By Aziz Azzam
Modern governance rests on many pillars, but the two most important, the two you could really call essential, are security and state-building. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s second rise to power came at a moment when Afghanistan, under the umbrella of the Republic’s system, was shaking to its very roots, on the verge of collapse. There was neither security nor state-building in it, this despite the fact that over two decades, the occupiers and their supporting institutions had spent billions of dollars in the name of government-building, or system and security.
The most shameful example of that so-called state-building was when two presidents took their oaths of office at the same time, a spectacle that dragged the dignity of the Afghan people through the mud before the whole world. They trampled even democracy’s own Western, so-called modern principles underfoot, running their own elections, their own commissions, filing their own complaints, declaring their own winners, and then turning around and rebelling against their own results. No further explanation is needed; every citizen of this country knows that people had grown sick even of the word “system,” of the so-called word “government” itself.
The second principle, security, is just as clear to everyone. With hundreds of thousands of troops, and hundreds of thousands more foreign occupiers behind them, backed by every kind of technology, anti-government cries still rang out inside the cities, insecurity was ongoing, and fighting and rebellion over power, seats, and positions never stopped. A uniformed policeman or soldier would carry out his duty by day, in appearance, and by night be a thief, a drug addict, a bandit, a man robbing people of their honor, and then, with no shame at all, pin the blame for it on the IEA. But in the areas under the IEA’s rule, the opposite was true: people lived with a sense of happiness and security, schools were open, healthcare was moving forward, and people’s cases and disputes were resolved fairly and in short order.
There are even plenty of examples of people coming in from the cities to bring their problems to the IEA’s courts to get them resolved, and having their cases settled in short order. When the Republic paid the price for its own actions and collapsed, one of the loudest claims was that the state and security had disappeared. With the IEA’s victory, the big concern was said to be how security and state-building could possibly be established under such circumstances.
Those who had only ever seen the Republic’s so-called state-building and security run through the hands of million-dollar projects and hired experts were uneasy about how this whole thing would now get done. But everyone is a witness to this truth: even on the very first day of the IEA’s victory, this task didn’t stall. Because the IEA’s forces and officials, with full attention to these same two principles, with planning and resolve, were ready to take on responsibility, and within a single week, administrative affairs and order had returned to normal, a state of affairs that, to many who carried the bitter memories and experience of regime change and civil war, looked like a dream.
On the question of security, there’s not much left to say right now, because when something is this plain and this visible to people’s own eyes, it doesn’t need analysis either. But there’s a lot that can be said about the system and the paths taken to build it, because the current system and order-building is without precedent. Alongside the physical rebuilding and transformation of ministries and institutions, alongside the improved functioning of structures, regulations, and systems, comes the creation of ease and satisfaction for the people, and, most important of all, accountability, without substitute.
Today the distance between the people and the system has vanished, has gone to zero. A minister, a director general, another official, moves around like an ordinary person, comes and goes to gatherings, walks through the city, travels every corner of the country the way any ordinary citizen would. That’s what real governance and system legitimacy and trust are born from.
But the people’s responsibility doesn’t end there. Just as the door has been opened for suggestions, criticism, and requests to leaders for correction and improvement, so too is it the responsibility of every accountable citizen, every countryman, to play their own national role in protecting and supporting the system, security, and the achievements made so far, because this exchange is a national commitment between government and people, one that every system needs to survive and grow strong.
