Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 44

NOTES
1. See, for example, “’Little America”: Infighting in the Obama team squandered
chance for peace in Afghanistan,” The Washington Post, 24 June 2012 (the excerpt
from the book that The Washington Post printed in advance of publication), or
Lind a Robinson’s New York Times review, “Long Divisions: ‘Little America,’ by
Rajiv Chandrasekaran,” New York Times, 7 September 2012.
2. Dexter Filkins, “After America: Will Civil War Hit Afghanistan When the U.S.
Leaves?” The New Yorker, 9 July 2012.
3. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Knopf:, 2012), 135.
4. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations
and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1988), 19.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. J.P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics, July 1968.
7. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and
Social Orders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. North, Wallis, and Weingast call this “the double balance: a correspondence
between the distribution and organization of violence potential and political power
on the one hand, and the distribution and organization of economic power on the
other hand.” If, for example, a group has a lot of political/military power but has
very little economic power, it will fight to get economic power. If political/military
and economic power resides predominantly in one group, fighting will be less
likely to break out.
9. Migdal, 4.
10. Ibid., 28.
11. Field Manual (FM) 3-24 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office
[GPO], 2006), 5-2.
12. Another line of reasoning, often summarized in the phrase “winning hearts
and minds,” holds that people value economic development and social services
and will support whichever party provides it.
13. FM 3-24, 5-18.
14. Ibid., 1-25
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 1-14
17. Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 67-68.
18. Ibid., 72-73. Winning control over the state did “not so much wipe the board
clean as redistribute the existing pieces.” Because these were elite conflicts rather
than mass population conflicts between peoples, Barfield compares them to corporate mergers and acquisitions, where management would change.
19. The internal variability of the Afghan state stems in part from urban-rural
disparities. From a Western background, it may be difficult to appreciate the magnitude of the distance between Afghanistan’s urban center and its rural periphery.
For example, Barfield tells of a conversation with a merchant: “He explained that

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villagers had goats with so little local value that they were eager to barter them
for his imported goods. As an example, the trader showed me a box containing a
half-dozen unbreakable tea glasses he had purchased for one hundred afghanis
in a city bazaar that he would barter for a goat valued in the village at five hundred
afghanis. . . . When his flock returned to the lowlands, each Tajik goat would then
be worth fifteen hundred afghanis in the local bazaar, meaning that his initial hundred afghani investment would yield a fourteen hundred afghani profit per animal.”
While Afghanistan’s urban center and its rural periphery are connected by a
complex and porous boundary, differences in customs and knowledge as well
as distance requires a specialized group of nonstate social actors to traverse
the boundary.
20. Barfield, 101.
21. Ibid., 103-105.
22. Ibid., 102.
23. Ibid., 166.
24. Ibid., 183
25. Ibid., 190.
26. Ibid., 191.
27. Ibid., 191-195. When Nadir Sha was assassinated in 1933, his son Zahir
Shah became a figurehead king. Hashin Khan, Nadir’s brother, was the true leader
until 1946, when he became ill and was succeeded by his brother Shah Mahmud.
Daud Khan, Shah Mahmod’s nephew, took the reins of power as prime minister
in 1953. Zahir Shah assumed power in 1963, but was ousted by Daud in a 1973
coup. The Musahiban dynasty ended in 1978 with Daud’s murder and Afghanistan’s
communist party ascension to power.
28. Barfield, 198.
29. Ibid., 220-221.
30. Ibid., 223.
31. Ibid., 204-205. While seeking foreign aid, first from Axis powers prior to
World War II and later from the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold
War, taxes declined from being most of the state’s revenue in 1920s to 30 percent
in the 1950s to less than 1 percent in the 1970s.
32. Barfield, 199-202.
33. Ibid., 220.
34. Ibid., 231.
35. Chandrasekaran, 70-4.
36. Ibid., 144.
37. Ibid., 166.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 108.
40. Ibid., 191-97.
41. Ibid., 301-306.
42. Ibid., 143.
43. Ibid., 262.

January-February 2014 MILITARY REVIEW