Two weeks from now, former two-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will take the oath of office for the third time, and this time it will be administered by President Asif Ali Zardari, the irony of which should not be lost on anyone.

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) took turns running the government during the 1990s, creating a rivalry that politicized institutions, allowed personalities to dominate government affairs, and used official resources to settle personal scores. Under Sharif's last government in 1999, Pakistani courts convicted Zardari and his wife Benazir Bhutto of corruption, sentenced both to five years imprisonment, and barred them from holding political office.

The upcoming Sharif-Zardari oath taking ceremony makes the personalized, cutthroat, dramatic, and oft-violent politics of the 1990s seem like ages ago. The first democratic transition of power in the country's history is a solid example of that.

Unfortunately, Pakistan is not that lucky. Just this week in Karachi, gunmen murdered Zahra Shahid Hussain, Vice President of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). PTI blames the killing on political rival the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), pointing to London-based MQM leader Altaf Hussain's call to party workers to protest election results.

Clearly MQM is still in the business of settling scores, along with a host of other individuals and groups that make up the complicated and powerful network of Pakistan's political elite. With Sharif's return to elected politics, many are wondering if he plans to use his stronger position to do the same thing, especially because there is no shortage of scores for a man known to have a very long memory.

Two men in particular come to mind when imagining Sharif's revenge - Pervez Musharraf and Asif Ali Zardari. Sharif's approach to both men will clearly indicate how "moderate" his approach to politics has become, as many in his party would have us believe.

Former President Pervez Musharraf is still under house arrest in Islamabad for multiple cases registered against him, none of which are actually directly related to the military coup he engineered against Sharif's government in 1999.

From exile in Saudi Arabia in 2007, Sharif claimed he had no interest in settling scores with Musharraf upon his return to Pakistan later that year; but he still emphasized that Musharraf's tenure was unconstitutional and he should step down. On the campaign trail just a month ago, Sharif showed relative consistency in his remarks when he pardoned Musharraf for a "personal vendetta...but the crimes the former military dictator committed against the nation are too big to be forgiven."   

Sharif is likely weighing the pros and cons of letting the courts run their course with Musharraf, or stepping in to engineer some face-saving escape for the retired general in order to avoid ire from the military. Much of the work, however, is already done for him. The courts are already very much set against Musharraf for ousting some of their own senior judges from their positions when he was in power.

If Sharif pushes too hard for due process and rule of law in the Musharraf case, he potentially risks relations with the military, which is protecting Musharraf with augmented security and views resolution of the cases as important for the institution's own reputation.

Which power center would Sharif rather risk ties with - an activist Supreme Court or the military? Perhaps the question is more an issue of which problem is more urgent - settling the score with Musharraf under the guise of due process or sustaining relations with the military in order to "overhaul" national security policies, as Sharif and Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani discussed earlier this week. The decision seems pretty clear, but can Sharif see it?

Sharif must also seek clarity in his relationship with Zardari. After decades of bitter fighting, exile, and imprisonment,  PML-N and PPP found common ground in 2006 when Sharif and Benazir Bhutto formed an alliance to end Musharraf's military rule by signing the Charter of Democracy. The partnership was not meant to be. Bhutto was assassinated by the Taliban in late 2007, which eventually won the PPP a large sympathy vote in the 2008 elections and put the PML-N in the opposition.

Sharif could have used his time in the opposition to settle some personal scores with the PPP-led government. But he did not exact the revenge many expected; instead, the PML-N appeared more cooperative and engaged with the PPP than it had ever been in the past. The two sides could not agree on a caretaker Prime Minister for the political transition, but they adhered to the letter of the law throughout the consultation process, and accepted the final decision made by the Election Commission of Pakistan. Of course, as with Musharraf, Sharif did not have to settle scores since the Supreme Court's targeting of Zardari for corruption was doing the job well enough.

In October of last year, the PPP government agreed to write a letter to Swiss authorities requesting that corruption cases against Zardari be re-opened. This seems to have temporarily resolved a three year conflict between the PPP and the courts, but Zardari's vulnerability remains open to legal interpretation. Furthermore, when his presidential term expires in September he will no longer be protected under constitutional immunity.       

When Zardari steps down, he could be open to further attacks by the Supreme Court, especially from Chief Justice Ifitkhar Chaudhry, who is known to have his own personal vendetta against Zardari. But Chaudhry himself retires in late December because of mandatory age limits. Between September and December, Zardari will be in a legal limbo that could be helped or hurt by the likes of Sharif. What happens in the Supreme Court after Chaudhry leaves is also a risk factor; it is unclear whether the court will continue the activist agenda laid out by the departing Chief Justice or take a more moderate approach.  

Sharif cannot be seen as interfering with the rule of law. At the same time, he must avoid isolating Zardari and the PPP because of their importance to Sharif in the Senate, where PPP maintains a plurality of seats and is needed to pass any legislation introduced by the government.

The unknown factor here is the extent to which the difficult past still shapes Sharif's thinking on Zardari, the PPP, Musharraf, the military, and a host of other relationships. Initial signs from Sharif indicate he has in fact become more moderate, calculated, and conciliatory: his recent meeting with Kayani, visiting political rival Imran Khan in the hospital after a campaign-related injury, and welcoming all parties to join the government.

Perhaps it is better for Sharif to focus on rebuilding these relationships and using them to implement the large mandate he has been given. In the end, victory on these fronts will be the best revenge.   

Shamila N. Chaudhary is a South Asia analyst at the Eurasia Group and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as director for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the White House National Security Council from 2010-2011.

Since the brutal attack in Boston a few weeks ago, the word terrorism, without being preceded by the word "cyber," unfortunately returned to our lexicon.  For those who have spent the better part of the past decade obsessed by the al Qaeda terrorism threat, there was much in Boston that looked very familiar.

Two men who have spent an even longer time watching the evolution of the al Qaeda threat, Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor in chief of the London-based newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi, and Phil Mudd, a former CIA analyst, Deputy Director of the agency's Counterterrorist Center, and Deputy Director of the National Security Branch at the FBI, have both written important and well-argued books that have a direct relevance to the al Qaeda inspired attack in Boston, the ongoing evolution of the al Qaeda threat and the U.S. intelligence community's current and future capacity to understand the ever-changing nature of that threat.

Abdel Bari Atwan's book, After Bin Laden - Al Qaeda the Next Generation, as its title connotes, seeks to explain the characteristics of "Al Qaeda and Associated Movements," or AQAM as he likes to call them, in the wake of bin Laden's death. 

Not surprisingly, Mr. Atwan makes a compelling case that while the death of Osama bin Laden and the decimation of al Qaeda Core's top leadership has hurt the central organization that was based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the movement and ideology, with its worldwide presence via regional associated movements, is as much of a menace to the West as ever and undiminished in its goal of a global caliphate.

Mr. Atwan spends considerable time discussing the poorly named "Arab Spring," the successive revolutions which occurred across the Arab world and the relationship that these events have with indigenous al Qaeda-associated movements that have their own deep roots in some of the very states that saw their governments topple, sectarian conflicts break into the open, and civil wars erupt.

While many of us in the West hoped that the revolutions in the Arab states would herald better governance and the opportunity for homegrown secularists with their own domestic legitimacy to rise, Mr. Atwan saw a different future - one where Islamist parties would dominate the ballot box and armed Islamists or AQAM would have a role to play as well.

Mr. Atwan takes the reader on an impressive tour of the Islamic world, with chapters and sections on almost every country and region from Arabia to Uzbekistan.  While some of the background history that he provides on each country or region is old news to regular readers of the New York Times international section, they do provide the context in each locale for Mr. Atwan to make his most provocative argument - al Qaeda-associated movements are poised for a comeback when either the Islamists or secularists fail in their efforts of good governance, regardless of whether it is in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Nigeria, North Africa, Sinai, or Central Asia.  While the situation in each country is distinct, in general, regional al Qaeda-type violence certainly seems unabated and potentially is on the upswing in countries like Iraq, Nigeria, Mali and Syria.

Mr. Atwan is at his best when explaining the tribal dynamics in such places as Yemen, where different alliances among the tribes and their long standing dissatisfaction with any central government make them a natural ally of al Qaeda-associated movements, who also seek to challenge the central government, are armed, and espouse an austere form of Islam that is not foreign to the locals.  Mr. Atwan draws similar astute insights about local dynamics when considering the prospects for growth for al Qaeda in the states of North Africa or the Islamic Maghreb.

Unlike many who follow jihadist groups, Mr. Atwan did not neglect the unstable Russian Caucasus region, including Chechnya and Dagestan -places now etched in the American consciousness.  While some may not have understood the centrality of the Caucasus in the al Qaeda narrative, Mr. Atwan captures not only its importance, but also its worldwide links to jihadists in Pakistan, the Middle East, and even Europe.

With such a broad array of al Qaeda-associated threats gathering across the globe, and a sporadic, hard to characterize, homegrown threat now having proven its capability to kill, one is likely to worry how the United States will confront this multi-faceted threat matrix.

Fortunately, we have Philip Mudd, who ate, slept, and dreamt this threat for the better part of this past decade from within various parts the U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy, to provide a unique perspective on how the United States is organized to confront this threat.  What gives Mr. Mudd's book, Takedown - Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda, its arc is his career trajectory within a counterterrorism bureaucracy that was constantly evolving to catch up to and ultimately try to stay ahead of a rapidly evolving al Qaeda threat.

For an outsider, Mr. Mudd provides unique insights as to what it was like on a day-to-day basis working in the CIA Counterterrorism Center and FBI National Security Branch and how those entities functioned, faults and all.  Mudd's descriptions of his encounters with senior policymakers and agency heads like Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and FBI Director Robert Mueller could easily have been found in a typical Bob Woodward book about inside Washington.  However, Mr. Mudd is a gentleman and takes the high road in his recollections.  The book is less about "takedowns" of particular terrorists and much more a story of Mr. Mudd's experiences inside the U.S. national security apparatus, embedded in explanations of the functioning of the U.S. counterterrorism community's threat bureaucracy.

Mr. Mudd's vantage point from inside the different organizations at particular points in time allows him to explain how the al Qaeda threat looked to the U.S. government at various points during the last decade.  This perspective is quite important and in many ways sets up the findings of Mr. Atwan's book about al Qaeda post-bin Laden.

Mr. Mudd served as a National Security Council staffer when the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred, after which he returned to CIA where he found himself at the rapidly growing Counterterrorism Center.  At that time, the U.S. intelligence community was concerned primarily - and rightly - with al Qaeda Core in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how to understand the hierarchy and network that supported it.  So, the arrests, capture, and subsequent interviews of senior al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided the intelligence community with information that could help potentially thwart plots or provide insights on other plotters and was, as Mr. Mudd describes it, "gold" for intelligence analysts.

As progress was being made against al Qaeda Core in the Af/Pak region, the United States mobilized for the Iraq War.  Mr. Mudd describes how, suddenly, the al Qaeda-linked insurgency in Iraq that rose up in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion became an important focus and required an expansion of resources at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.  Moreover, the phenomenon was not confined to Iraq after 2003 - but rather, an al Qaeda threat was spreading through South East Asia, North Africa, Turkey and Europe, as evidenced by attacks in these areas.

Although Mr. Mudd does not provide the detailed historical context or local dynamics that Mr. Atwan focuses on to explain this geographic proliferation of the al Qaeda threat, he does focus on one element that is a key common factor among all the al Qaeda associated groups regardless of where they are - ideology.  This ideology is not only anti-Western, but also requires the overthrow of Middle Eastern regimes, and thus "attacks are meant to spark a revolution, not an end in themselves." 

Furthermore, Mr. Mudd explains that it was during this time period (2003-2006) that the U.S counterterrorism community felt an acute sense of "surprise and unknowing" given the geographic sprawl that characterized al Qaeda attacks during this time. As time wore on, though, the intelligence community began to dedicate analysts not solely to al Qaeda Core but rather to these geographically disperse regions that now seemingly housed al Qaeda problems.  Interestingly, what Mr. Mudd describes happening at the national level was also happening at the NYPD Intelligence Division, and we too had to both widen the aperture of our analytic lens and devote more resources to a broader and more diverse al Qaeda threat during those years.

Once Mr. Mudd moved to the FBI, on loan from the CIA, he gained insight into the threat that was increasingly manifesting itself in the West and ultimately struck in Boston - the homegrown threat, comprised of "loose clusters of youths, typically kids who were angry and thought other members of their communities weren't serious about opposing what they saw as a U.S. or Western crusade in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere."  These men had little if any operational links to al Qaeda, but rather were inspired to act by the group's ideology.  

As the reader finishes both books, the authors veer off into very different directions.  Mr. Mudd makes no predictions as to what the threat will look like in future years, but gives the impression that the terrorism threat management bureaucracy in the United States had become more streamlined and regularized, or "far more well-oiled and less jumpy, than in the first years," suggestive of a higher level of functionality and capacity to thwart future al Qaeda plots.

Mr. Atwan, however, paints a picture that unfortunately does not bode well and in some ways challenges the assertions that the U.S. intelligence community has adequately evolved enough to face the diffuse, de-centralized al Qaeda threat that we face today.  In Mr. Atwan's world, various al Qaeda-type groups coordinate and collaborate across huge swaths of the earth and take advantage of the chaos and instability of the post-Arab Spring Middle East.  New post-revolutionary governments, whether Islamist or secular, may face protestors and al Qaeda-type terrorists who work together, if they falter or fail to deliver the changes that were promised. 

Mr. Mudd is clearly right in that the U.S. intelligence community now has the bandwidth and regional expertise to adequately focus on a diverse and dispersed al Qaeda threat.  However, the ability to better understand the threat and the ability to roll it back are different processes (intelligence analysis vs. counterterrorism policy execution).  Unfortunately, greater and deeper insights do not assure American counterterrorism success, especially when Mr. Atwan makes a compelling case that we face a future of many ‘al Qaedas' who have metastasized in hard to get at places, are unlikely to be completely defeated on the battlefield, nor collapse because of infighting, nor be successfully rendered impotent via U.S.-led decapitation strategies.  Thus, despite the U.S. intelligence community's increase in terms of both breadth and depth of expertise, the longest war will probably go on longer, and we may have to be content with an American strategy that can keep the regional al Qaeda franchise threats in check, but cannot eradicate them. 

Mitchell D. Silber is the Executive Managing Director of K2 Intelligence and was the Director of Intelligence Analysis for the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012.  

Pakistanis went to the polls on May 11^th to participate in landmark national and provincial elections. Violent attacks by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insurgency disproportionately targeted vocal opponents of the TTP prior to the vote, and clashes between rival candidates continued on election day itself. But despite the threats and disputed results in some constituencies - particularly the country's largest city of Karachi - this appears to have been the freest and fairest election in Pakistan since the country's first democratic national election in 1970. Its legitimacy was enhanced by being one of the most widely contested elections in Pakistan's history, with all major national and regional political parties taking part in what appears to have been a genuinely competitive contest.

During the campaign period, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan in particular seized media headlines and public attention with calls for change and efforts to mobilize the country's large youth vote. But given the PTI's disappointing electoral performance relative to expectations, credit for the high levels of participation - currently projected by the Election Commission at around 60% nationwide, considerably more than the 44% reported in 2008 - must also be shared more broadly. Beyond the party campaigns, a diverse and vibrant array of media coverage and social media participation, a caretaker government and Election Commission administration of the polls that were broadly accepted as neutral, and public commitments by the military establishment not to intervene all appear to have contributed to voters' determination to take part in the elections - despite Taliban threats and calls for a boycott.

Table 1: Preliminary Pakistan National Assembly 2013 Election Results

Source: Election Commission of Pakistan, Party Position (National Assembly), as of Wednesday, May 15, available at http://www.ecp.gov.pk/overallpartyposition05152013412.pdf

Note: Results are for 272 directly contested national assembly seats, and do not include 60 seats for women and 10 for minorities that are allocated proportionally to parties based on election performance. Candidates are allowed to contest multiple seats, requiring special elections in the event that they win in more than one constituency, meaning final results will be subject to further change.

Although the final results have yet to be certified, Table 1 illustrates that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) led by former two-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, has emerged as the clear victor. The party was able to nearly double the number of National Assembly seats it won from 68 in 2008 to at least 124 in 2013. Most pre-poll analysis predicted that the PML-N would emerge as the single largest party, but the general expectation was that the elections would produce a hung parliament requiring Nawaz Sharif to cobble together a weak coalition government. The PML-N's decisive victory, however, will enable it to reach out to potential coalition partners from a position of strength, increasing its freedom of action to use its newfound political capital. Whether this tremendous advantage will be seized or squandered remains to be seen, but expectations are already being raised - possibly unrealistically so - that Nawaz Sharif will now be in a position to tackle a range of issues from Pakistan's acute energy shortages to helping normalize relations with India.

While Imran Khan's PTI supporters may be the most disappointed voters after coming in second place across most of Punjab, the biggest loser in 2013 was the Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP), which had led Pakistan's coalition government from 2008-2013. Whereas the PML-N nearly doubled its seat numbers, the PPP was reduced from 89 seats in 2008 to 31 in 2013. While the scale of the PPP's defeat surprised many, the fact that it lost seats reflects a consistent feature in Pakistani electoral politics, which is the disadvantage of incumbency. No political party has won back-to-back elections in Pakistan since the PPP's victory in 1977 in an election widely acknowledged to have been massively rigged. The shortage of resources available to meet patronage demands often leaves the majority of voters unhappy with incumbents, who are then punished the next time elections are held.

This tendency was further exacerbated by the deep discontent of most voters with the direction in which Pakistan was heading (91% according to a recent Pew poll), and the perception that the PPP-led government from 2008-2013 was corrupt and inefficient, doing little to tackle some of the major issues confronting Pakistan, such as the country's serious energy crisis. The most disturbing aspect of the PPP's dismal performance is that it has now essentially been reduced to a party of rural Sindh, whereas historically it has been the only national party able to consistently win seats in all four provinces. It remains to be seen whether this devastating defeat, especially in the largest province of Punjab where it won only one seat, will serve as a wake-up call and force a substantial shakeup within the party, or whether it will continue its downward spiral into yet another ethnically defined party.

Another impact of the 2013 election result is that the role of the Pakistani presidency is likely to diminish further after the PML-N assumes office. Although the 18^th Amendment to Pakistan's constitution in April 2010 formally transferred many powers of office that had accrued to the president under General Pervez Musharraf's tenure to the prime minister, President Asif Ali Zardari's leadership of the PPP allowed him to retain effective control over its activities in parliament - though a verdict from the Lahore High Court forced him to relinquish his party title prior to the start of the campaign season. Zardari's term in office expires later this fall, and he now appears unlikely to secure reelection by the electoral college comprised of the national and provincial assemblies and the upper senate house. For the first time since Nawaz Sharif's ouster in a 1999 military coup, civilian power in the Pakistani political system will be re-centering in the office of the prime minister rather than a powerful president.

This represents a shift from the past five years, which had seen a general diffusion of power within the country. The PPP tenure was marked by significant compromises on power-sharing with the opposition and between the central and provincial governments. But the difficulties of managing a fractious coalition and fending off challenges to the government's authority from the judiciary and Pakistan's powerful security services ultimately consumed much of the PPP leadership's attentions. The result was a slow consensus-based policymaking process that, while necessarily more inclusive of the interests of the country's diverse centers of powers, stalled out before resolving many of the critical concerns facing Pakistan - particularly on economic reforms needed to address chronic energy shortages, fiscal deficits and tax revenue collection shortfalls, and Pakistan's integration through trade with its neighbors.

Table 1: Preliminary Pakistan Provincial Assembly 2013 Election Results

Source: Election Commission of Pakistan, Party Position (Provincial Assemblies), as of Wednesday, May 15, available at http://www.ecp.gov.pk/overallpartypositionPA05152013412.pdf

Although the largest parties managed to achieve small footholds in the other provinces, the overall election result has reinforced the regionalization and localization of political party organizations in Pakistan. Despite its wins, the PML-N made few gains outside of Punjab itself. The PPP retained its hold over the Sindh assembly, but lost its position elsewhere in the country. Although it failed to make major hoped-for gains in Punjab, the PTI secured approximately a third of the seats in the Khyber-Paktunkhwa provincial assembly, echoing the decisive ouster in 2008 of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal coalition of religious parties by the Awami National Party, which has now itself failed to gain reelection to any more than a handful of provincial assembly seats. Balochistan, which faces an active separatist insurgency and saw the lowest levels of participation, experienced the most fragmented electoral outcomes, with ethnic nationalist parties, religious parties, and independents dividing the provincial assembly and delegation to parliament.

The PPP retains a plurality in the upper senate house, and administrative devolution processes mandated by the 18^th and 19^th amendments to the Pakistani constitution have strengthened the autonomy and responsibilities of provincial governments, as well as locking in larger shares of national tax revenues for the provinces. The PML-N supported many of these reforms during its time in opposition, benefiting through its management of the Punjab government. It is possible the PPP and PTI opposition parties' control over provincial governments will ensure their stake in the system and provide for a negotiated balance of power with the PML-N at the center. But given the history of conflict in Pakistan over issues of federalism and provincial autonomy, relations between the new Punjab-based government in the center and the rest of the country have the potential to be a significant source of political tension going forward.

Beyond questions of divided center-provincial relations, the new PML-N government must also balance its relations with Pakistan's unelected centers of power - namely the military and the increasingly assertive judiciary. Speculation is already mounting as to whether Nawaz Sharif, who when previously in office confronted and was overthrown in a military coup by General Musharraf, will again try to increase the role of civilian authorities in security and foreign policymaking - traditionally the domain of Pakistan's military. Both the military and the judiciary are facing transitions of their own later this year, as Chief of Army Staff General Ashaq Kayani and Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry approach the end of their respective terms. These two institutions have effectively self-selecting control over their membership and leadership appointments, and are likely to continue to check parliament's freedom of action, potentially setting up deeper institutional clashes if a Sharif government chooses a course of more direct confrontation than its predecessor.

The new PML-N government takes office with many major challenges to resolve, including the ailing economy, tense relations with its neighbors to the east and west, and the continuing threat of domestic militancy. The PML-N, which played a patient waiting game in opposition throughout the PPP's tenure, can now credibly claim a mandate for action on many of these issues. But even with a stronger base of support in its home province of Punjab and in the national parliament, it will still face limits to its ability to push through new policies. Nonetheless, the transition from the PPP-led government at the end of its full term in office to a popularly elected successor is an important institutionalization of the democratic process as a means of resolving political disputes, and a hopeful sign for Pakistan's future political stability.

Andrew Wilder is the Director of Afghanistan and Pakistan Programs at the United States Institute of Peace, where Colin Cookman is a researcher. The views reflected here are their own.

As of this year, Afghanistan has experienced ten years of stabilization intervention, but what is there to show for it? Marked by massive expenditure with little to no accountability, and often marred by waste, stabilization in Afghanistan started out with arguably honorable aims. However, as troops prepare to leave in 2014, what legacy will be left behind?

Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) began with perhaps the best of intentions: to fill the vacuum of law and order left by the fall of the Taliban and undertake reconstruction, badly needed in a country devastated by three decades of conflict. The security situation was perceived to be relatively benign, with the major threats being criminals and warlords seeking to reassert power.

PRTs did some positive work, often acting as the only authority in a security vacuum, and were appreciated, at least early on, by Afghans. They were no substitute, however, for the effective governance and security required. PRTs' predominantly military staff received little to no training, lacked the technical skills required to carry out development work and focused more on short term quick impact projects instead of the long term state-and-peace-building work that was so badly needed.  Rather than seeking to build Afghan capacity - a central component of their mandate - they often worked around the government. The PRTs also created winners and losers, supporting local strongmen or funneling money through often corrupt construction companies.  

Despite early U.S. government acknowledgement of these problems, PRTs expanded rapidly, led by a multitude of different nations that were often unable to effectively coordinate amongst each another.  In 2008, the US Congress described the situation as one with "no clear definition of the PRT mission, no concept of operations or doctrine, no standard operating procedures."

As insecurity spread, the dual security and reconstruction roles of PRTs became increasingly schizophrenic. One incident in Ghazni province in 2004 saw PRT officials offering to build a well for villagers just weeks after they had fired rockets into the very same village killing nine children.  Unsurprisingly, residents were hardly consoled and Afghan goodwill for the PRTs was quickly eroded.

But the amount of money available for military-led development continued to increase.  In 2009, the US Army published the Commanders' Guide to Money as a Weapons System, which defined aid as "a nonlethal weapon" to be utilised to "win the hearts and minds of the indigenous population to facilitate defeating the insurgents." Aid devoted to these objectives rapidly increased: annual funding for the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP), the primary U.S. PRT funding stream, rose from $200m in 2007 to $1bn in 2010.

No centralised, comprehensive records appear to have been kept on the PRTs, either within the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) or the Afghan government, and rarely even within PRTs. When auditors found CERP project files incomplete or non-existent in 2009, CERP project managers told US auditors that their focus "was on obligating funds for projects rather than monitoring their implementation." Unsurprisingly there has been no comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of CERP-funded programmes; the most thorough examination is a 2011 SIGAR audit of CERP programming in the insecure eastern province of Laghman. It's a harrowing read.  Of the $53m CERP funds allocated to the PRT between 2008 and 2011, 92% (or $49.2m) was dedicated to projects found by SIGAR to be "at risk or have questionable outcomes." Funds were not managed in accordance with standard operating procedures, which were finally established in 2009, and none of the 69 projects had sufficient documentation to track outcomes. Again and again, the audit found the Afghan government unable to take over PRT projects.

PRTs were not the only instrument of stabilization. Between 2003 and 2012, USAID obligated $1.1bn in stabilization funding to for-profit contractors but such projects fared no better. One example is USAID's ‘flagship counterinsurgency program' the Local Government and Community Development Programme (LGCD). The budget and timelines for the $400m, five-year project mushroomed despite questionable early evaluation findings and the fact that over half of LGCD's expenditures were on staff costs and security.  USAID officials were unable to visit several sites because it was too dangerous. As for its impact, the USAID Inspector-General reported ‘the project's overall success seemed highly questionable.'

Part of the problem is that the goals of stabilization in Afghanistan were never comprehensively, consistently or clearly articulated.  Stabilization works on the assumption that conflicts are fuelled by grievances about poverty or neglect, and that development projects that improve governance, opportunities and services can ‘stabilize' conflict situations. But evidence is lacking or discouraging.  A 2011 Tufts university study found while there was some evidence some stabilization interventions can work in the short term, there is little evidence of long term security gains and much more indicating a tendency to create local conflict and ‘perverse incentives' to maintain insecurity.

In an world where aid agencies are required to prove their ‘value for money' and aid-receiving governments are pressured to become fully transparent, the lack of systematic, government-led push for accountability for the multi-billion dollar investments is hypocritical and irresponsible - and speaks to an ideological unwillingness to address the problems and pitfalls of stabilization approaches.

The lack of interest in documenting the impact of the stabilization efforts - both what works and what doesn't - does not bode well for the rest of the world. As global focus turns to other complex emergencies in Mali, Yemen and Somalia, stabilization is increasingly the approach of choice. Without recognizing systematic problems, stabilization interventions are unlikely to improve and begin to fulfill their lofty goals. After the troop drawdown in Afghanistan next year, perhaps we'll have a better idea of the true legacy of stabilization. But for now, the future looks worryingly unstable.

Ashley Jackson is a Research Fellow in the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute. Before joining ODI she worked for several years in Afghanistan with the United Nations and Oxfam.