Afghanistan, over the past one decade, has seen the peak of efforts to improve the state of affairs in the country. The end-result of more than a decade of intense efforts is now evident for all to see – improvements in the areas of public administration, public service delivery, jobs and employment and the overall economic conditions. Parallel to this list of achievements, there are still flagrant shortcomings and monumental failures that threaten the very future of the vision of a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan.

The efforts of the government of Afghanistan under President Hamid Karzai to turn around the trend of war and conflict by negotiating a political settlement have so far ended in failure. It has been more than three months since the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the ex-president and the chief of the High Peace Council.

However, the president and the government have been unable to place a suitable substitute for the slain chief of the High peace Council. The council, after the loss of its chief, continues to remain rudderless and is in acute need of a charismatic yet pragmatic leader, one that can match or exceed the profile and the stature of its slain leader.

It would be naïve to be too excited or optimistic about the High Peace Council and what it may or may not achieve in the future. It has been devoid of any strategic vision and the very strategy that underpins it and its activities disregards many factors without which peace efforts remain futile. As the government of Afghanistan's peace efforts remain in crisis, so the country's bureaucracy and the vast administrative apparatus that is tasked with delivering on the expectations of the people and the international community.

Perhaps, the greatest failing of the state in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era has been the incapacity and the inability of the government to effectively and efficiently deal with many of the multitude of crises that have engulfed the country.

It is one thing when you have a national leadership that gradually but efficiently takes the right decisive steps to overcome these challenges. It is quite another thing to have a leadership that is incapable and unwilling to first recognize the problems and then adopt the right policies and strategies towards the gradual resolution of these challenges.

As the years and months pass by, the country becomes more mired in crises that are the products of the state's own failures and shortcomings. It would not be realistic to place the blame for what has gone wrong in Afghanistan on foreigners.

The president's claim that the foreigners have been the source of corruption in Afghanistan does not stand up to logic nor scrutiny. The president's recent statement that the embezzlers, fraudsters, looters, traffickers and the corrupt can continue looting, embezzling and trafficking as long as they invest the illegal proceeds inside the country was an unmitigated disaster. That statement laid bare the reluctance of the government to seriously and effectively deal with these problems.

Need for a new vision
Afghanistan stands at historic crossroads. What is painfully missing and its absence evidently felt is is a new vision for Afghanistan, one that would be based on radical thinking, doing away with the old, tried, tested and failed paradigms and introducing and embracing new ones in conformity with the realities of today's Afghanistan. I believe that it is high time that these desperately-needed new paradigms be introduced and adopted. Our fight against corruption is one such area where new grounds should be broken.

Zero tolerance towards corruption and graft ought to start from the highest levels in the government and the core team around the country's chief executive. A piece-meal system that focuses first and foremost on cleaning up the public service delivery organizations and agencies should be part of any reformed crusade against corruption.

Improving the public service delivery agencies is an absolute necessity that would go a long way in enhancing the government-citizen interface and relationship. The single-largest and the most frequent grievance of the people in the country is the poor quality of public services from justice delivery and rule of law to provision of basic amenities such as water and electricity.

Improving these sets of basic but core service delivery mechanisms and agencies would go a long way in improving the perceptions of the common people towards the government and governance in the country.

After all, managing the perceptions of people and shaping a favorable image of the state is a basic yet critical principle of delivering good governance. Graft, embezzling and loss to public money and the exchequer, although very important challenges, are, however, in the second order of importance given the desperate state of governance and justice delivery in the country.

The ailing and unresponsive system of justice dispensation in Afghanistan is a major hurdle in the way of consolidating the rule of law and mobilizing the support of masses in favor of the government and the state.

The justice disposal and delivery system in Afghanistan under the Judiciary as one among the three branches of the state is inseparate need of extensive and sweeping reforms. The rampant graft and corruption and the slow process of judicial review that leads to accumulation of cases and makes litigation a very difficult affair need to be addressed.

The full range of issues and challenges in Afghanistan's judicial sector is beyond the scope of this article. However, the inaccessible and exclusive nature of the Judicial services in the country should be a priority for the government of Afghanistan and the international community.

The judicial system especially in the provinces and districts need to be cleansed of corruption and the full range of issues that undermine the justice dispensation process need to be integrated into a national action plan for improvement of justice delivery.

After all, after a decade of efforts in Afghanistan, justice dispensation is the principal duty of the government in Afghanistan especially after years of extensive and widespread human rights violations and encroachment of justice.