The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan

EVOLVING INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORKS AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS: POTENTIALS AND LIMITATIONS
This is the backdrop against which gender-mainstreaming efforts in the process of reconstruction and institutional
reform in Afghanistan must be evaluated. An important caveat must be the recognition that focusing
on government programmes and policies suffers from self-evident limitations in a context where the transition
from war to peace is still incomplete and where the illicit economy, and those who profit from it, continue to
command substantial resources and to fuel continuing instability. Nonetheless, despite the currently limited
reach of the institutional framework created by the Bonn Agreement, there have been some successful attempts
to put the issue of women’s rights on the policy agenda. These attempts are discussed below.
IV.A.
landmarks in state-building:
the Bonn agreement and
the national development
framework
Writing a year after the fall of the Taliban, Thier pointed
to several intertwined strands of “intervention and
entropy” in the political transformation of Afghanistan:
the (re)creation of a central state, the continuing “war
on terrorism”, and a relapse into division and conflict in
the countryside (2004b:39). Three years on, these parameters
broadly appear to hold. Nonetheless, the Bonn
Agreement laid out a framework and timetable for state-building and peace consolidation in Afghanistan. The
agreement endorsed the establishment of “a broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative
government”. 25 This was not a conventional peace agreement, however, since not all the warring parties were
represented and it lacked specific and actionable clauses on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration
(DDR) (Rubin 2003). Instead, it was an externally mediated power-sharing arrangement between the Northern
Alliance and the international community, leading to a peace that was fragile because of both opposition from
those who remained outside the nascent Bonn framework and the uneasy stalemate between the armed factions
within it.
The Agreement laid the groundwork for several institutional developments with a direct bearing on the representation
of women’s interests:
• the creation of an interim authority with a life-span of six months, to be superseded by a transitional
authority, chosen by an Emergency Loya Jirga (ELJ) to lead the country until such time as a government
based on free and fair elections can come into being
• the drafting of a new constitution, to be approved by a Constitutional Loya Jirga (CLJ) that would be
convened two years after the Bonn Agreement
• the establishment of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MOWA) charged with mainstreaming gender into the
policies and programmes of the line ministries to ensure that gender equity concerns are addressed.
By the time of the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s formal economy was entirely dependent on external
resources. The Bonn Agreement created a concept of Afghan sovereignty that, in the absence of the most
basic functions of statehood (fiscal management, internal security and social service provision), required a
great deal of effort if it was to become a reality. One of the first priorities of the interim administration was to
25 The Bonn Agreement Preamble.
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