Explaining varieties of corruption in the Afghan justice sector

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Judicial reform in Afghanistan is seriously undermined by systemic corruption that has resulted in low legitimacy of the state and weak rule of law. This article reviews the main shortcomings in the Afghan justice system with reference to 70 interviews conducted in Kabul. Building on legal pluralism and a political economic approach, the shortcomings and causes and consequences of corruption in the Afghan justice sector are highlighted. These range from low pay, resulting in bribery; criminal and political intrusion into the judiciary; non-adherence to meritocracy, with poorly educated judges and prosecutors; and low funding in the judicial sector resulting in weak case tracking and human rights abuses in the countryside. This is followed by sociological approaches: understanding corruption from a non-Western approach and emphasis on religion, morality and ethics in order to curb it

Managing withdrawal: Afghanistan as the forgotten example in attempting conflict resolution and state reconstruction

Perhaps surprisingly, given the availability of new Russian memoir material, some excellent individual monographs, and a large variety of declassified documents, a full operational-political account of the Soviet Union's withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan has yet to be written. This article, utilising openly published yet neglected sources, attempts to fill that gap. The final fate of the Najibullah regime, and the contradictory effect of the National Reconciliation Policy in Afghanistan itself, suggests four key lessons for international forces today as disengagement from both Iraq and Afghanistan again becomes a pressing issue, and as questions around re-creating stability within a failed state scenario again occupy the international community