Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

I'm going to focus a bit differently here, and give a different slice or touch a different piece of the elephant as compared to the other presentations. I will address the justice issues in Afghanistan. Let me suggest for starters that there are several things that we learned from a lot of the recent previous cases, post-conflict scenarios in other parts of the world that are relevant to Afghanistan.

The first is the obvious one, as Spence emphasized, which is efforts to reestablish justice and a viable, credible system of justice - whatever that may mean in the local context - is essential to basic security. That necessarily means something that the international community, when it's gone in previously to various countries, hasn't always done very well at, namely, focusing on all components of justice. It's not enough to just go in and say, "Ok, we're going to provide some assistance to the judges. We're going to get some judges appointed. We're going to do some training; we're going to do some other things. And oh - prisons? Well, no, we don't do that." Most of the international donor community doesn't like to provide assistance to prisons. It's where nasty things happen, it's where there can be abuses taking place. You get burned in the press because you provided assistance to some prison where things aren't done properly. So we won't pay attention to that. Police, oh well, you know, that's a separate matter. It all has to be integrated. You know, there've been plenty of places where we provided to do prosecution, but provide defense? Well, you know, that's somebody else's job, we don't have to pay attention to that. The system doesn't function unless we have all the pieces.

The other part is that it's always possible to determine what at least many of the needs of the justice system are very early on - right from the beginning. It's a mistake to wait, because those needs are not going to change. All that's going to changes is that the spoilers in the system - whether it's Afghanistan or anyplace else - will gain increasing power and make it more difficult to actually try to do anything constructive.

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