As a final note, it would be a tragic and lasting mistake for judicial reformers to assume (either explicitly or implicitly) that Afghanistan's "lack of a rule of law" or "chronic warlordism" is a problem somehow built-in to Islamic law or Afghan cultures. A historically informed study of the underlying causes of violence in Afghanistan reveal that ongoing military conflicts do not boil down to innate cultural differences or abstract legal debates, but rather fundamentally political issues - feudal lords' rivalries over trade routes, resistance to foreign intervention and economic adventurism, or even the rampant dire poverty that induces laymen to participate in the lucrative drug economy, rural banditry, or foreigner kidnappings in the first place - just to cite a few common examples from within Afghanistan today. Such political and economic root causes are the issues that need to be tackled and "reformed," as opposed to blaming Afghanistan's provincial mechanism of adjudication and tribal rule. As argued by Columbia University Professor of Anthropology Mahmood Mamdani, it is a commonly purported fallacy in Western policy circles and popular media to attribute political instability, widespread violence or just "conflict" in general in the Muslim world to Islamic cultures in some form or another, ignoring brutal histories of European colonialism in Muslim lands, the historical supplanting of traditional legal orders with Western codes and artificial legislation, and constant foreign intervention that constitute the chief causes of political upheaval in several Muslim country contexts today.[Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War and the Roots of Terror (2004)...]
-pg. 130 of Faiz Ahmed's "Judicial Reform in Afghanistan: A Case Study in the New Criminal Procedure Code" in Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, Vol. 29:1, University of California, Fall 2005.
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