Is Carving Up Afghanistan an Option?

After less than two weeks in a chateau near Bonn, Germany, Afghan leaders and their U.N. hosts declared they had in hand a prize that has eluded Afghanistan for more than 20 years: a commitment to government and peace.

Nobody, however, confuses Bonn 2001 with Philadelphia 1787, and the much-celebrated agreement between feuding Afghan factions is no constitution for the ages.

In fact, the Bonn negotiations merely have produced a schedule for attempting a definitive settlement: by Dec. 22, an “interim government”; a commission to write a first draft of a constitution within two months; a loya jirga, or council of elders, to serve as a constitutional ratifying convention within six months; and within 2those years, elections to choose a long-term government.

At each step, pitfalls await. Will the armed factions on the ground respect the new short-term administration of Pushtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai? What type of state will the constitutional drafting commission choose? Who will sit in the loya jirga--and who will choose them? Can a country habitually at war with itself be ready in a historical blink of the eye to carry out an exercise in mass democracy? Can the Afghans give birth to a viable state?

Almost on the first day of allied military operations, news organizations in Pakistan and India began speculating that partition of Afghanistan into its constituent ethnic units might be in the cards. Opinion-shapers in the U.S. also have floated the idea that a single Afghan state is a pipe dream.

The allure of partition is simple. Afghanistan contains a patchwork of warring linguistic and ethnic groups. In countries with a similar makeup, divorce between hostile communities arguably proved to be a peacemaker.

It worked in the borderlands between Germany and Eastern Europe. De facto partition curbed intercommunity violence in Cyprus. And carving out separate states on the Indian subcontinent, some say, averted more problems than it caused.

Partition, however, is far from an easy choice.

Difficult questions have to be asked about a policy that contains ominous overtones of ethnic cleansing. Can the West commit the material resources necessary to compensate the millions of individuals whom the upheaval of partition would traumatize? Is it possible to commit armed forces sufficient to oversee partition? Are we prepared to entertain the notion that the pluralist ideals on which some countries thrive may not work for all countries?

Partition of a state such as Afghanistan, which some say was once a model of coexistence, would be a bitter pill.

It would also throw away a legal concept at the heart of international relations since 1945--the immutability and supremacy of states regarding their borders and internal affairs. Partition changes borders, and it usually involves an element of compulsion. States seldom say “yes” when asked to extinguish themselves. Jettisoning a long-useful rule just to address Afghanistan, without trying less disruptive alternatives, would be foolhardy. Somalia and Congo suffer chaos as intractable as Afghanistan’s. In varying degrees, Colombia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Georgia, Mauritania, Yemen and Iraq have lost control of territories or peoples within their borders.

Until recently, policymakers took the view that international society can endure such pockets of nongovernance. Events have proved this view wrong.

Failed states do not merely cause privation for their inhabitants. In the haven and encouragement they provide terrorists, they also cause decay of geopolitical order. Afghanistan and its ilk are like collapsed stars, ceasing to cast useful light but disrupting vast regions with intense and malignant radiation.

In today’s new security environment, we must find remedies for states that implode.

If Afghanistan is to avoid the painful precedent of partition, the Afghans themselves will have to make the best of their barely charted aspirations.

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Thomas D. Grant, a fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, is an international lawyer specializing in nations’ constitutional issues.