Disputing parties may feel that they have an advantage in taking cases to venues where personal connections dominate. If one disputant has personal ties to one venue and the other has ties to another, they may attempt to bring it to two different venues. In some instances this exacerbates the conflict by creating tension not simply between the disputing parties but between those associated with each of the dispute resolution venues, as has been seen with the adversarial relationship between the police and community leaders in some parts of Nangarhar. More often in USIP's research, however, the use of multiple venues leads to something of a deadlock, when neither forum wants to directly challenge the authority of the other. In cases where the deadlock is between an informal and a formal mechanism, informal leaders may not want to draw attention to themselves by challenging the court system, while the decision by the court system itself may go unenforced by informal leaders, leaving the case essentially unresolved. In such instances, poor communication between the two groups, particularly when state officials are not from the region and elders try to avoid state control, leads to a situation where there is little to no cooperation. In settings where there is a large international presence and the Afghan state is considered neither a provider of local security nor a source of significant resources, there are even fewer incentives for informal actors to improve cooperative efforts with the formal system.
Urban areas in particular present a large number of informal venues to choose from, including mosque shuras, neighborhood shuras, tribal gatherings, trade unions or guilds, and even civil society organizations. Further complicating matters, in the past ten years, a series of initiatives, many of them sponsored by the international community, have set up new local councils at both the district and village level. Many of these are primarily aimed at development activities, but some have deliberate justice functions-such as ASOP, which was originally funded by the DFID and was later sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).57 the growing number of venues, and the increasing power of those whose influence is gained from means other than community support, has eroded the ability of leaders with true local legitimacy to negotiate durable settlements.
Informal Justice and the Insurgency
A good deal of the current interest in the informal sector by the international community comes from the belief that support for insurgent groups stems in large part from increasing disillusionment with the national government by the Afghan people, and in particular with the government's