A problem that has confronted Westerners specifically attempting to work with informal justice in Afghanistan has been misguided attempts to understand informal justice by applying the concepts of mediation and arbitration. At times, it has been argued by international officials and contractors that are setting up programs that mediation is best applied to shuras and more binding arbitration should be applied to jirgas. In reality, there is not such a clear divide in most local contexts. his is because the binding nature of informal mechanisms has far more to do with who is making the decision and the local political context. Pashtun jirgas often are binding, but this has far more to do with the social pressures being applied by fairly homogenous communities than the nature of the jirga itself. All of these misunderstandings have made discussions about informal justice far more complex, as international experts have tried to hammer Western concepts onto an Afghan context, but they also threaten to undermine how informal institutions function. More often than not, international efforts are exercises in rendering something foreign familiar to the external observer, rather than in trying to understand the internal logic and rationale of the informal systems. his is a feature of the international community's approach, which relies on straightforward models and does not deal well with flexibility, despite the fact that flexibility and the lack of a single model is part of what has made the informal system both effective and enduring. If an official law were passed making jirga decisions fully binding, it would de-emphasize the local, social negotiations thattake place during the decision-making process. Since it is these negotiations that make the decision acceptable in the eyes of the community, removing this step would be a grave error, even though, in Western terms, working to make decisions more binding might seem a logically sound decision.
Popular perceptions of international programs are that they are interpreting corruption through Western understandings of morality instead of attempting to first understand how it is perceived locally.
Understanding Justice Locally
Cultural sensitivity in discussing rule-of-law issues, however, cannot be limited to learning certain foreign terms. Even within specific communities there are debates over justice that need to be understood and taken into consideration. In Afghanistan there is a great deal of debate over what justice means and the role of both the courts and communities in resolving disputes-with particular conceptual divides between urban and rural areas, those of different ages, education levels, and ethnicity, and types of dispute. For example, the difference between the concepts of haq alabd and haq allah is widely interpreted by religious scholars in Afghanistan, with many suggesting that informal bodies, such as jirgas, have the authority to resolve civil aspects of certain cases, but that only the state has th