Walking Softly in Afghanistan: the Future of UN State-Building

During the initial stages of the military action in Afghanistan, there was considerable discussion about the role that the United Nations would play after the war. Some feared that the UN would be handed a poisoned chalice once the United States had completed its military objectives; others eagerly looked forward to the 'next big mission' and a dominant role for the UN in rebuilding Afghanistan on the model of Kosovo and East Timor. These expectations were tempered by the challenging security environment and the decision by major states contributing forces to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to limit their presence to the capital city of Kabul and its immediate vicinity. (Ongoing coalition actions in the east of the country continue to provide additional coercive powerreferred to as the 'B-52 factor'but this is largely outside the control of the UN). Expectations were also limited by the political context within which the UN was to operate: however dysfunctional, Afghanistan had been and remained a state with undisputed sovereignty. This was quite different from the ambiguous status of Kosovo and the embryonic sovereignty of East Timor. Under the leadership of Lakhdar Brahimi, the architect of the Bonn process, the UN mission adopted the guiding principle that it should first and foremost bolster Afghan capacityboth official and non-governmentaland rely on as limited an international presence and on as many Afghan staff as possible. This has come to be referred to as the 'light footprint' approach.3 Such a departure from the expansive mandates in Kosovo and East Timor substantially reduced the formal political role of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). This was in keeping with the limited role accorded to the United Nations in the Bonn Agreement, negotiated in December 2001 after the rout of the Taliban by the United States and its foreign and local allies, but also represents a philosophical challenge to the increasing aggregation of sovereign powers exercised in UN peace operations since the mid-1990s.