Over at Small Wars Journal, two officers from Task Force Stryker in southern Afghanistan eulogize their friend and partner, the Argandab district governor Hajji Abdul Jabar, whom the Taliban assassinated in Kandahar last week. By coincidence, James Traub ran a piece in the New York Times Magazine yesterday focusing on U.S. military partnership in Argandab, written before Abdul Jabar’s assassination, that gets at the harder questions posed by that partnership.

Here’s how Lt. Col. Patrick Graydon and Cpt. Jonathan Pan honor their friend and ally:

While military operations rooted out and temporarily defeated Taliban forces in Arghandab during the final months of 2009, Jabar reached out to village elders and pulled them into the weekly shuras. As security dramatically improved, he enthusiastically greeted lines of ordinary
Afghans requesting his help to solve their problems every day—governance had finally connected with the people of Arghandab. He worked with the newly arrived US civilians to bring the right projects to the right places to improve the agricultural productivity of the fertile valley. Over 20,000 Afghan men received cash-for-work jobs. As Arghandab became the model example of counterinsurgency operations in southern Afghanistan, Jabar hosted ambassadors, congressional delegations, and generals on almost a daily basis to give them a glimpse of what right looked like. However, those VIPs never saw the charismatic sparkle in Jabar’s eyes that we saw every time we walked into his district center. That sparkle was reserved only for those that had taken the time to get to know him, those who shared his intimate passion to bring progress to the contested valley.

I have no desire to get in the way of someone’s memory of his murdered friend. And I’ll pocket their description of Argandab. What’s necessary to ask, though, is whether “the model example of counterinsurgency operations in southern Afghanistan” can outlast Hajji Abdul Jabar.

If you read through Pan and Graydon’s piece, you see that there’s a concerted Taliban effort at picking off leaders of Abdul Jabar’s Alokozai tribe, for reasons they concede are elusive. And while they express optimism that Abdul Jabar’s successor, Kalimullah, has the “composure of a leader” — despite information they received in their briefing packets after Abdul Jabar’s death — there just isn’t enough time to reach a firm judgment. And he’s clearly a marked man.

But let’s say Kalimullah is a capable leader. Afghanistan doesn’t just need leaders. It needs durable, capable institutions to consistently provide for the Afghan citizenry. And here’s what Traub observed in Argandab before Abdul Jabbar’s death:

And yet the Taliban continued to afflict the district like a low-grade virus. Many of the villagers who came to the District Center and sat patiently in the shade waiting to get their registration papers or to petition government officials refused to talk to me; they worried that even there the Taliban might be listening. Muhibullah, a young man with a neatly trimmed beard and a crisp pale green shalwar kameez, had come from Charbagh, where the I.E.D.’s were laid the week before. “During the day,” he said, “the government is there; they offer projects and say you can work. But then the Taliban leave a night letter at the mosque and say if you work on this project, you will pay the penalty.” The penalty, he said, was having a finger, an ear or your nose lopped off. The local school closed after the Taliban killed a teacher. As a shopkeeper, Muhibullah was fortunate that he could afford the car fare to send his kids to school in Kandahar. “The situation is getting worse,” he said. “People are leaving for Kandahar because of the security situation.”

To be fair, the nine or so months outlined by Graydon and Pan since “clearing” Argandab of insurgents is a short period of time for district governance to take root. But with that caveat in mind, now we have to see whether Abdul Jabar built an institutional foundation for Argandab’s development or whether his charisma and influence held the thing — anything — together.