Читать книгу The State-Building Dilemma in Afghanistan - Haqmal Daudzai - Страница 10

The qualitative research methodology makes the foundation of this dissertation. The data used in this study comprises both secondary academic sources and materials, as well as my field research in Afghanistan. The secondary source materials used in this study include a wide range of aca [25] demic books, journals, research publications and papers, survey materials, the Afghan government, and international donor organization’s policy papers, and finally, investigative reports and articles from credentialed Afghan and international media outlets.

The primary desk-based research is done in my university library – the University of Erfurt, Thuringia federal state of the Federal Republic of Germany. Due to family reasons, in June 2015, I moved to Frankfurt am Main – Hessen federal state of Federal Republic of Germany – where I was based in the library of Goethe University. Both the Erfurt and Goethe University libraries have extensive access to a wide range of academic source materials and facilities (including access to online databases of other academic institutions) in the field. However, there has been limited access to Afghanistan-specific source materials, particularly access to materials published and available only in local Afghan languages of Pashtu and Dari.

Fortunately, this problem has been overcome, largely, by my multiple visits to Afghanistan, including two months of field research where the library of Kabul University has been used for this purpose. Though many of the secondary source materials used in this study are in the English language, however, sources in Pashtu, Dari, and German languages were also used as needed. While Pashtu and Dari are my mother tongues, I also have a comprehensive command on German due to studying and working in Germany for eight years.

In addition to the secondary data, the field research makes a significant part of this dissertation. Due to the inferior security conditions across Afghanistan, the field research was considered mainly in one phase that lasted from 10th March until 25th April 2016. However, one spontaneous interview was conducted in September 2017, in Kabul – a trip made primarily for personal purposes.

From the 34 Afghan provinces, 6 large provinces including Kabul, Kandahar, Balkh, Bamyan, Herat, and Nangarhar were chosen for conducting the field research. The key reasons behind the selection of the above provinces for field research comprise the de-facto ethnolinguistic power-politics of the warlords, and their influence on national and sub-national government institutions including the elected provincial councils. While the capital, Kabul, is the largest populated city for all major ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the home for national politics, the remaining five provinces have their significance in respect to being the home and powerbase for major ethnolinguistic [26] groups and political parties in sub-national politics. For example, Kandahar remained the capital for Pashtun tribal, ethnic groups and the birthplace for influential Pashtun political leaders and movements including the Taliban, ex-President Hamid Karzai and his family, and general Raziq– to point out just a few of the historical figures and movements of the last two-decades. Nangrahar is another Pashtun dominant province in eastern Afghanistan, and also the de-facto powerbase for the Tajik dominant Northern Alliances warlord group including the Pashtun Qadir family (Abdul Qadir and his son Zahir Qadir) and the Pashaie ethnic Ali family (Hazrat Ali and his son Ahmad Ali) – again to mention just a few prominent figures. Herat is a dominant Tajik province and is identified with the prominent Jamiat-e-Islami (Islamic Society) party leader and warlord, Ismail Khan. Balkh, though a multi-ethnic province, remains the battleground for power between the dominant Tajik Jamiat-e-Islami party of Atta Mohammad Noor and the Uzbek Junbish (Movement) party of Abdul Rashid Dostum. Finally, Bamyan is known as the capital of the Hazara ethnic group, de-facto ruled by the Hezb-e-Wahdat Islami (Islamic Unity Movement) party of Karim Khalili.

The conducted field research is primarily based on qualitative expert and elite interviews. The Afghan elected Provincial Council (PC) members are the main target group for interviewing in this research. The PC members could be primarily considered as elites, due to their functional power and position but also experts due to their specific knowledge in the field. According to Beate Littig (2009), there is no fundamental difference between the elite and expert interviews from the methodological point-of-view and research approach. The only difference between elite and expert interviews lies behind the ‘differing social and political sciences research traditions and interests’ (p. 98). A clear understanding of the elite and expert interviews and their overlapping commonalities could be extracted from Littig’s (2009) following lines:

It concludes with a sociology of knowledge-based appeal that the (professional) functional elite –given their positions of power– be considered as a specific group of experts. From a methodological perspective and as a result of their specific interpretive knowledge (“know-why”) and procedural knowledge (“know-how”), experts (and thus also the elite) are of relevance to social and political sciences research. Consequently, interviews with the elite aimed at generating explicit, tacit, professional or occupational knowledge should be seen as (an)expert interview. (pp. 98-99)

[27] Moreover, as it was revealed in our test-interview with the IDLG personnel¹, the majority of the PC members possess double roles; (1) the formal elected representation positions at the PC, and (2) the informal local community elite role, including tribal elder, Jihadi commander, religious scholar (e.g., Mullah), spiritual elite (e.g., Sufi Pir), civil society activist, or member of a political party. In addition to the above-listed elites, interviews are also conducted with other experts including government employees, members of informal community councils, civil society actors, and Taliban shadow-government members.

The exploratory research approach is considered for developing interview questions. Bernt Reiter (2013) exclusively describes the exploratory research approach in the following paragraph:

We can spend hours debating what “democracy,” or “citizenship” really is. However, this discussion is beside the point. What exploratory research focuses on is to what reality a word like “democracy” refers to. What does democracy mean in Colombia today? What does it mean to a poor campesino, a black Chocoano, or an indigenous tribe member from Vaupés? We need to dissect, to analyze by pulling apart, words from the reality they refer to and, as exploratory social scientists, we should focus on the reality, not the words. This means, in most cases, that we need to look for indicators that tell us something about the reality represented by a word. (p. 6)

To summarize Reiter, exploratory research is concerned with the world ‘reality’ of concepts and approaches that depend on different contextual conditions. This approach is significant to the present study, as it dwells not only into the post 2001 state-building intervention in Afghanistan from the international standard principles’ perspective but also from the Afghan elite and contextual perspective. It is attempting to draw an Afghan solution to the problem and thereby, the Afghan perspective is considered significant for finding answers to the questions. In other words, it is critical to know what and how the Afghan elite perceive the state-building concepts and mechanisms including democracy, state-institutional design at the central (unitary centralization and the debate around possible alternatives) and local (democratic provincial councils and its role in decentralization) levels. As Littig (2009) also notes that in exploratory expert interviews “members of the [28] elite serve as sources of information on specific areas of knowledge that would otherwise be inaccessible” (p. 101). Thus, considering the explorative research approach, field interviews were designed in a semi-structured and open-ended questionnaire format. According to Nigel King and Christine Horrocks (2010), semi-structured interviews provide participants with the opportunity to present their understandings of the concepts and phenomena through sharing individual experiences (p. 16).

In total, I conducted 39 semi-structured interviews in 6 large provinces, respectively 10 in Kabul, 8 in Herat, 3 in Kandahar, 6 in Jalalabad, 6in Balkh and 6 in the Bamyan province. From out of 39 interviews, 29 were conducted with PC members and the remaining 10 with government officials, tribal elders, members of community development councils (CDCs), civil society activists, and Taliban shadow-governments’ leading officials.

Based on their prior request², I conducted a group discussion interview with the Kandahar PC members, while the remaining 28 interviews were conducted in an individual or one-on-one session manner. The group discussion with the Kandahar PC members comprised of 7 representatives from whom 3 were female, and the remaining 4 were male participants. Moreover, based on interviewees’ prior request, 5 interviews, (3 with Taliban officials in Herat and Kabul, and 2 with civil society activists in Kandahar and Balkh) were conducted in an off-the-record manner, the remaining interviews were all recorded. In addition, to the snow-ball technique, I have used my contact networks.³

The length of the interviews varies from person-to-person, encompassing around 5 to 40 minutes each. With a total of 15 open-ended questions, I designed the semi-structured questionnaire in 3 main sections: the demographic section, the local governance section, and the Central Governance section⁴. Taking the sensitivity of the issue into consideration, I prepared the questionnaire not only in both Afghan national languages of Pashto and Dari [29] but also conducted as wished by the interviewee either in Pashtu or Dari⁵. From out of 39 interviews, 18 interviews were conducted in Dari language and the remaining in Pashtu.

Moreover, due to limited participation of Afghan women in the PC, attempts were made to interview as many females as possible. From out of 29 interviews with PC representatives, I managed to interview 9 female PCs respectively, 3 in Kandahar, 2 in Kabul, and the remaining 4 (1 in each) in Balkh, Bamyan, Herat and Nangarhar provinces.

The recorded interviews are transcribed together with the help of native Afghans who had fluent command on both national languages of Pashto and Dari. I analyzed the transcribed text through the content analyses method. The inaccessibility to computer-based coding software for both Pashtu and Dari languages led me to work with the data manually. The direct quotes woven in the study are translated from Pashtu and Dari into the English language by me. Efforts have been made to deliver the exact message while translating. My previous experiences as an official translator for Pashtun and Dari to English and vice versa with international organizations was an asset in this regard.

Besides interviews, I also applied observation and participation method in this study. I collected notes during attendance at several provincial council’s members’ sessions and meetings with the constituencies during the field research. The collected notes are paraphrased, and quoted word-for-word, and highlighted via footnotes in this dissertation.