SACW - 07 July 2016 | Afghanistan’s Theorist-in-Chief / Pakistan: Discrimination in Media Agency / Bangladesh: Terror in a Dhaka Cafe / India: RSS in the Govt ? / Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 / Brexit working class counter-revolution / Survival in Stalin's Russia

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 7 July 2016 - No. 2903 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Terror attack in a Dhaka Cafe - Select Editorials from Newspapers in South Asia
2. Bangladesh: Horror and Sorrow in Dhaka - Tahmima Anam / The sinister manifestations of history - Subir Bhaumik
3. Pakistan: Discrimination based on religion faced by a media worker - PILER's letter to Information Minister, cc to DG of APP
4. The Brexit working class counter-revolution: British lefties who are rejoicing today risk being engulfed by a right-wing firestorm | Harsh Kapoor
5. India: Should RSS Volunteers be permitted to join Government Services? | Ram Puniyani
6. India: "And then the government fell. But the books continued!" An interview with Romila Thapar
7. 1991 report on the exploitation of professional blood donors by the blood banking system in India released in digital format
8. India: Narendra Dabholkar - A champion of rationalism

9. Recent On Communalism Watch:

- UK: Campaigners Urge Government to Fully and Impartially Investigate Sharia bodies - Press release from secular feminists in Britain
- India: Modi Govt Reshuffle Nine out of 20 the ministers upgraded and inducted today are from the RSS
- Bangladesh has degenerated into an Islamic fundamentalist country and government is responsible for it
- India: Meet the "Muslim rapist" - Hindutva propaganda machine's latest product (Aditya Menon)
- Announcement : Public event in Calcutta 'Bangladesh: Humanity, Free thinking under attack' (9 July 2016)
- After every gruesome crime undertaken in the name of Islam there are the inevitable calls for a "moderate Islam"
- Bangladesh: Dhaka attack - Why denouncing the terrorists as being untrue to Islam is completely ineffectual (Ikhtisad Ahmed)
- Bangladesh: What Kind of Prime Minister Are You, Sheikh Hasina? | Javed Anand

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Letter from Kabul : Afghanistan’s Theorist-in-Chief | George Packer
11. India: Avoiding the zombie city algorithm | Anant Maringanti
12. Review: Shodhan on Sharafi, Mitra, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947
13. Following the Brexit vote, I fear tolerant Britain is lost for ever | Gilane Tawadros
14. Review: Elena Osokina. Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927-1941

========================================
1. BANGLADESH: TERRROR ATTACK IN A DHAKA CAFE - SELECT EDITORIALS FROM NEWSPAPERS IN SOUTH ASIA
========================================
Select editorials in daily newspapers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India on the killings of people in a cafe in the Gulshan district of Dhaka.
http://www.sacw.net/article12855.html

========================================
2. BANGLADESH: HORROR AND SORROW IN DHAKA - TAHMIMA ANAM / THE SINISTER MANIFESTATIONS OF HISTORY - SUBIR BHAUMIK
========================================
In June, in some desperation to bring to book those behind the seemingly unending series of murders, the Bangladesh police had launched a nationwide crackdown on Islamist radicals believed to be responsible for the murder of secular bloggers, publishers, writers, Hindu priests and Buddhist monks, Christian pastors and even Baul music exponents. More than 14,000 suspects were nabbed within a week.
http://www.sacw.net/article12856.html

========================================
3. PAKISTAN: DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RELIGION FACED BY A MEDIA WORKER - PILER'S LETTER TO INFORMATION MINISTER, CC TO DG OF APP
========================================
Letter from Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research to the Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting with a copy to the Director General of Associated Press Corporation
http://www.sacw.net/article12842.html

========================================
4. THE BREXIT WORKING CLASS COUNTER-REVOLUTION: BRITISH LEFTIES WHO ARE REJOICING TODAY RISK BEING ENGULFED BY A RIGHT-WING FIRESTORM | Harsh Kapoor
========================================
Brexit is a triumph of national chauvinism and is damaging to the left
http://www.sacw.net/article12853.html

========================================
5. INDIA: SHOULD RSS VOLUNTEERS BE PERMITTED TO JOIN GOVERNMENT SERVICES? | Ram Puniyani
========================================
An old controversy resurfaced lately. After the alleged denial of government jobs to candidates linked to the RSS
http://www.sacw.net/article12852.html

========================================
6. INDIA: "AND THEN THE GOVERNMENT FELL. BUT THE BOOKS CONTINUED!" AN INTERVIEW WITH ROMILA THAPAR
========================================
Violence against Muslims, against socialists, against intellectuals, against women – India has been witnessing a pattern of tragic events since the coming to power of the right wing government, whose actions and policies scream out ‘Intolerance!'. The country's citizens and its media, deemed as the fourth pillar of democracy, have been taking sides without entirely understanding the situation. We interviewed Professor Emeritus Romila Thapar on these issues.
http://www.sacw.net/article12828.html

========================================
7. 1991 REPORT ON THE EXPLOITATION OF PROFESSIONAL BLOOD DONORS BY THE BLOOD BANKING SYSTEM IN INDIA RELEASED IN DIGITAL FORMAT
========================================
The AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) is releasing the digitized version of its report titled “Blood of the Professionals” – a report on the exploitation of professional blood donors by the blood banking system in India.
http://www.sacw.net/article12849.html

========================================
8. INDIA: NARENDRA DABHOLKAR - A CHAMPION OF RATIONALISM
========================================
Three years ago, atheist and rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar was shot in the back of the head from close-range and in broad daylight by motorcycle-borne assailants when he was on his morning walk. He was 67.
http://www.sacw.net/article12818.html

========================================
9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 

- UK: Campaigners Urge Government to Fully and Impartially Investigate Sharia bodies - Press release from secular feminists in Britain
- India: Modi Govt Reshuffle Nine out of 20 the ministers upgraded and inducted today are from the RSS
- Bangladesh has degenerated into an Islamic fundamentalist country and government is responsible for it
- India: Meet the "Muslim rapist" - Hindutva propaganda machine's latest product (Aditya Menon)
- Announcement : Public event in Calcutta 'Bangladesh: Humanity, Free thinking under attack' (9 July 2016)
- After every gruesome crime undertaken in the name of Islam there are the inevitable calls for a "moderate Islam"
- Bangladesh: Dhaka attack - Why denouncing the terrorists as being untrue to Islam is completely ineffectual (Ikhtisad Ahmed)
- Bangladesh: What Kind of Prime Minister Are You, Sheikh Hasina? | Javed Anand

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

========================================
10. LETTER FROM KABUL : AFGHANISTAN’S THEORIST-IN-CHIEF
by George Packer
========================================
(The New Yorker, July 4, 2016 Issue)

President Ashraf Ghani is an expert on failed states. Can he save his country from collapse?

Ghani is Afghanistan’s Jimmy Carter—a visionary technocrat who has alienated potential allies and has no feel for politics.	Photograph by Adam Ferguson for The New Yorker	

Ashraf Ghani, the President of Afghanistan, wakes up before five every morning and reads for two or three hours. He makes his way daily through an inch-thick stack of official documents. He reads proposals by applicants competing for the job of mayor of Herat and chooses the winner. He reads presentations by forty-four city engineers for improvements to Greater Kabul. He has been known to write his own talking points and do his own research on upcoming visitors. Before meeting the Australian foreign minister, he read the Australian government’s white paper on foreign aid. He read four hundred pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report on the day of its release, and the next day he apologized to General John Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, for having not quite finished it. He reads books on the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, on the Central Asian enlightenment of a thousand years ago, on modern warfare, on the history of Afghanistan’s rivers. He lives and works in the Arg—a complex of palaces inside a nineteenth-century fortress in central Kabul—where books, marked up in pencil, lie open on desks and tables.

Two decades ago, Ghani lost most of his stomach to cancer. He has to eat small portions of food, such as packets of dates, half a dozen times a day. He sometimes takes digestive breaks, resting—and reading—on a narrow bed in an alcove behind his office in Gul Khana Palace. Or he sits with a book in his favorite spot, under a chinar tree in the garden of Haram Sarai Palace, where the library of the late King Zahir is preserved. During the Presidency of Ghani’s predecessor, Hamid Karzai, the library was a dusty pile of antique volumes. After Ghani took office, in September, 2014, he organized the royal collection. Whereas Karzai filled the palace with visitors and received petitioners during meals, Ghani often eats alone. After twelve years in power, Karzai and his family walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars from Afghan and international coffers. Ghani’s net worth, according to his declaration of assets, is about four million dollars. It consists largely of his house, on four acres in western Kabul, and his collection of seven thousand books.

A trained anthropologist who spent years doing field work for the World Bank, Ghani has been in and out of the Afghan government ever since the overthrow of the Taliban, in 2001. His abiding concern has been how to create viable institutions in poor countries overrun with violence, focussing on states that can’t enforce laws, create fair markets, collect taxes, provide services, or keep citizens safe. In 2006, Ghani and his longtime collaborator, a British human-rights lawyer named Clare Lockhart, started a consultancy, the Institute for State Effectiveness, in Washington, D.C. Two years later, they published “Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.” It describes the core functions of a state and suggests such measures as tapping the expertise of citizens in building institutions. By then, the theme was no longer a technical subject. The chaos in Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan threatened global security.

Theorists are rarely given such a dramatic chance to put their ideas into practice. Afghanistan has been at war ever since the Soviet invasion of 1979, when Ghani was a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate at Columbia University. Most of the country, including several provincial capitals, is threatened by the Taliban, even as the insurgency devolves into a network of narco-criminal enterprises. In sixty per cent of Afghanistan’s three hundred and ninety-eight districts, state control doesn’t exist beyond a lonely government building and a market. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have established a presence in the east. Afghanistan can’t police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents. (In May, Mullah Mansour, the Taliban leader, was killed by an American drone strike while driving from Zahedan, Iran, where he reportedly consulted with Iranian officials, to his base, in Quetta, Pakistan, with a fraudulent Pakistani passport.) Afghanistan’s finances depend on foreign aid and opium. Corruption is endemic. After the departure of a hundred and twenty-seven thousand foreign troops, in 2014, the economy collapsed, unemployment soared, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans abandoned the country. Ghani is the elected President of a failed state.

A slight man with a short gray beard and deep-set eyes under a bald dome, Ghani bears a resemblance to Gandhi, except that he does not seem like a man at peace. He hunches over and winces, head tilted, and when he gestures he keeps his elbows pinned to his sides. He laughs at odd moments, and he can’t control his temper. Young loyalists surround him, but he has alienated powerful allies. Isolated in the Arg, Ghani works killingly long hours and buries himself in projects that should be left to subordinates. “Because he’s been an academic for a very long time, he just can’t help a mode of working that requires him to study and analyze every problem,” a senior Afghan official said. “If he asked for a file on garbage collection in Kabul, and he received a binder of five hundred pages, he would finish it that night—and then take copious notes.”

Whereas Karzai talked warmly with guests for hours, leaving everyone happy, Ghani disdains small talk, and visitors come away feeling intimidated or slighted. Once, in Kabul, the President scheduled fifteen minutes for Ismail Khan, a powerful warlord from western Afghanistan. Jelani Popal, one of Ghani’s closest advisers, told him, “See him for as long as he wants or don’t see him at all—but you can’t spend just fifteen minutes.” Ghani stood firm: the corrupt and brutal emir of Herat was worth exactly a quarter of an hour.

Ghani is a visionary technocrat who thinks twenty years ahead, with a deep understanding of what has destroyed his country and what might yet save it. “He’s incorruptible,” the senior official said. “He wants to transform the country. And he can do it. But it seems as if everything is arrayed against him.” Ghani is the kind of reformer that the American government desperately needed as a partner during the erratic later years of Karzai’s rule. Yet he has few admirers in the State Department, and in Kabul the élite don’t hide their contempt. They call Ghani an arrogant micromanager and say that he has no close friends, no feel for politics—that he is the leader of a country that exists only in his own mind. Ghani is Afghanistan’s Jimmy Carter.

Many observers don’t expect Ghani to complete his term, which ends in 2019, and 2016 is described as a year of national survival. “This is the year of living dangerously,” Scott Guggenheim, an American economic adviser to Ghani, said. “He’ll either make it or he won’t.”

The stone walls of the Arg are fortified with concrete blast walls and checkpoints manned by armed guards. Outside, barricades and razor wire divide Kabul’s streets into the private armed encampments where Afghan élites and foreign diplomats live. The public must steer clear, and the city is choked with traffic. When it rains, the rutted streets flood; when fighting in the north cuts power lines, the streets go dark. Periodically, a suicide bomber detonates a murderous payload. American officials no longer risk driving—from dawn to dark, helicopters clatter over the U.S. Embassy compound. Smelling weakness, Afghan politicians scheme in lavish compounds built with stolen money, each convinced that he should be inside the Arg. In the mountains around Kabul, the Taliban are just a few miles away.

“My father’s mother really had a profound influence on me,” Ghani said. “She literally began her day with an hour of reading. But the most fundamental impact was education.” We were seated in facing chairs, in a ceremonial room on the second floor of Gul Khana Palace. The soaring walls and pillars were of green onyx, the doors of inlaid walnut. Ghani, by contrast, looked like a well-off shopkeeper, in a traditional dark-gray shalwar kameez and a black coat, conveying that he is a native son and drawing a firm line between his current life and the decades he spent in American universities and with global institutions.

In 2011, Ghani and his daughter, Mariam—an artist who lives in Brooklyn—published a pamphlet titled “Afghanistan: A Lexicon,” a mini-encyclopedia that chronicles cycles of reform, reaction, and chaos that have recurred in the country. The opening entry is on Amanullah, Afghanistan’s king from 1919 to 1929. Amanullah was the first great modernizer: he oversaw the writing of a constitution, improved education, encouraged freedoms for women, and planned an expansion of the capital. He also fought to make Afghanistan’s foreign policy independent of Britain. But Amanullah offended key elements of society, including the mullahs, and he was overthrown by tribal leaders. Although Amanullah “accomplished a remarkable amount,” Ashraf and Mariam Ghani wrote, he “did not succeed in permanently changing Afghanistan, since his ultimate failure to forge a broad political consensus for his reforms left him vulnerable to rural rebellion.” Rapid modernization undone by conservative revolt became both template and warning for Afghan progressives, “who have returned again and again to his unfinished project, only to succumb to their own blind spots.”

Ghani comes from a prominent Pashtun family. His paternal grandfather, a military commander, helped install King Nadir, who assumed power shortly after Amanullah’s overthrow, in 1929. Ghani’s father was a senior transport official under Nadir’s son, King Zahir, who reigned for forty years. Ghani was born in 1949. He grew up in Kabul’s old city, spending weekends and vacations riding horses and hunting on the ancestral farm, forty miles south. He was teased at school—he was undersized, and sometimes bent over like an old man—but he impressed classmates with his seriousness. In 1966, his junior year of high school, he travelled to America as an exchange student. At his new school, in Oregon, Ghani won a student-council seat reserved for a foreigner. “The first council meeting, we made some simple decisions,” he said. “Lo and behold, the next week they were implemented, because the council had access to money.” The experience shaped his thinking about development: “You can get together, you can talk as much as you want, but if there’s not a decision-making process—that’s where democracy really matters.”

In 1973, Ghani received a political-science degree from the American University of Beirut, where he fell in love with Rula Saade, a Lebanese Christian. They got engaged, and in 1974, after Ghani returned to Kabul to teach, his prospective father-in-law paid him a visit. “You’re going to end up in politics and you’re going to ruin my daughter’s life,” Rula’s father said. Ghani replied, not quite truthfully, “I’m totally committed to being an academic.” (The couple married in 1975, and, in addition to Mariam, they have a son, Tarek.)

In July, 1973, the monarchy was overthrown by the King’s cousin Daoud, who became Afghanistan’s first President. Daoud initially aligned himself with the Communists and, according to the Ghani “Lexicon,” he “reiterated the flawed model of modernization imposed from above.” In 1978, Communist troops shot Daoud to death as he tried to hide behind a pillar in Gul Khana Palace. Assassination followed assassination until the end of 1979, when the Soviets invaded and the jihad began. The Arg is haunted by its murdered occupants.

In 1977, Ghani and his family left Afghanistan, and he didn’t live there again for a quarter century. At Columbia, he completed a dissertation in cultural anthropology. “Production and Domination: Afghanistan, 1747-1901” analyzes the nation’s difficulty in building a centralized state in terms of its economic backwardness. The writing is almost impenetrable: “By focusing on movements of concomitant structures, I have attempted to isolate the systemic relations among the changing or non-changing elements that combine to form a structure.” The author moves between clouds of abstraction and mounds of data—nineteenth-century irrigation methods in Herat, kinship networks in Pashtun financial systems—without readily discernible priorities.

In the eighties, Ghani taught at Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins, and in 1991 he became an anthropologist for the World Bank, based in Washington, D.C. Travelling half the year, he became an expert on finance in Russia, China, and India. “He really had a moral purpose—solving poverty for real people,” Clare Lockhart said. “When he arrived in capital cities, he’d go to the markets to see what people were buying and selling, then he’d go out to the provinces and villages. He’d interview groups of miners.” Such field work was unusual for a World Bank official. James Wolfensohn, who became president of the bank in 1995, shifted its emphasis from simply lending money to poor countries to attempting to reduce poverty. He wanted to know why African and Latin American countries that followed the bank’s liberalization policies remained poor. The answer had to do with corruption, weak institutions, and ill-conceived practices by donors. Wolfensohn ordered a review of the bank’s programs, and Ghani submitted many blistering critiques, which made him unpopular with his colleagues.

Meanwhile, he was preparing for a future in Afghanistan. In 1997, with the Taliban controlling most of the country, a Columbia graduate student interviewed Ghani at the World Bank. “When we get peace in Afghanistan, we’ll go to New Zealand to learn best practices for raising sheep,” Ghani said. “We’ll go to Switzerland and study hydroelectric projects.” Afghanistan—mountains, deserts, ungoverned spaces—has always seemed to offer a blank slate for utopian dreamers: British imperialists, hippie travellers, Communists, Islamists, international do-gooders. Alex Thier, who worked for the U.N. in Afghanistan in the nineties and, later, with Ghani in Kabul, described him as an “N.G.O.-style revolutionary, as if he grew up in a cadre of the World Bank rather than in the Communist Party.” To be a visionary is, in some ways, to be depersonalized, to refuse to see what’s in front of one’s face.

On September 11, 2001, Ghani was at his desk in Washington, and he knew immediately that everything was about to change for Afghanistan. He drafted a five-step plan for a political transition to a broad-based Afghan government that could be held accountable for rebuilding the country; he warned against funding and arming the warlords who had brought Afghanistan to ruin and the Taliban to power. During the American-led war against the Taliban, a small group of experts—including Lockhart, the Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, and the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, then the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan—met at Ghani’s house outside Washington. That December, the group’s work influenced the Bonn Agreement, which mapped steps toward representative rule, while leaving unresolved the conflict between Ghani’s vision of a modern state and the interests of regional power brokers.

Six months later, Karzai became Afghanistan’s leader. Ghani’s first job in the new administration was to coördinate and track foreign aid. He believed that Afghans needed to set their own priorities for development rather than be at the mercy of the conflicting agendas of foreign countries and international agencies. Some Afghans and Westerners saw Ghani, after decades in the U.S., as a foreigner in his own land. But he is a prickly nationalist who would have been an egghead anywhere. He had a particular animus toward Western aid officials who had plenty of money and power but scant knowledge or humility. He once dressed down a contingent from the U.S. Agency for International Development for their incompetence. Ghani was among the first to foresee that a flood of foreign aid could enrich foreign contractors and turn officials corrupt while doing little for ordinary Afghans.

With Hanif Atmar, the Minister of Rural Development, Ghani created the National Solidarity Program—grants in amounts of twenty thousand to sixty thousand dollars for twenty-three thousand Afghan villages, largely funded by the World Bank. (The idea came from similar World Bank programs that Ghani had studied in Indonesia and India.) Afghan villagers were required to elect a council of men and women, devise their own goals—such as clean water or a new school—and make public their accounting figures. In one case, thirty-seven villages pooled their money to build a maternity hospital. Clare Lockhart met families just returned from exile in Iran, living in animal-skin shelters. One woman, describing the importance of the grant, told her, “It’s not about the money.”

“Don’t tell her that,” another villager said. “She’ll take the money away.”

“I don’t have that authority,” Lockhart explained.

The first woman finished her thought: “It’s that we’re trusted to do this.”

The N.S.P. was one of Afghanistan’s most successful and least corrupt programs. A new school cost a sixth of one built with a U.S.A.I.D. contract. Paul O’Brien, an Irishman who served as an adviser to Ghani, said Ghani understood that “the key to development is strong domestic institutions that can regulate all the actors around them, including international do-gooders.” When Ghani challenged foreigners to tell him what accountability measures they wanted in return for giving Afghan institutions control of the money and the agenda, “they wouldn’t do it,” O’Brien said. Donors had brought their “development army in all its glory, and that meant outputs and contracts and boxes checked.”

Instead of sending money to local communities through Afghan channels, donors like U.S.A.I.D. bid out contracts to large international companies, which in turn hired subcontractors and private security companies, none of which had a long-term stake in Afghanistan. In a 2005 ted talk on failed states, Ghani called such programs “the ugly face of the developed world to the developing countries,” adding, “Tens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on building capacity with people who are paid up to fifteen hundred dollars a day, who are incapable of thinking creatively or organically.”

The National Solidarity Program didn’t get to write Afghanistan’s future. Some estimate that during the peak years of foreign spending on Afghanistan only ten to twenty cents of every aid dollar reached the intended beneficiaries. Waste on a scale of several hundred billion dollars is the work of many authors, but the U.S. government was among the chief ones.

In the summer of 2002, Karzai named Ghani Minister of Finance. The Ministries of Interior, Defense, and Foreign Affairs were more obvious bases for building personal power, but Ghani put in twenty-hour days, holding staff meetings at 7 a.m., in a building with shattered windows and no heat. He introduced anti-corruption measures, established a centralized revenue system, and created a new currency, supporting it with the traditional hawala network of money trading. He urged his staff to take on the drug and land mafias that were infiltrating the state, saying, “We need to hit them everywhere, so they won’t have the space to establish networks.” This was the blank-slate phase of post-Taliban Afghanistan, and Ghani became the most effective figure in the new government. “The golden period of the Karzai rule was when Ashraf Ghani was Finance Minister,” Jelani Popal, a deputy in the Finance Ministry, said. “Karzai was a people person and kept the integrity of the state and society, but Ghani was the de-facto Prime Minister and the main engine of reform.”

Ghani’s temper, perhaps inflamed by the effects of his stomach cancer, became notorious. He shouted at Afghan staff and Western advisers alike. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, had known him for decades—they were in college together in Beirut—and he challenged Ghani: “Why do you have such a bad temper?” Ghani denied it, Khalilzad repeated stories he’d heard, and they went back and forth until Ghani slammed his fist on a table and exploded: “I don’t have a temper!”

Ghani’s combination of probity and arrogance antagonized the entire Karzai cabinet. When he discovered that the Minister of Defense, the Tajik warlord Mohammed Fahim, was padding his payroll with tens of thousands of “ghost” troops, Ghani slashed Fahim’s budget. Ghani later heard that Fahim went to the Arg and told Karzai that he wanted to murder Ghani—to which Karzai replied, “There’s a very long line for killing Ashraf.”

In 2004, after being elected President, Karzai made noises about dismissing Ghani. Lakhdar Brahimi asked Karzai, “Do you have anybody better than him?” Karzai said no. Brahimi encouraged him to try to work with Ghani, even though he knew that nobody in the cabinet supported Ghani, either. Brahimi asked Ghani, “You’ve been here three years and you don’t have a friend in this country?” Ali Jalali, then the Minister of Interior, said that Ghani had clashed with cabinet members from the Northern Alliance, such as Fahim, in his campaign to take power away from the warlords. Several people also told me that Khalilzad had been competing with Ghani since their university days and leveraged American influence over Karzai to undermine Ghani. (Khalilzad said that he had tried to get Karzai to change his mind, but failed.) By 2005, Ghani was gone. He later insisted that he had resigned because the government was descending into narco-corruption.

The government lost its brightest light. “If he had stayed, Afghanistan would be completely different today,” Popal said. Karzai, a master at keeping his various constituencies in the tent, had no interest in the ideas that consumed Ghani. With the American troop presence too small to secure the country, Karzai used foreign largesse to empower local strongmen, whose behavior led to the return of the Taliban.

Ghani briefly became chancellor of Kabul University. A former student there remembers that he was always either yelling at groups of undergraduates or promising things that he couldn’t deliver—a state-of-the-art library, for example. Karzai tried repeatedly to bring Ghani back. Once, in 2008, he summoned Ghani and Popal to the Arg. “I made a mistake,” Karzai said. “I’ll give you more power than before.” He offered Ghani the Ministry of Interior. Ghani refused, saying, “You are a very suspicious man. You listened to people and fired me.” Privately, Ghani confided to Popal that he planned to run for President against Karzai the next year. By then, Popal was in charge of the powerful department of local governance. “I know all the districts,” he told Ghani. “You don’t have a chance.” Ghani insisted that he could give speeches that would mobilize millions of Afghans. “It doesn’t work that way,” Popal told him. “You need to establish relationships.”

I met Ghani in Kabul in the spring of 2009, as the campaign was about to begin. He had given up his American citizenship in order to run. He described a “double failure” in Afghanistan: a failure of imagination by the international community and a failure by Afghan élites “to be the founding fathers—and mothers, because there are some—of a new state.” He received a group of university students in his home, a beautiful post-and-beam structure in traditional Nuristani style. Ghani listened to the students complain about nato firepower killing civilians, about Afghan corruption, about American manipulation of the election in Karzai’s favor. They didn’t know that American officials, disillusioned with Karzai, had encouraged Ghani to run against him. Before I left, Ghani gave me a chapan, the intricately woven coat of northern Afghanistan, and a copy of “Fixing Failed States.” I saw no sign of a volatile character—he was confident of his prospects.

But Popal was right: Ghani had no following, and he received a humiliating three per cent of the vote. Karzai was reëlected amid charges of rampant voter fraud that embittered his closest challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, and fatally damaged his relationship with the United States. Karzai, who could not run for a third term, withdrew into the Arg and steeped himself in conspiracy theories about the West. A billion-dollar Ponzi scheme was exposed at the country’s largest bank. Karzai’s final years in office were a political death agony.

During this period, Ghani was in charge of preparing Afghanistan for the withdrawal of nato forces and the handover of military authority to the Afghan Army by the end of 2014. The job, which was pro bono, allowed him to travel around the country, visiting provincial governors, corps commanders, and district police chiefs. It was a kind of listening tour, convincing him of the people’s desire for reform.

In 2014, he ran again for President. He published a three-hundred-page campaign manifesto, “Continuity and Change.” It was a classic Ghani production. “It is very smart in diagnosing all these problems,” Alex Thier said. “He’s an idea factory with all these proposals—but you don’t read it with a sense that they will all be accomplished.” When you cut through the language, the manifesto is a call for the empowerment of the Afghan people against corrupt élites: “Outstanding individuals, intellectuals, women, young people, producers of culture, workers, and other parts of society wish for change, and we want to respond to this wish.”

Ghani stopped wearing Western suits and started using his tribal name, Ahmadzai. He hired young campaign aides who were savvy about social media, and he gave rousing speeches declaring that “every Afghan is equal” and that “our masters will be the people of Afghanistan.” There were rumors that he was taking anger-management classes.

During the campaign, Farkhunda Naderi, a female member of parliament, suggested in a TV debate that the next President should name a woman—the first—to Afghanistan’s high court, which has the power to nullify laws deemed contrary to Islamic law. “Unless you get a woman on the Supreme Court, all the rights women get are on the surface and symbolic,” she told me. Naderi had suggested the idea to Karzai, only to be told that no woman was qualified. Karzai’s wife, a doctor, was rarely seen in public during his years in the Arg, but Rula Ghani was a prominent surrogate for her husband during the campaign, to the delight of some Afghans and to the chagrin of others. During a campaign speech at a Kabul high school, Ghani announced his intention to select a woman for the Supreme Court. Naderi, who was in attendance, listened in disbelief. “I was like, ‘Wow!’ He was brave to do that.”

In a naked attempt to win the votes of minority Uzbeks, Ghani selected Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, as a candidate for Vice-President. Dostum is accused of so many killings that he’s barred from entering the United States. Ghani once called him “a known killer.” Naderi was forced to defend Ghani to friends who supported human rights. “It means he’s a politician,” she told them. “If you’re going to do something in Afghanistan, you can’t import other people. You have to do something with the people who are here.” This had been the dilemma for Afghan reformers ever since King Amanullah: how, when, and whether to compromise. Ghani was showing that he, too, could play politics the old, dirty way.

In the first round of voting, on April 5th, Ghani came in second among eight candidates, with thirty-one per cent. Abdullah Abdullah, who had lost to Karzai in 2009, led, with forty-five per cent. Elegant and diplomatic, Abdullah was a familiar figure in Afghan politics. Of Pashtun and Tajik parentage, he was identified politically with the Tajiks. Abdullah and Ghani had served together in the first Karzai cabinet, with Abdullah as Foreign Minister, and they shared pro-Western, pro-reform, anti-corruption views. “I’ve known Abdullah since 1995 and Ghani since 2002,” Thier said. “These guys really care. They are not cynical, they’re not trying to turn the affairs of state to their own benefit.” Three-quarters of the nearly seven million voters chose one of these two candidates—evidence that, despite years of war, foreign interference, and disappointed hopes, Afghans still wanted a modern country.

Inevitably, the runoff between Ghani and Abdullah, in June, played out along ethnic lines, with Pashtuns—the country’s largest group—consolidating around Ghani. When early official results showed Ghani leading, Abdullah claimed a fraud on the scale of the 2009 election. An adviser to Abdullah blamed Karzai and his handpicked election commissioners, saying that they wanted power to revert to agreements among élites, with Karzai as kingmaker, if not king.

Fifteen thousand Abdullah supporters marched on the Arg to protest the election. Ghani’s circle was equally adamant. His campaign coördinator at the time, Hamdullah Mohib, recalls a meeting in which Ghani advisers discussed bringing a hundred thousand people into the streets. Ghani told them, in his didactic way, “A civil war lasts on average ten or fifteen years, and even then they’re very hard to end—ours is still going on. I can guarantee that tomorrow, if you march on Kabul, the first bullet will be fired. If anyone can guarantee when the last bullet will be fired, then I’ll allow the march.”

The U.N. mission in Kabul supervised an audit. James Cunningham, the American Ambassador at the time, recalls, “The U.N. and E.U. people really worked their asses off, being accused every day of malfeasance by one side or the other. There were fistfights inside hot warehouses, and lots of yelling.” The audit showed fraud on both sides, more of it favoring Ghani than Abdullah. American officials feared that the dispute could cause Afghanistan to fracture along ethnic lines. In July, 2014, a document circulated in the State Department:

    We should be modest about the audit mechanism—given the apparent closeness of the election and the involvement of the chief electoral officer in fraud, it is almost impossible that we will ever know who won . . . with sufficient clarity to persuade his disappointed opponent. The audits are a way to buy time for political accommodations and eventually to certify and add some credibility to a result.

American officials spent the summer negotiating a deal between Ghani and Abdullah. The loser would have to accept the other as President, without conceding the final vote, and in return would be named Chief Executive Officer—a Prime Ministerial position that doesn’t exist in the Afghan constitution. (The suggestion came from Ghani.) The results of the audit would not be released, to spare the defeated candidate a loss of face. Both Ghani’s and Abdullah’s camps resisted the arrangement, each certain that it had won outright. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment that September, there was a strong chance that, for lack of an agreement, Karzai would stay in office or that Abdullah and the Northern Alliance would declare a parallel government. Daniel Feldman, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who was involved in the negotiations, said, “If Karzai had stayed in, or if there had been a parallel government, that would have been the end of our presence in Afghanistan, and probably the end of Afghanistan—civil war on top of the Taliban.”

By mid-September, the audit had been finished: Ghani was judged the winner. But Abdullah wasn’t ready to concede. Secretary of State John Kerry called Ghani from Paris; citing the audit, he said that if fraudulent votes were discounted the gap closed significantly in Abdullah’s favor. Ghani took this to mean that the U.S. believed he had lost an election he’d tried to steal. If he was taking anger-management classes, they didn’t work. He summoned Feldman to his house for a chewing-out that lasted several hours. Grudgingly, Ghani and Abdullah accepted a compromise. On September 21st, they signed a document creating a National Unity Government. On the crucial issue of the distribution of political appointments, Abdullah had wanted the language to read “equal” and Ghani “fair.” They compromised on “equitable.” Since there was no word for it in Dari, one had to be invented: bara barguna, or “equalish.” The N.U.G. was an act of statesmanship on both sides, but no one was happy with it. To the public, it suggested that Afghan democracy was a back-room deal brokered by élites and foreigners.

Ghani was inaugurated on September 29, 2014. It was the first peaceful transfer of power in Afghanistan since 1901, but Ghani and his aides felt that he had been forced to become something less than Afghanistan’s legitimate President.

When Ghani took office, his approval rating was above eighty per cent. Eighteen months later, in March, when I met him in Kabul, it was twenty-three per cent.

In our interview, I asked how “Fixing Failed States” had guided him as President. “It’s a road map for where do you begin, when you arrive, and what you do as a leader,” Ghani answered. “One of the first things I did was to ask my colleagues in the cabinet to prepare hundred-day action plans.” He went on, “Organizations are accumulations of historical debris. They are not consciously thought. So when you ask the Education Ministry ‘What’s your core function and who’s your client?’ they laugh at you. When I say that the client is the Afghan child—and the Ministry is an instrument, not the goal—it’s greeted with shock. It’s a new idea.”

This thought led Ghani to expound on Mountstuart Elphinstone, a nineteenth-century Scottish envoy and the author of “An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul,” which described the egalitarian nature of Afghan society. From there, Ghani’s mind jumped to the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman, Amanullah’s grandfather, who imported the authoritarian idea of hierarchy from his years in exile in Russia. Then, as an example of the “inherited élitism” that distorts Afghan politics, Ghani told the story of a young man he had named Deputy Interior Minister, who had ordered a policeman beaten for stopping his vehicle because of a violation, and was then made to apologize on national television. Finally, Ghani arrived at the reign of Amanullah: “I call it the unfinished reform. A section of the élite was reformist, and then they met popular resistance. Today, the public is unbelievably aware of the constitution, of the world, and of its aspirations. The public is reformist.”

Seated across from Ghani, I found it hard to follow this two-hundred-year history of Afghan élitism. In retrospect, I can see its brilliance. But it still doesn’t seem like a road map for governing.

It was as if, after decades of thinking and reading and writing, he had to solve all Afghanistan’s problems at once. He assumed that he had a mandate from “society.” The élites were finished—“they’re out of touch,” he said. He began to impose his vision on every corner of government. He retired more than a hundred generals who had been skimming money from troop contracts. He demanded the resignations of all governors and cabinet ministers, and announced that nobody who had served in those capacities could do so again, thereby alienating fifty or so political veterans in one blow. He fired forty high-level prosecutors who had falsified their résumés. From an American-built command center in the basement of one of his palaces, Ghani held regular videoconference calls with his military commanders. He reviewed the portfolios of every international donor agency. Every Saturday, he sat at a long table in a wood-panelled room in Gul Khana Palace and chaired a committee on procurements, spending several hours reviewing contracts to make sure that they represented clean government. Ghani believed that doing such chores was the only way to solve Afghanistan’s core problems.

He trusted so few people that he could find nobody to hire as his spokesman, nobody to be mayor of Kabul. During cabinet meetings, some ministers felt so intimidated by Ghani that they busied themselves taking notes to impress him. Amrullah Saleh, a respected former intelligence chief, who was left out of the administration, said, “There is a silence in his cabinet, and it’s a treacherous silence. Ghani is not physically alone—he is intellectually alone.”

The public began hearing about ambitious projects. Ghani had become an authority on Afghanistan’s water resources, and he announced plans for twenty-nine dams, leaving the impression that they would be finished in two years. After a conversation with Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, Ghani told aides that India’s private sector would soon be investing twenty billion dollars in Afghanistan—a figure that seemed to come out of nowhere. Daniel Feldman, the American Special Representative, found Ghani’s ideas equally inspiring and implausible: “We’d walk out of meetings and say, ‘I’m not sure what country he’s talking about. It’s not Afghanistan. It sounds like a canton in Switzerland.’ ”

One morning in Char Chenar Palace, Ghani met with forty-four civil servants—forty men and four women—in charge of planning a new municipality northeast of Kabul, a variation on a project that has enticed Afghan reformers since Amanullah. As the engineers stated their pedigrees and their areas of expertise, Ghani jotted down notes while snacking on nuts, taking particular pleasure in introducing aides who had gone to Harvard or who had been named Silicon Valley’s engineer of the year. “I’ve read all the documents of the proposals you’ve submitted,” he said. “Let’s have a discussion of them.” One by one, the engineers and city planners presented slide shows about recycling, parking garages, solar-powered buses, electronic databases for title deeds. Ghani seemed perfectly happy spending a morning hearing ideas from young technocrats. Outside the Arg, mayorless Kabul was inundated with rainwater and uncollected garbage.

In “Fixing Failed States,” the chapter on politics is titled “Failed Politics”—Ghani’s book supposes that politics is destructive. He doesn’t think in terms of interests and bargains. He believes that people will act correctly once the reasonable course is shown to them (or imposed on them). After becoming President, Ghani all but ignored the traditional politics of Afghanistan—tribal networks, patronage systems, strongmen.

Under Karzai, politicians came to the palace with requests for money or for favors, and he heard them out. By one estimate, members of parliament stole a billion to a billion and a half dollars a year. During Ghani’s first year in office, he refused to meet with favor seekers. His chief of staff, Abdul Salam Rahimi, made himself so inaccessible that the joke around Kabul was that you had to call the President to see the chief of staff. Karzai used to pay the family of a power broker named Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani more than a hundred thousand dollars a month in “expense money” to keep its support. (Karzai denies this.) Ghani cut off the family, and Gailani’s sons became Ghani’s enemies. Something similar happened with Abdul Rassul Sayyaf, a former mujahid and one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan. “His initial request was for key ministries and provinces, so he could give them away,” one of Ghani’s advisers told me. “He didn’t get them. He was upset. What was more upsetting was he was no longer seen as close to power—he could no longer buy people’s loyalty.”

In Afghanistan, politics is the only path to status and power, which is why the scramble for government jobs is so fierce. Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, a banker and former Finance Minister, supported Ghani during the election. According to Ahady, Ghani promised him the Foreign Ministry, but when the time came Ghani hedged. Ahady became an opponent as well. “I’ve not promised any portfolio to anyone,” Ghani told me. “Mr. Ahady, if his sense of commitment to this nation is by portfolio, then he should judge himself.”

Last year, the notorious police commander of Uruzgan Province, Matiullah Khan, was killed, and tribal elders came to Kabul to discuss his replacement. Ghani initially wouldn’t see them, but his advisers insisted. The elders wanted the job to go to Matiullah Khan’s brother. Ghani said that he would seek the best candidate, and later rejected their choice. In the following months, nearly two hundred security posts in the province fell to the Taliban as policemen changed their flags and switched sides.

Ghani was capable of giving in to political reality. He allowed two strongmen to stay on—Atta Mohamed Noor, the governor of Balkh Province, in the north, and Abdul Razziq, the police chief of Kandahar—even though they were known for corruption and human-rights violations. They were essential partners in the fight against the Taliban, and under American pressure Ghani yielded.

One of Ghani’s young aides told him, “People say you’re not doing politics.”

“What kind of politics?” Ghani asked.

“You’re not meeting leaders, members of parliament, mujahideen.”

“It’s by choice that I don’t.”

“Why?” the aide asked. “These political élites are attacking you, and you’re losing political capital you need for reforms.”

“If I meet them, they will be all over me,” Ghani replied. “First, they’ll ask for my fingers, then my hands, then my legs. We will engage only if the discourse changes. When the time comes, you will see me meeting with them.”

Ghani’s intransigence aroused so much resentment that he couldn’t get parliament to approve some of his key appointments. Until recent weeks, he had no intelligence chief and no confirmed Defense Minister. When he named a candidate to be the first female Supreme Court justice, parliament narrowly voted her down. Predictably, the National Unity Government failed to work. The signed agreement included no specifics on the distribution of appointments, and Abdullah and Ghani vetoed each other’s choices, or one of them held the process hostage until the other gave in. Ghani’s candidate for Attorney General was blocked while Abdullah’s camp tried to get one of its own hired for Minister of Interior. One of Abdullah’s top aides, a diplomat named Omar Samad, was appointed Ambassador to Belgium, the E.U., and nato. In April, Samad was about to travel to Brussels when the President’s office sent him a letter withdrawing nato from the portfolio. Samad rejected the deal and left Kabul to be with his family in Washington. “Tiny power struggles are going on,” Samad told me. “It’s a game of domination.”

The paralysis in Kabul so concerned Washington that President Barack Obama chided both leaders in a videoconference call in March, telling Abdullah, “The political agreement that you signed with President Ghani, as far as we know, did not give you veto power.” The Attorney General–Interior Minister swap finally went through. But Ghani’s advisers remained frustrated, blaming the N.U.G. for their inability to carry out their agenda. It’s a view that commands little sympathy in Washington.

Ghani retains the loyalty of a few protégés, among them a man in his early thirties named Hamdullah Mohib. His parents had sent him to Britain in 2000, at the age of sixteen, in order to avoid conscription by the Taliban. Arriving at Heathrow without papers or money, he was taken on by a social-services agency as an unaccompanied minor. Alone in London, Mohib worked his way through college and graduate school, studying computer engineering. In 2008, he heard about a lecture at the London School of Economics by an Afghan politician who had written a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Mohib arranged to have the author speak to an Afghan student association in London. As Mohib and his friends waited for their guest to arrive, they went outside to hold parking places for the twenty-five-car entourage they expected. “I saw a man carrying his laptop bag, walking up the sidewalk,” Mohib recalls. “I was impressed. And then when he started talking—I’d never heard an Afghan politician talk like this. The others—it was all a show. And here was a man, it was all substance. He didn’t talk about himself. It was about Afghanistan and what we could do to fix it.”

Mohib worked on Ghani’s unsuccessful 2009 campaign, and in 2014 he became a top adviser. After the election, Ghani made Mohib his deputy chief of staff, then named him Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United States. The appointment rankled senior politicians, as if Ghani had given the post to an errand boy. Ghani was signalling the eclipse of the generation of Afghans who had made their names fighting the Soviets and one another.

“This is the critical time in our country’s history—my generation understands that,” Mohib said. “We either build systems and institutions that will protect my family and other people’s families, and good people will rise to the top—or we will lose, and the corrupt mafia win. If they win, it will be fiefdoms and the same families passing power from one generation to the next.”

One night, I had dinner in Kot-e-Baghcha Palace with Scott Guggenheim, the American economic adviser to Ghani. He worked with Ghani at the World Bank and, in 2002, helped create the National Solidarity Program. Guggenheim, a gregarious sixty-year-old who favors Indonesian shirts, was now living virtually alone, amid servants, in the palace. Heads of state had been invited to use it as a guest house, but almost none of them would stay overnight in Kabul. Guggenheim was given the room where, in 1979, a Communist leader was said to have been smothered in his bed.

Over dinner, Guggenheim said, “Ashraf’s biggest problem is not that he’s a bad politician but that he has a twenty-five-year vision and everyone thinks it means next year. He throws out completely unrealistic dates as placeholders.” Guggenheim described the terrible hand that had been dealt to Ghani, who took office amid the withdrawal of nearly all foreign troops. Afghanistan’s legal economy depended on U.S. bases and contracts, and after the withdrawal unemployment reached forty per cent—a disaster that the World Bank underestimated so drastically that donors hadn’t earmarked money for an emergency jobs program. American spending in Afghanistan went from about a hundred billion dollars in 2012 to half that last year. At the same time, the Afghan Army had to assume full responsibility for fighting a resurgent Taliban, with fewer weapons. Guggenheim compared the start of Ghani’s Presidency with Obama’s in 2009—“but with John Boehner as his Vice-President.” Hopelessness returned among Afghans, and a hundred and fifty-four thousand of them emigrated to Germany last year. Ghani chastised citizens for fleeing their country.

The Americans, Guggenheim went on, wanted Ghani to pursue incompatible paths: to fight corruption while keeping the corrupt Old Guard in the fold. Few people in Kabul could say what America’s policy in Afghanistan was. “Ask any senior U.S. statesman: Is there any strategy at all, besides withdrawal?” Guggenheim said. “They were so focussed on that unity government, getting it to hold together, they forgot about having an effective government.”

Around Kabul, people were waiting to see if the government would fall. Peace talks that Ghani had initiated with Pakistan were going nowhere. Afghanistan’s double-dealing neighbor had been unable, or unwilling, to bring the Taliban to the table. Why would Pakistan negotiate an end to the war when it was close to securing its goal—an Afghanistan so weakened by the Taliban that it would become a client state? The fighting season was expected to be worse than ever. A Western diplomat took out a map and showed me Taliban positions north of Kabul, along a strategic highway in Baghlan Province. “If Baghlan falls to the Taliban, they’re very quickly on their way to Kabul,” the diplomat said. The Afghan Army would concentrate its forces on defending provincial capitals while ceding rural areas, but this meant that the government would keep losing ground. At the American Embassy, officials were said to be reading cables sent from the Embassy in Saigon in 1975, just before the American evacuation of South Vietnam.

The Afghan Army is constantly on the defensive, suffering heavy casualties. Without the continued presence of American troops in the country, it would very likely collapse. In a return to “the Great Game” of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan would be exploited by its neighbors—Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China, and India. “We need what’s called a ‘hurting stalemate,’ ” another Western official told me. “Because there are élites in Kabul and Islamabad and Rawalpindi who shop in the same malls in Dubai and are happy for the war to grind on.” He added, “Over ten years, we’ve gone from trying to bring good governance and security and development and rule of law to survival. . . . There’s still a lot of ways the government could fall.” He mentioned the possibility of widespread public unrest. Last November, after the Islamic State decapitated seven Hazara civilians in southern Afghanistan, thousands of citizens nearly overran the Arg, and some palace officials imagined themselves going the way of their predecessors.

The other path for Ghani’s fall is political. Recently, he has been more willing to play by the old rules—for example, he named Gailani to the sinecure position of chairman of the High Peace Council. But the powerful men Ghani has angered are plotting their way back into power. The agreement signed nearly two years ago by Ghani and Abdullah called for electoral reforms, local elections, and a constitutional assembly to be completed by September of this year, in order to enshrine Abdullah’s job in the constitution. None of this has happened, or will anytime soon, because of political infighting and the war—giving Ghani’s enemies an opening to denounce the government’s legitimacy. Karzai, who meets regularly with the opposition, is said to advocate the convening of a loya jirga, a traditional assembly, which could lead to Ghani’s ouster and the naming of a new President. Umer Daudzai, Karzai’s former chief of staff—who had been the point man for handling cash from the Iranian regime, with a bill-counting machine in his office—told me, “Ghani has made everybody around him an enemy. There’s nobody left. One day, I was watching his wife on TV, and my wife said, ‘Why are you watching her so closely?’ I said, ‘I’m waiting for her to explode—Rescue me!’ ” Daudzai has formed a political coalition to take over the Arg when the chance comes. “If there is going to be change, there is only one way,” he said. “Ghani resigns.” A Western official with long experience in Afghanistan told me that the notion of a junta installed by a military coup was not far-fetched.

In Kabul, there is strikingly little evidence of the long and costly American effort. I asked Amrullah Saleh, the former head of intelligence, what had been achieved in Afghanistan in the past fifteen years. “From the American point of view, very little,” he said. “From the Afghan point of view, very much. I may have a lot of personal grievances, but, if you look at the picture from a bird’s eye, things have changed enormously.” Saleh didn’t mean roads or dams. He meant the transformation of Afghan society, of public discourse, among activists and intellectuals, women and youth. “Prior to 9/11, the biggest theme of our discussion was: How do you form a state? Today, it’s not that. The biggest discourse today is how the state can deliver, how the state can survive, how Afghanistan’s diversity can remain intact, and how it can be a partner with the world community.”

Those themes have engaged Ghani throughout his life. Although Saleh is one of his critics, he believed that Ghani could still do important things, and he did not want to see him go the way of other reformers in Afghan history. “For me, the pain is that as people see very little being delivered by this government, by this President, it will not only mean the failure of Ashraf Ghani,” Saleh said. “It will also mean the failure of technocracy in Afghan politics.” 

George Packer became a staff writer in 2003.


This article appears in other versions of the July 4, 2016, issue, with the headline “The Theorist in the Palace.”

========================================
11. INDIA: AVOIDING THE ZOMBIE CITY ALGORITHM
by Anant Maringanti
========================================
(livemint.com - 29 JUne 2016)

If we approach cities as if all they require are software products to be activated to a new life as smart cities, all we will be doing is paying rent for server stacks for data warehousing

Social scientists and planners have been asking for granulated data for a long time. Clunky, outdated data preserved in outmoded formats makes Indian urbanization one of the most opaque processes in the world. Yet, at a time when new data technologies and new promises of openness are in the air, social scientists and planners appear to be wary. They seem to think that urban life is up in the air like never before. Corporate and political bluster aside, Indian city managers apprehend heightened uncertainties like never before. What explains this dissonance? What do we need to do create a robust urban imagination?

Cities are palimpsests. The postman knows the boundaries of his daily beat. The bus conductor knows the route that he navigates trip after trip. The milk man knows which door to knock morning after morning. The newspaper boy knows which of his rolled up missiles is to be aimed at which balcony week in and week out. The swanky new shopping mall can only be aligned with the 400-year-old city wall. The households in the gated community are reminded of the fact that they are sitting in the foreshore of the 700-year-old lake when rainwater floods their basements—year after year.

Cities are Janus-like—one face is constantly improvising and learning new routines of self-regulation. The other seeks to meticulously create rules that are accepted as legitimate by everyone for the whole to be orchestrated. Planning, regulating and catalyzing change in such places requires data. But it equally requires discretion. It requires intimate knowledge of the local. Change driven exclusively, and undemocratically is a recipe for chaos and misery.

The improvising, self-regulating city operates tactically. It conceals and reveals, dodges and embraces, ducks and thrusts forward, disrupts in minute invisible ways and yet finds its own rhythms. The planned, regulated city operates strategically. It structures, creates opportunities and obstacles. It exercises authority and puts in place infrastructure. Data is created by people who act strategically and tactically. While there can never be a perfect symmetry between the two, they can and should work together, however uneasily, for cities to remain functional. Investments in data technologies without appreciation of this coexistence of different ways of cities create hopelessly entangled legacies of infrastructures and routines.

Take the simple case of bus tracking software. With easy availability of GPS technologies, many schools in our cities are now offering GPS tracking services to parents of children. When the school bus approaches the stop near home, the parent receives a text message. A scroll appears on the local TV screen. The bus is geo-fenced—i.e. when it goes off its ordained route, a deviation alert is recorded and transmitted to everyone. This technology-enabled service is billed as one that saves the parents precious time, makes schools more accountable and children safer. The data is supposed to be useful to ensure that the bus driver is not siphoning off fuel. It is useful to plan school bus routes. So far so good. But what happened to the idea of decent schooling in the neighbourhood? Why are children commuting such long distances through strange, unfamiliar and threatening territories?

This puzzle gets even more intriguing when we consider the fact that till date, not one among the State Transport Undertakings (STUs) which run fleets of thousands of buses in Indian metropolises has fully embraced bus tracking software. Most of them still deploy fleets based on the direct observations reported by controllers and depot managers. Equipped with electronic Ticket Issuing Machines (TIMs), each of the thousands of conductors logs in information about each of the thousands of tickets issued by them in a shift. Most of them still make schedules based on the assumption that running time is a simple function of time and distance, ignoring the rush hour slowdowns. Since a large percentage of crew are contract workers whose monthly income is linked to the number of trips made in a shift, they resort to speeding and skipping scheduled stops. Introduction of data technologies without paying heed to changing work routines and contracting norms has resulted in large amounts of unusable data at one end and disenfranchised bus crews at the other. STUs’ strategy is undermined by the employee tactics.

Take the case of stray dog population in Indian cities. It is the responsibility of the public health wings of municipal authorities to keep the population of stray dogs in Indian cities under check.

In many cities, it varies between five to ten humans per dog. They are required by law and policy to neuter dogs and release them into their old neighbourhoods. Increases in dog population result in higher competition for food and mating and leads to aggressive behaviour and poor health occasionally endangering humans. Yet, more and more municipalities are relying on contract workers, who due to lack of familiarity with neighbourhoods, create war-like conditions on the streets when they catch dogs for sterilization. Hospitals are reporting dog menace near mortuaries and general wards. Dog census, sterilization data, and neighbourhood assessments are all important for creating safe and compassionate neighbourhoods for humans and non-humans—in this case, stray dogs. But equally important are local knowledge, behavioural studies, physical planning and neighbourhood institution building. Smart initiatives that are blind to this lead to programmes like the ones adopted by some smart cities recently—insert microchips in stray dogs, install surveillance systems around mortuaries, hire more data entry workers to monitor the situation.

Government agencies in Indian cities—public utilities, service providers, regulators, local governments—are all virtually under siege from vendors of new technologies.

With large chunks of government work being outsourced, the capacities within these agencies to deal with their day-to-day functions has dramatically come down in the last two decades. The casualty in this is native intelligence. If we approach cities as if all they require is software products to be activated to new life as smart cities, all we will be doing is to pay rent for server stacks for data warehousing.

Smart city initiatives ought to be imagined as interventions into living organisms—not algorithms that can activate doddering zombies. This can be done if we listen out carefully for the urban voices and actors (and that includes dogs and monkeys and other neighbours) that are being systematically ignored.

Anant Maringanti is the director of Hyderabad Urban Lab, a multi-disciplinary urban research institution based in Hyderabad. 

========================================
12. REVIEW: SHODHAN ON SHARAFI, MITRA, LAW AND IDENTITY IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA: PARSI LEGAL CULTURE, 1772-1947
========================================
 Mitra Sharafi. Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947. Studies in Legal History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Illustrations. 368 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-04797-6.

Reviewed by Amrita Shodhan (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-Asia (June, 2016)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Parsi Legal Culture: A Detailed Ethnography of a Distinctive Tradition

Mitra Sharafi’s account of Parsi legal culture is a comprehensive and detailed legal ethnography of the Parsis of the early twentieth century. It studies the way in which Parsis in Bombay (India), Burma, and generally in the British Empire took to the law as profession as well as a means to solve their disputes. The book is a most important contribution to the field of almost nonexistent scholarship on colonial Parsi social history. While there are a host of interesting old biographies, which Sharafi uses expertly, there are very few critical studies of the colonial experience of the Parsis. Sharafi looks at a range of Parsi legal developments in the formalized British courts, primarily from 1865 onward, when the Parsi Matrimonial Acts were codified and the Matrimonial Court set up. Most of her case histories are from the early twentieth century. 

The most striking and ambitious claim of the book is that the Parsis were exceptional in inserting themselves in positions of power in the colonial legal system so that the agents in the colonial legal field—from legislation to dispute settlement—were themselves Parsis. Thus, she suggests that they manipulated colonial structures to suit their community’s needs, perceptions, and tastes. This might be seen as an intervention in the debate on the modalities of colonial rule and its impact on Indian communities. The debate in the field has ranged from the argument that the imperial administrators ruled by local mores and the colonial era was no great break from previous rulers to the argument that the colonial rulers transformed Indian society beyond recognition, either by excessive, inadequate, or inappropriate intervention.[1]

Sharafi’s position seems to support the first argument that colonial rule was undertaken by extensive collaboration with the natives. However, she is less interested in this historiographic argument. As befitting the lawyer that she is, her book focuses on attesting how the natives used the system for their own new and burgeoning social and religious interests. Thus, her book documents the changes that were ongoing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not buying the argument of changeless Indian society, nor the unremitting anticolonialism. She suggests that the Parsis were similar to the other Indians who worked the colonial system and contributed to its making but were exceptional in the extent to which they inserted themselves in the colonial system to work it for themselves. She develops this understanding in order to situate the elite Parsis employed as colonial judges and lawyers adjudicating Parsi disputes and inter-Parsi personal and religious matters. 

The attempt to demonstrate Parsi agency and “their desired models of the family and the community” as somehow autonomous of the imperialist reading of Zoroastrian history makes for a most thought-provoking read (p. 24). Sharafi talks of a Parsi habitus in the law in Bombay to answer the question of autonomy. She says Parsi habitus was first visible in the 1830s and reproduced in concentrated form with the development of a subculture of Parsi litigation until 1947. She outlines this inhabitation of the legal system over a very long period with thick descriptions and immense detail about the use of the courts both as litigants and the types of cases that come to court and legal professionals manning the courts. Her footnotes, as detailed as her text, provide context to the Parsi practices with reference to Hindu, Muslim Jewish, and Armenian case law as well as broader imperial references to Australian and African cases and legal practices.

Sharafi’s book examines Parsi legal engagement through three “mirrors” through the colonial period of 1772 to 1947 (p. 30). The three are legal culture and litigation; legislation, primarily the Matrimonial Acts and the Matrimonial Court; and Parsi legal engagement on questions of trust law and membership in the community. 

Section 1 analyzes legal culture primarily through litigation, chiefly matrimonial and personal issues taken to court. Here she argues that Zoroastrian legal material and rules were not translated until late in the colonial period and thus were not seen to be guiding the Parsis in the early period. She also suggests that the Parsis had no robust legal institutions. This contention is contradicted in the second section with some documentation of the role of the Parsi Panchayat and admitting that early nineteenth-century information on the Parsi Panchayat was not accessed or accessible. Thus her study of Parsi litigation is primarily from the early twentieth century when the colonial courts were firmly established. She examines the field of legal pluralism for the Parsis and finds only references to informal friends and family as sources of legal authority in this period. There is no reference to panchayats as judicial bodies in this late period. There is a tantalizing reference to formal arbitration bodies. This could form the subject of another important study. It would also be interesting to follow up the Parsi Panchayat in an earlier period, from the early nineteenth century, and examine cases even on appeal to the British courts from the panchayat. Harry Borradaile’s two-volume Reports of Civil Causes Adjudged by the Court of Sudder Adawlut (1863) are full of appeals against panchayat decisions of different castes in the 1800s-20s.

Sharafi documents an interesting overlap and orientation toward state law among Parsis and the use of formal law even in private arbitration. Anyone further interested in this state of legal pluralism could refer to the excellent work of Gopika Solanki, Adjudication of Religious Family Laws (2011), on Bombay. Solanki’s study provides an interesting comparison with the current state of the interpenetrated worlds of state law and community or private practice. Sharafi’s description of the private arbitrators and people being warned of what “outcome might be expected from going to court” is reminiscent of Solanki’s contemporary findings and suggests some modification of Parsi exceptionalism (p. 45).

The second section of the book looks at Parsi legislation. Here she looks at the making of the Parsi personal law code and the setting up of the Matrimonial Court. The Parsis rejected the application of primogeniture and coverture and lobbied for the making of their own law. The engagement of Parsi lawyers is well attested, and she documents well the twists and turns in the saga of the making of the law. This is documented with a nice set of family histories of Parsi lawyers and in-depth studies of men like D. F. Mulla. Humorous anecdotes and cartoons give a textured sense of legal life. This makes for an interesting ethnography of the full range of Parsis in law, from clerks, bailiffs, and translators, to officials in courts and jails, and judges. 

The last part of this section examines the application of the Matrimonial Acts through case records. Again most of the record is from the early twentieth century. It documents in some detail various disputes in family practices: polygamy, prostitution, child marriages, domestic violence, and divorce. Sharafi demonstrates her skill as a storyteller, and you might find the story of a family you know as I did of a Parsi family in Ahmedabad and their marital quarrel (p. 146n120, the story of Jehangir Vakil). This section delineates the decline of the Parsi Panchayat as an adjudicatory body elected from the Anjuman. In the context of the present study, this is only a minor coda and thus she can conclude that there was no “robust ... forum for dispute resolution among the Parsis, the colonial courts filled the gap” (p. 82). Perhaps the courts replaced the panchayat. In fact, the Matrimonial Court with its Parsi jury is a very good panchayat in a certain sense.

The third section, titled “Beyond Personal Law,” reflects on the making of the community, showing the role of lawyers and judges in settling cases with reference to the practice of trusts as well as community membership. The in-depth study of several cases—the juddin (non-Parsi) conversion controversy, the Parsi Panchayat case (1906-8), and Bella’s case in Burma (1925)—presents the story of how the community has built its boundaries over the last hundred years. She argues that activist judges like Justice Dinshah Dhanjibhai Davar have provided extensive judgments on the basis of their own value system and ideals and knowledge about Zoroastrianism. Would they have found it impossible to do so without “their own” judges? What does it do to the colonial system to have partisan judges? Her study of the activist role of Justice Davar and others reminds one of Marc Galanter’s path-breaking article “Hinduism, Secularism and the Indian Judiciary” on Hindu judges, especially Justice Pralhad Balacharya Gajendragadkar, and their role in reinterpreting Hinduism in court.[2] Sharafi takes forward Galanter’s work on the social history of Indian judicial structures and histories. 

The book is a mine of information drawn from interesting research done in various archives across the world, from the Scottish dales (to examine the background of some of the characters in her story) and London, to Bombay and Burma. The book is also beautifully illustrated with almost thirty cartoons and photographs. It should be of great interest to those interested in Parsi history, colonial lawyering, and the growth of religious communities. The extensive footnotes make it a very useful resource for academics in a range of disciplines in history and law, focusing on customary practices, legal pluralism, and colonial legalities. The footnotes would be more accessible if the complete references had been repeated in the bibliography. As it stands, the bibliography is a very select listing of sources. The index is also limited and does not provide comprehensive access to the text. The book will go into a second and paperback edition, where the referencing can be extended. This work has already set the benchmark and laid down the parameters for a discussion of Parsi history. It also makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the colonial experience. 

Notes

[1]. Among others, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Sudipto Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

[2]. Marc Galanter, “Hinduism, Secularism and the Indian Judiciary,” Philosophy East and West 21, no. 4 (October 1971): 467-487.

========================================
13. FOLLOWING THE BREXIT VOTE, I FEAR TOLERANT BRITAIN IS LOST FOR EVER
by Gilane Tawadros
========================================
(The Guardian - 4 July 2016)

As instances of race hate crimes increase, I wonder what happened to the open, tolerant nation that offered refuge to my family 46 years ago

As I posted my vote to remain in the EU into the ballot box, I had an overwhelming sense of teetering on the edge of a precipice. My parents were political exiles, compelled to leave President Nasser’s Egypt in 1970 when friends and neighbours were too scared to air their views in public and knocks on the door in the early hours meant imprisonment and possibly torture. My parents weighed up their options: stay in their own country surrounded by everything that was warmly familiar; or uproot their family so that their children could be free to speak their minds and determine their future?

They chose the latter. After some deliberation about where to go – the United States, Australia, Canada or Britain – they chose Britain. They loved the BBC World Service, which they considered a beacon of free speech, and were connected to Britain, as so many millions of people are, through the legacy of empire and colonialism, through language and education, and above all through a deeply held belief in the British values of tolerance, inclusion and openness.

Related: After a campaign scarred by bigotry, it’s become OK to be racist in Britain | Aditya Chakrabortty

And so, in middle age, they left behind everything they knew to embark upon a risky venture. My father, who had been an engineer and senior officer in the Egyptian air force, studied computer science and took menial jobs to support his young family. In spite of the financial struggles and the petty, mundane humiliations, my parents were convinced they had made the right decision.

After I had cast my ballot, I took the bus to Shepherd’s Bush tube station. A campaigner was distributing “vote remain” stickers to passers-by. I photographed him. A young woman standing behind me on the bus smiled: “This feels very emotional,” she said. “I’m Polish and I feel like no one wants me to be here. But who would be willing to accept the minimum wage as we do? My sister lives in Germany and is training to be a lawyer. It’s different there.”

France and Germany, I once thought, were less tolerant than the accommodating Britain. In France – where I lived for a time – you were either French or “other”; there was no middle ground, no hyphenated identity. But Britain was different. You could never belong completely but you could embrace Britishness and enjoy a hybrid, contingent form of belonging: black British, British-Egyptian, British-Asian and so on.

It wasn’t 100% British in a pure, cricket-white, cricket test sort of way, but it was British enough, and left room for the well of other cultural experiences and influences that shaped your identity. In turn, this hybrid, contingent identity enabled Britain to grow into a 21st-century nation infused with the intellectual, artistic and social influences of countless other cultures, making it richer and more interesting.

Related: Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply | Randeep Ramesh

When did that change? That is the question that has haunted me for the past week, since I woke last Friday morning and reached for my phone to learn the result of the EU referendum. The change did not happen overnight. It happened slowly.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the change started but it has come in small steps rather than substantial leaps. The slow souring as multiculturalism stopped being something to be celebrated, becoming instead a watchword for an ill-advised dalliance with something dangerous; the spreading view that racism and prejudice were issues for individuals after all, and not institutional and systemic as the inquiry into the botched investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s brutal murder had established. the increasing hostility towards British Muslims in all parts of British society; and the heightened fear of migrants and refugees, which reached fever pitch during the campaign. Now that reports of race hate crime are soaring, it seems undeniable that the vicious and irresponsible rhetoric of politicians and media in the days and weeks leading up to the referendum has fostered toxic sentiments.

I feel bereaved, as though I may have lost something very dear, and I’m terrified that what I have lost may be irrecoverable. Strange as it may seem, I am in mourning for St George. Born in what is now Israel to a Greek family, he was a soldier in the Roman army in Italy and he died in what would become Turkey. This is the version of Englishness I think is worth fighting for: embedded in Europe, connected to the world, not frozen and immutable. If we can’t be Europeans in a constitutional sense then now is the time to reclaim and redefine Englishness as an identity, culture and politics that is intrinsically diverse, worldly and constantly evolving.

========================================
14. ELENA OSOKINA. OUR DAILY BREAD: SOCIALIST DISTRIBUTION AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL IN STALIN'S RUSSIA, 1927-1941. Edited by Kate Transchel. New York: Routledge, 2015. 288 pp. $47.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-56324-905-1.
========================================

Reviewed by Alexey Golubev (University of British Columbia, Department of History)
Published on H-Material-Culture (June, 2016)
Commissioned by Marieke Hendriksen

The book under review is not brand new. Its first Russian edition was published in 1999 by Rosspen, one of the leading academic publishers in Russia; the English translation appeared from M. E. Sharpe in 2001; and the second Russian edition came out in 2008. Its author, Elena Osokina, who at the time of writing was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, used an extraordinarily rich body of archival sources that gave her work a textbook status in the studies of consumption and everyday life during Stalinism. At the same time, this book is of interest not only to historians of the Soviet Union, but also to a broader audience of scholars of material culture. Our Daily Bread is an excellent study of social effects of commodities and their circulation, which is all the more illuminating as it examines a period of radical political, economic, and social transformations, when the ability of commodities to suggest and materialize forms of social organization became particularly visible.

The study begins with 1927, a watershed year in Soviet economic history, when the Soviet government announced a highly ambitious program of accelerated industrialization known as the First Five-Year Plan. Prior to 1927, the Soviet government had tolerated certain elements of market economy, first of all in agriculture and retail trade, as a measure to overcome the post-Russian Civil War economic and social crisis. However, the accelerated industrialization campaign required a massive redistribution of wealth from the agricultural sector to heavy industry. Market tools failed to provide the Soviet government with a lever against peasants unwilling to sell their products below market prices for the abstract needs of industrialization. This is a well-known story, which Osokina discusses in chapters 1–3 from different perspectives. We meet Soviet officials with their ideological concerns, political visions, and economic ideas; rank-and-file bureaucrats who had to meet production quotas set by the First Five-Year Plan and were ready to resort to any means in order to fulfill them; urban communities facing food shortages and blaming the countryside for them; and, of course, Soviet peasants who bore the brunt of the Soviet government’s determination to “phas[e] out the market and replac[e] it with the planned economy” (p. 8). Chapter 4 describes the climax of this confrontation between the Soviet government and independent farmers. Osokina shows here how the accelerated industrial development acquired its own momentum that demanded a fast, effective, and ruthless extraction of wealth from agricultural producers, destroyed the remaining elements of the market economy, and led to a collapse in food production and, eventually, the Soviet famine of 1932–33.

The destruction of the national market had one important consequence for the Soviet commodity: its free circulation was now replaced by two other forms of distribution. One was the state rationing system, another was the black market. This led to important social and cultural changes that Osokina discusses in the remaining six chapters of her book. The combination of the state monopoly on the distribution of commodities coupled with their shortages (beginning with bread, a basic staple of the Soviet diet) prompted Soviet leaders to introduce differentiating rationing schemes for different social groups. In chapters 5–7, in particular, Osokina shows how in the course of the early 1930s the satisfaction of consumer desires among Soviet citizens became a reward from the state. Different levels of consumer satisfaction depended on one’s level of contribution to the Soviet national economy. As a result, different access to commodities acted as a kind of social topography that redefined Soviet social space on the basis of one universal factor: the intimacy of one’s relation to authority. While education, occupation, or social origin did matter in one's navigation through Soviet social space, its fundamental structure was more amorphous and spontaneously forming: social distinction in the Stalinist USSR was measured in terms of symbolic distance to the authority, and this distance was materialized in the different access to commodities. Osokina nicely demonstrates it in the appendix of her book, where she structures her rich empirical material into tables showing supply norms established by the Soviet government for different categories of its citizens. In 1931, for example, there were four categories of workers in the Soviet Union, a classification defined by their ability and willingness to meet or, better, to exceed the production quotas as well as by the importance of the factories where they were employed in the industrialization plans. The workers in the highest rationing category received 4.4 kg of meat per month, while those attributed to the next three categories received, in descending order, 2.6 kg, 1 kg, or nothing at all. Butter was rationed only to the first two categories of workers (400 and 200 gr, respectively), and eggs (10 per month)--only to the highest one. The state’s position as the only legitimate provider of material welfare created a social hierarchy in which satisfaction of a consumer desire was a measure and a result of one’s position within this hierarchy. The black market that Osokina examines in chapters 7 and 10 further contributed to this social change by draining economic resources from disadvantaged population groups to the people whose social position was closer to the new power vertical.

Our Daily Bread is, thus, an important intervention in our understanding of social change in the Stalinist USSR. Most works on consumption and material culture in the USSR focus on the Soviet government’s intentional efforts to restructure Soviet society in a kind of a social engineering experiment. For example, Julie Hessler’s A Social History of Soviet Trade (2004) approaches the period of the 1930s as the time when the state authorities adopted a new model of “cultured soviet trade” as a means to construct a more civilized, rational, and controllable society. Vera Dunhan’s earlier In Stalin’s Time (1976) argued in a similar way that during late Stalinism the Soviet state used consumption to solicit cooperation from the Soviet “middle class,” whose intellectual expertise became a key resource in the technological confrontation with the Western bloc. These approaches have been extremely productive in our understanding of the politics of consumption in the Stalinist USSR. What we can learn from Elena Osokina’s book with its focus on consumption practices is that the dramatic social changes of Stalinism were, perhaps, not just orchestrated by the Soviet government, but were also a product of a new social form of the Soviet commodity. In a very materialist logic, Our Daily Bread demonstrates how the world of Soviet people came to reflect the world of Soviet things that had changed dramatically with the onset of radical economic reforms based on the ideas of planned economy. Following commodities in their trajectories through Soviet social space, this book shows the work of deep social structures that shaped Soviet society in the 1930s, influenced its later evolution, and are still visible in post-Soviet societies.


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

     #####
    #### _\_  ________
    ##=-[.].]| \      \
    #(    _\ |  |------|
     #   __| |  ||||||||
      \  _/  |  ||||||||
   .--'--'-. |  | ____ |
  / __      `|__|[o__o]|
_(____nm_______ /____\____ 

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
=====================================