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INTRODUCTION:THE AFGHANISTAN COMPACTBefore the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and all that followed, Afghans and thehandful of internationals working on Afghanistan could hardly have imagined beingfortunate enough to confront today’s problems. The Bonn Agreement of December 2001providing for the “reestablishment of permanent government institutions” in Afghanistanwas fully completed with the adoption of a constitution in January 2004, the election ofPresident Hamid Karzai in October 2004, and the formation of the National Assembly inDecember 2005.From January 31 to February 1, 2006, President Karzai, UN Secretary-GeneralKofi Annan, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair presided over a conference in Londonof about sixty states and international organizations that issued the Afghanistan Compact,setting forth both the international community’s commitment to Afghanistan andAfghanistan’s commitment to state-building and reform over the next five years. Thecompact supports the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS), an interimversion of which (I-ANDS) the Afghan government presented at the conference. 1 Thecompact provides a strategy for building an effective, accountable state in Afghanistan,with targets for improvements in security, governance, and development, includingmeasures for reducing the narcotics economy and promoting regional cooperation. 2 Thecompact also prescribes ways for the Afghan government and donors to make aid moreeffective and establishes a mechanism to monitor adherence to the timelines andbenchmarks. The compact places responsibility for meeting these goals on thegovernment of Afghanistan, which can easily be held accountable, and the “internationalcommunity,” which cannot be. The United States, United Kingdom, and other donorsstrongly opposed language in the compact that would have held those present at theLondon conference (listed in a compact annex), rather than an abstract entity, responsiblefor implementation.1 The Afghanistan Compact and the I-ANDS are available at www.ands.gov.af.2 For this conceptual framework for peace building, see Barnett R. Rubin, “Constructing Sovereignty forSecurity,” Survival, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter 2005), pp. 93–106.1