Afghanistan is spiraling downward. Terrorist strikes in Kabul and an assassination campaign against local officials, schoolteachers and religious figures in the southern provinces have illustrated the reach of the Taliban and the vulnerability of the government.
The common reaction of the United States and Afghanistan’s other foreign backers has been to call for more international troops and to reaffirm their commitment to the government of President Hamid Karzai. But this approach has done little to alter the situation, because the root causes of Afghanistan’s deepest ills lie elsewhere.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Afghanistan’s 2004 Constitution is inappropriate and ineffective. The strong presidential system it embodies has not served the country well.
At the time, many historians and constitutional scholars warned that such a system wouldn’t work in a war-torn state with so many tribal and ethnic divisions. Presidential systems typically produce many disgruntled losers intent on challenging or undermining the victor. In addition, they can also put too much formal power in the hands of the winner, leading to personalized politics in which lesser politicians fight viciously over access to the president.
Yet, paradoxically, the actual powers of the president are often less than they appear on paper, while his responsibilities are heavy and the expectations that citizens have of him are unrealistic. It is all too easy to create a job that no one could do adequately.
This is precisely what has happened to President Karzai. A decent and incorruptible man, he has nonetheless grown increasingly isolated from the public. His position has been undermined by associates in the executive branch who lack his personal qualities, and by the allocation of ministries to various factions as political prizes.
The result is a corrupt and dysfunctional government in which senior positions are filled not on the basis of merit but by family, tribal, ethnic and factional connections. The president and his key advisers increasingly attract the blame for all the failures of Afghanistan’s transition; the presidential system is cracking under the weight of the burdens it is expected to carry.
Afghanistan does have a two-chamber Parliament, and although it is far from ideal, it has provided a venue for a range of voices to be heard. Unfortunately, the executive branch has seen no compelling reason to coordinate its functions with the legislative. The relationship is so tense that President Karzai and Muhammad Yunus Qanooni, the speaker of the lower house (the Wolesi Jirga), haven’t been on speaking terms for the last six months.
Given its history of weak state structures in ever-changing relationships with tight-knit tribal and ethnic societies, Afghanistan would be far better served by a more inclusive parliamentary system of government. This would mean a ceremonial rather than an executive president, a prime minister and other cabinet members drawn from the upper and lower houses of Parliament, and stronger local and regional governments that would make ordinary Afghans feel connected to the political system.
Such a decentralized system would ensure that the government had a working parliamentary majority that could hold the executive branch accountable. At present, Mr. Karzai really answers to a fractious cluster of foreign donors, not to elected Afghan legislators, a situation that has made the Afghan public understandably skeptical of the democratic experiment.
A number of President Karzai’s political rivals have argued in favor of a parliamentary system, and for this reason alone, it seems, his supporters have spurned the idea. This is a pity: constitutional questions of this sort go far beyond the turmoil of day-to-day politics, and deserve measured and thoughtful responses.
In Afghan tradition, the proper forum for considering changes of this scope is the Loya Jirga, or grand assembly. It was the 2003 Loya Jirga that finally established the present constitutional arrangements. There is now a need for another grand assembly to repair them. This might cost Mr. Karzai his job, but it could also save his country.
Amin Saikal, the director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University and the author of Modern Afghanistan and William Maley, the director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the university and the author of Rescuing Afghanistan.