998; Wallensteen and Stollenberg, 1998; Holsti, 1995; Reno, 1998; Kaldor, 1999; Keen, 1998; Jean and Rufin, 1996). The war economy of Afghanistan, which exemplifies this type of system, is an open war economy affecting a broad region. Afghanistan, stateless and devastated has become both a source of the world’s most infamous opium transport and marketing center. The spread of means of transportation and communication, the development of cultural, similarity, and economic ties between Afghans and all the neighboring societies, the opening of borders and lack of customs enforcement in many areas, and the increase in opium production and other contraband activities, the Afghan war economy has given rise to a pattern of regional economic activity and associated social and political networks that compete with and at times undermine official economies and states. Transformation of this criminalized war economy is thus essential not only to Afghanistan but to neighboring regions. The economic and political stability of Pakistan, in particular, is threatened by phenomena associated with the political economy of war in Afghanistan, but the phenomena also reach into Iran, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia, and, through the drug trade, into Russia, Europe, and North America. The pre-war society of Afghanistan cannot be reconstructed, but today’s structures developed from transformations of that fragile and fragmented society. Furthermore, in the event that political conditions permit an attempt at reconstruction, an understanding of prewar social, economic, and political relations is necessary if Afghans and international actors are to avoid replicating or even magnifying dysfunctional features of the system that proved so vulnerable to external intervention and institutional collapse (Rubin, 1995a).In the 1970s Afghanistan had an economy and society bifurcated between a rural, largely subsistence economy and an ur...
