Introduction
Every serious recent attempt to analyze the ongoing instability in Afghanistan has included a commentary on the lack of justice as a motivator of grievance and conflict.l A number of these analyses have focused on the twin facts that Afghanistan's formal justice mechanisms are seen to be expensive, corrupt, and slow, while "informal" justice mechanisms are preferred by local communities because they are more familiar, more credible, and less corrupt.
In its increasingly fervent search for success in Afghanistan over the past few years, the international community began to pay much closer attention to these mechanisms and try to support existing ones or create new ones based on its understandings of functional, historical models. Approaches have varied from small-scale projects implemented by local partners to multimillion dollar interventions implemented by large international contractors that include the training of local dispute resolution facilitators and the paying of their salaries.
Given the millions of dollars that have been spent by the international community over the past ten years on improving the formal justice sector, the fact that the vast majority of Afghans still prefer informal justice mechanisms raises serious issues about the effectiveness of these programs. hese include the practical question of whether the informal and formal systems can be combined, the programmatic question of whether the internationally driven rule-of-law programs were well designed in the first place, and the philosophical question of what "justice" means to Afghans in a continually evolving context.
his report begins with the latter question, situating Afghan notions of justice within a specific political and cultural context. While the international community has tended to see "justice sector reform" as a subcomponent of "security sector reform," for Afghans the question of justice plays a far more political role. Perceptions of political legitimacy are derived from judgments on how "justly" political actors behave, while community harmony depends on the satisfactory resolution of disputes. Both the political legitimizing function of dispute resolution and the impact of dispute resolution on community harmony have lodged within the Afghan informal justice system a preference for "restorative" solutions rather than the "punitive" measures of Western formal justice systems. Particularly in times of instability, the cost of not resolving a conflict within a community, or a conflict that involves several communities, affects a population much wider than that composed of only the disputants. his often leads to compromises that, while not perfect, are better geared to long-term stability, whereas the formal justice system tends to render "winner-takes-all" verdicts that leave a lingering sense of injustice on the part of the loser and that may contribute to future conflicts. he emphasis on reconciliation and the promotion of social harmony also reflects the influence of Islam on