Afghan Compact

The Afghan Compact was adopted at the London Conference on Afghanistan on 31 January – 1 February 2006, co-chaired by the Government of Afghanistan, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations. It succeeded the Bonn Agreement of December 2001, whose political roadmap (constitution, presidential and parliamentary elections) had largely been completed by late 2005.

The Compact set out a five-year partnership built around three interdependent pillars:

• Security, including disarmament of illegal armed groups, counter-narcotics, and the build-up of the Afghan National Army and Police.
• Governance, rule of law, and human rights, covering judicial reform, anti-corruption measures, and public administration.
• Economic and social development, anchored in Afghanistan's Interim National Development Strategy (later the ANDS).

It contained dozens of time-bound benchmarks with target dates running through end-2010 and was endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 1659 (2006). Implementation was overseen by the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (JCMB), co-chaired by the Afghan government and the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

In practice, donors used the Compact as the political reference point for aid pledging conferences, while the Afghan government invoked it to push for greater alignment of donor spending with national priorities and on-budget delivery. Progress was uneven: electoral milestones and ministry-building advanced, but security deteriorated sharply from 2006 onward as the Taliban insurgency intensified, and opium cultivation expanded in southern provinces.

The Compact effectively expired in 2011 and was succeeded by the Kabul Process (Kabul Conference, July 2010) and the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework (July 2012), which carried forward the conditionality model of aid in exchange for governance reforms. With the collapse of the Islamic Republic in August 2021, the Compact's institutional architecture ceased to function.