpose of decentralization but then in the actual actions of the institution was actually re-centralization and strengthening the patronage network and the evidence since its establishment and particularly their role during the during the the elections has sort of highlighted that aspect of the role so in some my my sort of comments regarding the the sort of local or internal political relations in Afghanistan in general is this patronage based sort of political relations that are existing ideal G functioned to secure the central power through their forms of intervention ASOP that I give example before at the district level is one example of it elections is another example of it whereas World Bank the UNDP have tried to use you know a different form of more democratization and going through a very smooth process of elections and representation and equal distribution of resources across the country now what I try to highlight here are again to two sort of points that we had we started with earlier on and that is this kind of conflicting agendas of the intervention forces in the country now let's also remember that this kind of conflicting agendas or competing agendas and in cases they are competing and others they completely contradicting each other one comes with the purpose of democratization and liberalization the other comes with the purpose of strengthening the patronage network if an international military person comes at the district level and asks the district governor to bring their allies into a council and then pays them also a hundred and something dollar not at then under the name of salary I'm very like precise to say that they didn't call it a salary but I don't care what it is called it is money coming to someone's pocket transportation allowance or whatever so if they do that's what kind of messaging it gives people strengthening of the patronage base relation because patronage is what they are relying on in the travel with that patronage relations is that okay this governor they bring their own loyals the governor the district governor leaves the other one comes and then what happens there is another form of intervention that is also happening and I probably that give that example I don't know how much time do I have now good amount of time or okay right so one form of intervention and then I probably sort of sort of try to to wrap up I hope I didn't bore everyone with going long but you know PhDs they talk too much and I also have a habit of talking a little bit too much in times another form of intervention I talk about and then we will sort of close and that was the case in Bamiyan I mentioned that the Bamiyan the village in the Bamiyan was rather had a strong religious ties with the with Najaf and by my arrival in this particular locality I realized that there was a construction going on of a very large multi-floor madrasa and they call it was a madrasa downstairs on the top a very a mosque also and then also a very large conference hall with a capacity of probably a thousand people in one hall so I tried to sort of figure out and find out from the local villagers who is funding it and then the response was very generic everyone that I met and talked to they said you know someone very charitable contributed some money and we built this and at the same time I was you know involved in building a school in another part of Afghanistan so I knew very well in terms of costs of how much it it costs to build such a large building and I find out through my research that it was actually funded through the religious networks and the religious networks from Najaf funded this much larger with a much larger capacity of 2,000 people or 1,000 some hundred people not very far away from another very large madrasa in mosque in the probably a hundred and fifty meters away from the same place and that was called madrasa Muhammad Yam this was called madrasa Muhammad Yam is at the center of the very close to the district capital but but they are not very this literally like a hundred and fifty meters max probably 80 and so by learning about this fact that's you know religious networks are also interested in and and having a presence at the village localities then having that presence in the form of you know not only a mosque where people go pray and go home but also a madrasa and that the mullah of this madrasa that I met was a very bright intelligent young Afghan man maybe in his probably mid 20s fully capable of speaking Arabic English Urdu Farsi all three four languages and the busiest person in the village because he says I wake up when I start my day at four o'clock and I end it at nine or ten because I have classes of I teach girls and boys English I teach the Arabic I teach the maths I teach because he had a his education in in he said in Pakistan and somewhere but I don't know that how much of that was because and there are like in Pakistan also madrasa's for she is she a students to go and study so in some to me that part of the learning or studying the village context was also very important so I tried to make a comparison in terms of in estimations of how much funding has has been channeled through in a speed to the same CDC for two villages and how much funding could estimatedly be spent on this large madrasa and my figures kind of say that okay around sixty to sixty five thousand dollars was channeled through World Bank and the whole building of this madrasa in the transportation of everything there based on my estimation was not less than two hundred thousand dollars and in a much shorter period of time the madrasa in the building was completed and to this to this day that we talk I still see sometimes when I watch over some photos coming from the village I see that the the hall is the center of all events that are happening in Yakov long the string particularly the martyrs day that when they do it to to commemorate the martyrs day so what I try to sort of highlight by these different forms of intervention is looking at these competing agendas over the same people the same population and how it is sort of changing the local power relations so the person who was in charge of the building and construction of construction of this madrasa was the same person who was also the chief of the CDC the democratically elected sort of democratically elected but not constitutionally recognized community councils and in the same way this is how the sort of the the the sort of competing agendas are reflecting in an Afghan context now to sort of look at it in terms of how this relates to the larger question of separating development from politics at the local level and its relations at the central level and even beyond that in sort of the regional and international levels it's it's becoming very impossible to see it incomplete separation from each other what and it takes me back to to my earlier comments related to the sort of interrelations with between these between these multiplicity of actors and sort of the way that they intervene that's without sort of linking their interventions and looking at them all at the same time in the same places that has happened it will be very incomplete picture of the country and the realities that we are and in this conversation I focused mostly on on local governance and the way it is formed the latest post my research in between 2010 and 2014 are that the NSP program is over and I maybe in the conversation and Q&A part I can cover some part of this what happens when that program was over on the ground and then the new program citizens charter for Afghanistan has began there is near now a policy for subnational governance or it is called the roadmap which is 16 pages very precisely explaining different layers of governance and so forth so some development since then is happening but then no matter what kind of future we are heading towards as we speak within the current context of you know peace talks and the changes the elections that is happening the presidential and a kind of a dozens of elections coming I'm not saying the dozens of four elections are expected to happen at the same time for the first time there will be district council elections in July all of them promised for July so within this new context that is emerging there are lots of ambiguities again about these kind of relations that are evolving at the very bottom level in Afghanistan in terms of you know the legitimacy of these these structures that are created particularly after the programs and what happened to them during the program who they are empowering and who they are disempowering and then all these sort of at a much sort of zooming out level and how these kind of bargainings and debates between government and the armed opposition or if we can call them Taliban on how they who controls and who has more control over I strongly disagree with the notion of control I would rather call it an influence but my explanation and the fact that this program has covered over over 99 almost 99% of the entire country it tells a lot about you know these questions of control and influence and the role of state at the very local level thank you very much for your attention