political system based on clientelism. The inclusion of warlords into the cabinet and governors of provinces has been criticised due to their involvement in previous human rights violations and their failure to govern during the 1990s was criticised by international observers and competing Afghan elites. However, warlords hold provincial security with their militias’ loyalty and leverage of assets in exchange for centralised support. After the defeat of the Soviet-backed communist Afghan government, Mujahidin warlords seized the majority of corrupted institutions
Based on unprecedented empirical research conducted with lower levels of the Afghan police, this unique study assesses how institutional legacy and external intervention, from countries including the UK and the US, have shaped the structural conditions of corruption in the police force and the state.
Taking a social constructivist approach, the book combines an in-depth analysis of internal political, cultural and economic drivers with references to several regime changes affecting policing and security, from the Soviet occupation and Mujahidin militias to Taliban religious police.
Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Singh offers an invaluable contribution to the literature and to anti-corruption policy in developing and conflict-affected societies.
with the ANP (UNDP, 2009: 5–6). Afghans regularly pay cash or a gift to police officers and other state officials (IWA, 2018: 42). A rule of law specialist, and former Mujahidin fighter, stated that kickbacks, protecting illegal activities and internal payoffs are evident among police chiefs, which intensifies bribery, [The] person who is going to be appointed to a chief of police in that province or even that district has to have a strong agreement to send a specific amount of dollars every month to the person here. This is one deal. The other deal is that
. It is, virtually without exception, never applied to groups of non-Sunni Muslims. GLOBAL DISCOURSE 569 In contrast to the notion of the ‘dog’, the ‘lion’ metaphor as used by IS seems an unlikely candidate for conveying dehumanising claims. As Haslam, Loughnan and Sun argue, animal metaphors can be used to convey the idea that people are ‘desirably wild’. However, in referring comparing its own to lions, IS is not merely claiming that they are courageous or ‘lion-hearted’. Rather, it characterises lions and mujahidin as ferocious, ravenous and merciless predators
the society studied. Conclusion In this theoretical framework, I argue that the political, economic and social aspects in Afghanistan affect the way in which we view corruption. The theoretical framework shows the significance of different cultural understandings of conflict. As shown in Chapter 5, these cultural understandings of conflict are based on structural changes 123 Social construction of corruption in the Afghan police force during modernist, communist, Mujahidin, Taliban and quasi-democratic regime changes. In addition, the conditions of the
doctrine, have been rushed. Corruption had been overlooked by the international community but after the remobilisation of the Taliban and civil society corruption perception reports, an anti-corruption strategy was implemented. However, efforts to curtail police corruption continue to be hindered by the drug economy and engrained corruption. The structural conditions of the Afghan state and system of policing changed since the modernisation period of the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet occupation, the Mujahidin civil war, the Taliban regime and the internationally
perceptions of police corruption have hindered support of the state and its services, and increased Taliban support and the use of informal networks. In relation to cultural drivers, there is no noble cause, motivation, pride or sense of mission to secure the state against intervention or to topple a regime (unlike during the Mujahidin era) in the current Afghan police force to fulfil a clear mandate and work duties. The lack of professional obligation to the role appears to be the case because Western conceptions of police culture find a strong moralistic strand
various Mujahidin groups, their publications meant for external and internal consumption largely stay clear of sectarian rhetoric ( Fuchs, 2017a ). The next paragraphs will spell out these tensions between external influence and local concerns in some more detail. The ASWJ, sectarianism, and the dominance of politics For Ihsan Ilahi Zahir, Shi‘is formed a predominantly doctrinal concern. None of his works, irrespective of whether he released them before 1979 or after the Iranian Revolution, features any explicitly political content. Instead, Zahir emphasised the
driven by economic necessity because many impoverished people are crime- and corrupt-free. For example, during the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, plain-clothed secret police were well paid but looted homes and businesses that had been searched to gather Mujahidin intelligence (HRW, 1991). Furthermore, it is pivotal to acknowledge that the salaries of Afghan judges were increased 10 times during the regime of the Taliban to curtail corruption, yet this led to greater bribes (Demirbüken et al, 2009: 139). Hence, increasing pay may have reverse repercussions
client faced on the night Martin was killed (Polizzi, 2013). 6 DAESH, the Arabic term for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, can also be defined as ‘to trample or crush’ or ‘bigot’ depending upon how the term is configured in Arabic (Garrity, 2015 ). 7 It is important to note that the current use of cinematography within the context of Salifist Jihadi terrorism is not new and was first employed by the Afghan mujahidin to document their fight against Soviet forces, which invaded that country in the early 1980s. Stenerson (2017) observes, however, that the videos
