Referring to the administrative centers of Afghanistan’s provinces as ‘capitals’ is misleading and, in its small way both reflects and contributes to confusion about how our efforts aimed at strengthening sub-national governance should proceed.

Afghans never refer to provincial centers as a capital or ‘pai-takht,’ the location of the throne. Only Kabul is the pai-takht. Provincial centers are simply, ‘markaz,’ a generic term for ‘center’ without having any political or sovereignty connotation.

In the U.S., we refer to the seats of governments of our states as capitals but never use that term for centers of administrative units of lesser scale, such as counties or parishes. That’s because in the U.S. federal system the 50 states are semi-sovereign.

The provinces in Afghanistan’s unitary system are only administrative units which have, by and large, been delineated for the administrative convenience and considerations of the central government. And over time the number of provinces has changed with the current number of 34 being of recent vintage.

As we seek in our counter-insurgency strategy to bring the Afghan government closer to the people, one of the main efforts is to build sub-national administrations at the provincial and district levels. We too often regard the walis, governors, at the province and uluswals, district administrators, at the district as officials who have executive power rather than simply being administrators. And we often look to them to do what they lack the legal authority to do.

That’s not to say that there aren’t strong governors and even strong district administrators, but their strength is more often based on the resources they personally bring to the position. Such resources may be the wealth they are able to extract through connections or through having the power to wrest resources illegitimately and also through their personal connections to powerful individuals at the center.

Too often the Coalition expects that walis and uluswals can exercise control over the police or the line ministries when they have no statutory authority to do so. We expect these officials to wield executive control and when they don’t do it then they are charged with being weak or incompetent.

Some steps have been taken (in large measure driven by donors who are confident that they know what is best for the Afghans) to pass to the provinces and to the provincial administration greater power including putting together a budget. For example, in preparation for the presentation of the Afghan National Development Strategy last spring, an exercise was undertaken for each province to devise a provincial development plan (PDP) which would reflect the will of the province to some degree.

The entire PDP exercise, which was touted as a demonstration of bringing the government closer to the people, was carefully stage-managed by Kabul bureaucrats who came to the provinces and in many if not most cases organized and directed the efforts.

While some may quibble the common use by foreigners of the word “capital” instead of “center” is trivial, it is important that outsiders who come in intent on “reconstructing” Afghanistan, have a careful understanding of the nature of the administrative and governance structure with which they are dealing and that they avoid projecting onto the Afghan sub-national administrative units concepts that reflect their understandings and expectations based on living in a federal system where the senior officials of their states or provinces do exert some executive control over their units.

For the Afghans, the desirability of devolving power and executive control away from the center is anything but universally agreed. Some Afghans argue vehemently for devolution, others fear that such devolution will make Afghanistan even more ungovernable. This is a matter that touches on many sensitivities and will ultimately be for the Afghan people to determine, not outsiders.