Rents, Patronage, and Defection: State-building and Insurgency in Afghanistan Anand Gopal Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Anand Gopal All rights reserved ABSTRACT Rents, Patronage, and Defection: State-building and Insurgency in Afghanistan Anand Gopal Afghanistan has been one of the most protracted conflicts modern era, but theories of civil war onset fail to explain the war’s causes or its patterns of violence. This thesis examines the origins of the post-2001 period of the conflict through the perspective of state formation; although many civil wars today unfold in newly-forming states, the processes of center-periphery relations and elite incorporation have been little studied in the context of political violence. The thesis first describes how Afghanistan’s embeddedness in the international state system and global markets undermined the nascent state’s efforts to centralize and bureaucratize, leading instead to warlordism and neopatrimonialism. Second, it demonstrates that the development of an insurgency after 2001 was due not to ethnic grievance or rebel opportunities for profit, but rather to the degree to which local elites were excluded from state patronage. Third, it examines the role of ideology and social position in the Afghan Taliban movement. The dissertation seeks to offer a theory of political violence in Afghanistan that can, mutatis mutandis, help explain key features of civil war in newly-forming states. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables ................................................................................................................................................ iii List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 1 MODELS OF CIVIL WAR ......................................................................................................................... 5 STATE FORMATION: CLASSIC AND MODERN ........................................................................................ 9 State formation in the Global South .................................................................................................. 11 Thesis outline ..................................................................................................................................... 15 RENTIER STATE FORMATION: WARLORDISM AND STATE WEAKNESS IN AFGHANISTAN ............................................................................................................................... 21 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 24 State capacity .................................................................................................................................... 26 Two forms of rent capture ................................................................................................................. 28 The mechanism of rent dispersion ..................................................................................................... 30 A roadmap ......................................................................................................................................... 30 AFGHANISTAN AND RENTS: COUNTERTERRORISM AS A RESOURCE ...................................................................... 32 RENT DISPERSION, SPATIAL FIXING, AND RENEWAL .......................................................................................... 34 Case One: The Weapons Caches of Uruzgan Province ....................................................................... 39 Case Two: Hunting the Taliban in Kandahar Province ....................................................................... 46 Case Three: Highway Mercenaries .................................................................................................... 48 Summary ............................................................................................................................................ 51 RENTS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE .................................................................................................................... 52 Case Four: The 93rd Division .............................................................................................................. 57 NEOPATRIMONIALISM ................................................................................................................................. 63 Case Five: Policing Uruzgan Province ................................................................................................ 64 THE TALIBAN: STATE-BUILDING WITHOUT RENTS ............................................................................................. 71 Rents .................................................................................................................................................. 73 Coercion and Co-optation .................................................................................................................. 75 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................................ 82 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................. 85 LOCAL SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND GLOBAL WAR: EXPLAINING INSURGENCY .............. 92 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 94 A Puzzle .............................................................................................................................................. 94 Theoretical background ..................................................................................................................... 95 A Roadmap ...................................................................................................................................... 100 THE FAILURE OF ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS ............................................................................................... 101 BACKGROUND IN LIGHT OF THEORY: MALICIOUS DENUNCIATION ..................................................................... 106 DATA AND METHODS ................................................................................................................................ 110 Local Positions ................................................................................................................................. 110 Attributes into Relations .................................................................................................................. 114 Affiliation Centrality ......................................................................................................................... 115 PATRONAGE AND EXCLUSION ..................................................................................................................... 119 i ELITE NETWORKS ...................................................................................................................................... 122 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 133 Attributes into relations ................................................................................................................... 133 Explaining the Afghan War .............................................................................................................. 134 State Formation and Civil War in the Modern World ...................................................................... 135 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................................ 138 IDEOLOGY AND DEFECTION IN THE AFGHAN TALIBAN ................................................... 144 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 146 DATA AND METHODS ................................................................................................................................ 149 Attribute Selection ........................................................................................................................... 149 Network Selection ............................................................................................................................ 152 IDEOLOGY AND ATTRIBUTES: ALTERNATE THEORIES OF TALIBAN RECRUITMENT AND DEFECTION ............................ 156 Ethnicity and Tribe ........................................................................................................................... 157 Ideology ........................................................................................................................................... 158 NETWORK STRUCTURE AND COHESION .......................................................................................................