Crime and War in Afghanistan: Part II: A Jeffersonian Alternative?

Abstract

In Part I of this article, US President, Barack Obama, is reported as saying to his inner circle that their objective in Afghanistan is not to build a Jeffersonian democracy. Part II is about the idea that a more Jeffersonian architecture of rural republicanism in tune with Afghan traditions is a remedy to limits of the Hobbesian analysis of cases like Afghanistan in Part I. Anomic spaces where policing and justice do not work are vacuums that can attract tyrannical forms of law and order, such as the rule of the Taliban. Peace with justice cannot prevail in the aftermath of such an occupation without a reliance on both local community justice and state justice that are mutually constitutive. Supporting checks on abuse of power through balancing local and national institutions that deliver justice is a more sustainable peace-building project than regime change and top-down re-engineering of successor regimes.