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A military surge is not enough to win in Afghanistan. Conquering the Taliban will require counterinsurgency economics. Karzai and his corrupt coterie of government officials have failed the Afghan people one too many times, making fortunes from illicit trade, monopolizing U.S. contracts and jailing their rivals. Let us hope with a renewed set of promises to keep that Kabul can lead the way to a functioning state. Adapted from the source document.

A prominent feature of the literature on Islamic law is the absence of reference to concrete cases. The preference given to oral testimony over written evidence by the ulema may have been one of the reasons for this neglect. But a more crucial factor can be traced back to the conceptual apparatus of the researchers who made use of the blurred notion of "traditional" society. As obedience to norms in such societies was supposedly automatic, the researchers could legitimately focus on ideals instead of the complexities of concrete behavior.

The foundation of a State in Afghanistan by the Pashtun tribesmen in 1747 posed the question of a religious policy. The issue was not that of proselytism. Most of the Afghans did adhere to one or another form of Islam and the followers of other creeds did not even constitute one percent of the population. But the Islam adhered to by the tribesmen did not have Shari'a (Islamic Law) as its judicial basis and no religious tradition enforced allegiance to monarchs.

Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have taken an active part in the effort to save failed states for many years, serving as World Bank officials, as advisers to the UN, and as high-level participants in Afghanistan. In Fixing Failed States, they described the issue--vividly and convincingly--offering an on-the-ground picture of why past efforts have not worked and advancing a groundbreaking new solution to this most pressing of global crises. For the paperback edition, a new preface addresses continuing governance problems in weak states like Afghanistan and the global financial recession.