When Coburn analyzed how power was exercised in Istalif, he found that no one was truly in charge. Local power brokers might possess wealth, honor, a reputation for piety, abundant weaponry or powerful allies, but they lacked the means or the will to convert those gifts into decisive authority. The maliks, or elders, made a big show of representing their communities’ interests in meetings with outsiders and serving their followers generous meals; each year they presided over festive villagewide “snow picnics,” where the children of Istalif playfully competed to wreck one another’s snow-and-ice dams on the terraced hills above the town. But for all their public visibility, the maliks were only as strong as their communities allowed them to be; they were not secure hereditary chieftains but anxious agents of the professions or neighborhoods or clans they served. (Coburn speculates that when villagers obeyed a curious edict permitting music at weddings only if it issued from a single boombox, they did so largely because they feared that louder music would draw too many guests needing to be fed.) The mullahs, for their part, had little ability to intervene outside the mosque, and the village’s wealthy merchants had little sway since they lived primarily in Kabul and often came from the low-status weaver class. Aging commanders of the anti-Soviet jihad supplied money and guns to young men, who struck a menacing pose by wearing the “pakul” hat of the great Tajik fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, rather than the “karakul” hat favored by Hamid Karzai. While the commanders successfully extorted rent from local merchants who ran shops on public lands, they were unpopular and preferred to remain in the shadows, strenuously avoiding one another as well as any direct conflict with the state.

As for the state’s representatives, their authority was what Coburn calls a “useful fiction.” The district governor wielded his connections to Kabul as best he could, but did not possess great influence, in part because — in keeping with the most sophisticated state-building methods — government aid was mainly distributed by locally elected committees. Istalif’s police were seen as hapless at best, predatory at worst; Coburn found that villagers were eager to protect him from a local officer. The French soldiers who periodically showed up in the bazaar had little impact, though their presence did become an excuse for keeping women out of the area. But Coburn observed that “no group was less effective at accumulating influence” than the NGO community. The best development experts accomplished little: their turnover was high, and they frequently bestowed their largess on deserving locals — women, refugees who’d returned from abroad with some education, victims of wartime injuries — who didn’t have the connections or ability to capitalize on their good fortune. NGO workers seemed less concerned with achieving a valuable outcome than with demonstrating to their backers that they had followed a mission plan to the letter.

As Coburn recounts, one organization spent $20,000 on an electric kiln that could have greatly increased the productivity of the local potters except that it was donated to a women’s center where men were not allowed to set foot; apparently, the donors did not know that the custom in Istalif was for men to do all the pot-making and firing, and for women to stick to the glazing and other decorations. The kiln supposedly wound up being used by friends of the district governor’s wife. If the NGOs achieved so little unintentionally, Coburn found that local leaders often achieved little by design. He watched in disbelief as they rejected a proposal to pave the main road connecting Istalif with the nearby highway leading to Kabul. The new road would have benefited the entire village by reducing the difficulty and cost of travel; but one malik objected that its construction would disproportionately assist another malik’s sector of the town, and the proposal was quietly tabled. In other words, to disturb the existing distribution of power was to risk reigniting too many local conflicts. And as in the American white-collar workplace, no one was eager to speak strongly on behalf of the idea for fear of losing face if it failed. In Istalif, it often seemed, politics meant convincing people you had power by forestalling any event that might reveal you didn’t.

Coburn does not romanticize the ways of Istalif — the quiet the town has enjoyed since the end of the Taliban regime is highly tenuous, and largely the result of tacit agreements among bitter rivals over what to forget and ignore. Whatever the fragility of such an arrangement, Coburn implies that it is preferable to the modernizing plans of even the most thoughtful state-builders. The attempt to create impersonal, merit-oriented bureaucracies and to spread liberal beliefs about gender, religion or criminal punishment is as likely to exacerbate conflict as to resolve it. Stability is created with the resources at hand, not from on high or far away (“The state does not live here,” Istalifis like to say).

In his skepticism of centralizers, modernizers and humanitarians, Coburn echoes other anthropologically minded writers. Thomas Barfield’s “Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History” insists that Western powers made a serious error by installing Karzai in a presidency with quasi-monarchical powers. They “attempted to restore a system designed for autocrats in a land where autocracy was no longer politically sustainable.” Similarly, Barfield suggests that asking rural Afghans to rethink their beliefs about religion or women’s rights is sure to fail. Afghanistan’s own Ataturk, Amanullah, who tried to ban the veil in 1928, fled to India in 1929. A better course of action, the record shows, was to pursue “policies of social change in urban areas where they were welcome, and then let them spread to the countryside only after prejudices against them had waned.” With some irony, Barfield shows that Afghan rulers of the last 150 years anticipated Karzai in their combination of anti-foreign rhetoric with a reliance on outside assistance; one king after another cast himself as the essential preserver of Afghan independence and tradition while depending on British subsidies. Meanwhile, life in the countryside was little affected: the most successful rulers “declared their governments all-powerful but rarely risked testing that claim by implementing controversial policies.” After the Taliban’s departure, “the enthusiasm for restoring a highly centralized government was confined to the international community and the Kabul elite that ran it.”