In such conditions, instability is not simply a concern about personal safety-it is a collective understanding that there is uncertainty about a community's political future. his shared uncertainty makes dispute resolution programming difficult to design and implement. In TLO's linkage project, for example, moving past the research stage and piloting genuinely new approaches took a good deal of effort and initially met with limited success. Some of the key impediments were concerns by both members of the formal and informal sectors that any shift in the status quo could threaten their own authority. While elders saw the value of a formalized documentation system, the risk that registering cases in the formal sector would lead to a reduction in their status made them hesitant to embrace the concept. At the same time, while court officials worked with the informal system because of its de facto influence and often referred a majority of their cases to the informal sector, TLO's project had trouble expanding these patterns, because any formal recognition could potentially be perceived as an acknowledgment of the officials' own limited authority. All this suggests that it is far more beneficial to provide secure spaces in which local and autochthonous dispute resolution processes can arise on their own. Trying to force bodies into such practices as a part of stabilization is fraught with challenges and risks to the local population.
Capacity and Funding Issues
High attrition and turnover is particularly damaging to programs that rely on establishing relationships with community leaders and government officials.
Projects run by small Afghan NGOs in particular are susceptible to both capacity and funding issues. Staff turnover at Afghan NGOs following the "civilian surge" has been incredibly high as new USAID funding has led to program expansion, putting an increasingly high premium on Afghans with experience working for international organizations and those who speak English. High attrition and turnover is particularly damaging to programs that rely on establishing relationships with community leaders and government officials. One of the reasons TLO and CPAU were comparatively successful was because the mid-level staff who typically met with these individuals remained fairly constant and was able to establish relationships. Other staff members, however, were lured away by higher salaries that only large international organizations could support, which further exacerbated a series of issues that stem largely from NGOs running donor-driven (as opposed to community-dr