Afghanistan

  —George Kennan, 1951

  “Just as the US military is reinventing itself through a counterinsurgency strategy, US civilian actors need new instruments, practices and thinking.”

  —Clare Lockhart, 2009

  Afghanistan is unique in many ways, but its needs are similar to those of other countries and thus the lessons of history are applicable. Aid has helped devastated countries recover from conflicts, Mozambique being a prime example in the 1990s; or at least provide incentives for the population not falling back to conflict, as is the case with Bosnia and Kosovo. In the Cold War, aid and a strong international commitment helped devastated countries in Europe and Asia eventually become stable and prosper. Compared with these countries, Afghanistan has a less developed political system and deeper divisions in the population, and lacks infrastructure, institutions, sizable resident educated elites, and residual state capabilities. Better aid programs that aim to build up these lacking components of civil society could have had better results and inflicted less collateral damage on society.601

  Much of the aid that has been devoted to Afghanistan has been absorbed by the aid efforts themselves and only a relatively small percentage has been effective in making life better for Afghans. In addition to the aid effort absorbing resources being devoted to it and allocation often reflecting donor rather than Afghan priorities, the amount of aid has been inadequate. Afghanistan has received much less aid on a per-capita or per-area basis than other post-conflict aid efforts, despite Afghanistan’s more widespread devastation and lower level of pre-war development. One 2006 overview of the aid process is summed up as follows: “While aid has undoubtedly contributed to progress in Afghanistan, a large proportion of aid has been prescriptive and supply-driven, rather than indigenous and responding to Afghan needs. It has been heavily influenced by the political and military objectives of donors, especially the imperative to win so-called ‘hearts and minds.’ It has tended to reflect expectations in donor countries, and what Western electorates would consider reconstruction and development achievements, rather than what Afghan communities want and need. Projects have too often sought to impose a preconceived idea of progress, rather than nurture, support and otherwise expand capabilities, according to Afghan preferences.”602 Aid efforts, along with the military action by the coalition in Afghanistan, demonstrate that their ability to do good is inherently limited by the difficulty of changing Afghanistan for the better, while their ability to do harm suffers no such constraint. The result has been, in the words of Ashraf Ghani: “International technical assistance is considered to be largely wasted. . . . Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into technical assistance only to increase corruption and misgovernance.”603

  Aid to Afghanistan

  Afghanistan has been dependent on outside aid since its emergence as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century, with some of the aid going to development of a national government, mostly going to the state running and supporting elites who were part of various high-level patronage networks in order to ensure their support for, or at least non-resistance to, Kabul policies. The high point of this approach by donors and Kabul alike was the Golden Age: foreign aid provided the Afghans with actual gold. In terms of creating a stable state post-2001, Afghanistan was, in effect, starting from where the former king began, when his 1933 coronation offered peace after years of civil war, not like when he was overthrown in 1973. The way the monarchy established itself starting in the 1930s was to convince the Afghan people that it was in their personal (and financial) interest to be associated with the state, including supporting and participating in state-established institutions, such as education. With the benefit of hindsight, the former king’s policies, of building a centralized state with limited capabilities, appear to have often been the wrong choice for achieving stability, as the growth of the Communist opposition, with foreign support, demonstrated. The growth of a private sector economy was neglected in favor of state-controlled and -directed investments. Making the life of the average Afghan better was not a high priority even in the nation’s supposed Golden Age, and making the life of the average Afghan woman better was more remote still.

  Because previous Western governmental aid efforts with Afghanistan were largely cut off in the 1990s, many of the lessons learned by the nations supporting the Afghans during their war against the Soviets had to be re-learned, especially the pitfalls: widespread corruption and diversion, minimal accountability, and the collateral damage caused by the creation of the culture of dependency. Programs were too often judged by how many resources were allocated rather than their effects in reaching Afghan grassroots.

  Outside aid for the Afghans did tremendous things in the 1980s. Covert aid enabled the Afghan resistance to endure and eventually prevail against the Soviets. Humanitarian aid kept the worlds’ largest population of refugees from starving in Pakistan. Cross-border aid kept many Afghans on their land inside Afghanistan. But parts of the aid flow contributed to Afghanistan’s continuing problems. Pakistan’s ISI allocated the covert aid and favored the Islamist HiH and other Pushtun parties it believed it could control. Arab money and the Pakistani security services enabled the rise of the Taliban Culture in Pakistan in the 1980s.

  In 2009, Eshan Zia, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, said “to strengthen legitimacy we must enable government to serve the people”; this has not been a self-evident fact through Afghanistan’s history, but this historical precedent seemed to have been swept away by the assurance that pervaded the population that the US-led intervention in 2001 was going to make life better for everyone.604 The international aid effort effectively preceded the emergence of a functioning Afghan national government or a national economy, and the current divisions and direction of international aid in Afghanistan flow from the fact that in 2001–02 there was no government to engage with when the programs started to help unify its flow in the most effective manner.

  Since 2001, Afghan governance has depended heavily on aid in the absence of a functioning national economy and still lacks the ability to fund itself. In 2008, 90 percent of all Afghan public expenditures depended on international assistance. The 750 million dollars that the Afghan government raised from duties and taxation itself was equivalent to what Afghanistan received from just one aid program, the US Department of Defense’s CERP (commander’s emergency response) program. Afghanistan has one of the lowest domestic revenue-to-GDP ratios in the world, around seven percent. This by itself helps create a culture of dependency, as nothing can function without outside assistance. Experience has shown that reliance on an aid flow creates rent-seeking behavior that undercuts democratic institutions; the “curse of aid” is worse than the “curse of oil.” Both aid and oil provide money in a way that counters the establishment of an effective independent government and a functional civil society alike.605 While the flow of aid has been insufficient to rebuild or stabilize Afghanistan, it has been enough to fuel the growth of the culture of corruption and dependency, and, through that, the Taliban culture that promises both Islamic rectitude and an end to the cultural chaos caused by these outside influences, be they well-meant or not. But the importance of aid means that, for all its drawbacks in Afghanistan, there is no alternative except for the Afghan government to rely on it until a functional national economy emerges.

  The post-Bonn government was the first to make improving the daily life of the average Afghan a state priority; but where they have done this, as in the provision of opportunities in education and basic health care, it was overshadowed by the raised expectations that were created by the 2001 US intervention and new frustrations with the continued corruption, lack of jobs, violence, and narcotics trade. Aid resources went to implementing the provisions of the Bonn agreement, such as the Loya Jirgas and presidential and parliamentary elections, not to creating a stable, legal economy, restoring agriculture or local governments and a civil society free from corruption.

/>   At the time of the Bonn conference, the US resistance to a commitment of open-ended “nation-building” led to a donor-driven approach, where nations pledged what they wished, coordinated at international conferences, and provided criteria for Afghans as to how this aid was to be used. With a donor-centric aid approach, the Afghans have tended to get what the donor or Kabul believes they want, rather than what they are actually willing to take ownership of. Like most of Afghanistan’s problems, there is no easy solution. Each option has real costs and limitations that can only be mitigated rather than prevented.

  This amorphous policy reflected the political reality in the US and other donor nations. The US Congress was simply not going to authorize funds for nation-building and institutional creation in Afghanistan when it was competing with the commitment to Iraq and other priorities and there was no way to guarantee that the money would not go to line the pockets of a corrupt few. The US approach of emphasizing donor priorities meshed with and encouraged the UN “light footprint” concept that the then-Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) Lakhdar Brahimi had put forward. Security Council Resolution 1401, which passed on 28 March 2002 (since renewed annually), established the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which is led by the SRSG. This was also not intended to create a strong top-down UN direction to the aid effort. Brahimi said that his priorities were “security, security and security,” recognizing that without providing Afghans with security, both the Kabul government and its foreign supporters would have their claims to legitimacy severely undercut, and their ability to carry out real social and economic reconstruction would be limited. The UN wanted to ensure that the Bonn process was seen as an Afghan-run process so that cultural resistance and suspicion of outsiders would be mitigated and the growth of Afghan capabilities enabled. It was not going to repeat its direct hands-on involvement seen in post-conflict situations such as East Timor, despite its relative success there.

  The US wanted only a limited UN presence in post-2001 Afghanistan, and it was unlikely that the UN could have taken a larger role even had this been their goal.606 The US instead encouraged the “lead nation” concept which eschewed a unified aid effort. The “lead nation” approach was adopted internationally at the January 2002 Tokyo donor conference. Five different nations would each have “lead” responsibility for a high-priority aid area: the UK was responsible for narcotics, the Italians in the judicial sector, the Japanese (through funding UNAMA as the lead agency) in disarmament, demilitarization and rehabilitation (DDR), and the Germans in police training.

  In reality, much of the implementation of this approach proved counterproductive, as the discrete assignments were, in reality, all interconnected on the ground and required a unified approach that was difficult to achieve without a mechanism for coordination, planning, and resource allocation between the five “lead nation” donors.607 Despite the pledges made in Tokyo, the “lead nation” aid approach ended up woefully underfinanced. This disjointed approach was distrusted by the Afghans and proved inadequate in scope and funding. “We are to have German cops, Italian judges, and British drugs,” lamented an official in the Afghan government at the time, wishing instead for a Afghan-led unitary effort. Shortfalls in the lead nations’ programs, such as the German failure to train meaningful numbers of non-corrupt police, the Italian failure to create a judicial system, the British failure to reduce narcotics cultivation, and the Japanese-funded UNAMA efforts that made DDR appear not as a confidence-building measure between Afghans but rather an attempt to impose centralized power on pro-Kabul non-Pushtun Afghans and make them unable to resist the emerging insurgency by well-armed ethnic Pushtuns, all together had an impact long after this approach had come to an incremental end in 2003–06, before it was officially replaced by the Afghanistgan Combat and subsequently the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS).

  The impact of outside aid on Afghanistan in the past decade has, ironically, not all been positive. After the fall of the Taliban, it was assumed by Afghans that an aid effort would have the same scope and efficacy as the military effort that defeated the Taliban and chased Al Qaeda and would now solve all of Afghanistan’s vast problems. No Afghan leaders emerged to dampen this view and put realistic goals in place, and so this tremendous amount of hope started to turn into bitter cynicism and mistrust of the coalition and the Afghan government alike for failing to bring about this better life when it appeared within their reach. Rather, each Afghan leader or elite looked to get as much as he could from the fledgling nation, either in terms of acquiring governmental or local power or, more often, self-enrichment. Instead, what Afghans saw as the preponderance of the money went to foreign consultants or else never really left the donor country, and that which made it to Afghanistan often vanished. Afghans, elites and grassroots alike, cut out from the process, saw this as yet another form of corruption by the donors and responded to it with their own, Afghan, corruption, because they felt it was essential to their survival in the absence again of any real alternative.608 “A collection of haphazard, fragmented, and short-term responses” was former finance minister Ashraf Ghani’s bottom-line view regarding the aid effort.609 The Afghan response to it was similarly short-term—oriented.

  “All supply-driven, never demand-driven” has been the widespread characterization of the aid process. The donor-centric aid process, in repeated international conferences since 2001—Tokyo, London, Paris, and The Hague—has put down many markers for the Afghans but few for themselves. The Afghanistan Compact that emerged from the London Conference in February 2006 had 77 benchmarks for the Kabul government but none for donors, which could have covered controversial issues like how quickly commitments would be converted to cash and how much of each dollar pledged would benefit Afghans.

  The aid effort—from contractors to donors, international organizations, and NGOs—often appeared to Afghans as a foreign intrusion on their way of life without the obvious benefit of preventing renewed civil war which they have continued to ascribe to the foreign military presence. Some 40 percent of aid never leaves the donor country, as it is turned into corporate profits and consultant salaries; when in-kind transfers of aid to Afghanistan are counted, the percentage of many aid-for-Afghanistan programs that end up going to the donor country is nearly double.610 The US was one of the worst donor nations in terms of how many cents of every aid dollar had a direct benefit on the lives of Afghans.611 Again, this reflects political realities and a strong rationale. The Congress would not authorize funds without US operational control and has long insisted that US contractors be used in aid programs; the widespread corruption and incapacity associated with the Afghan government has made them reluctant to make aid on a government-to-government basis, at least until it can be demonstrated that progress has been achieved in achieving transparency and removing corrupt officials.

  Developmental aid has often been so filtered through a series of subcontractors that little is reaching Afghans. This is especially true with regard to the US-sponsored road-building and other infrastructure programs. The quality of the Kabul-Kandahar highway, built with US funding, was so poor that stretches had deteriorated after two years’ use as the multiple layers of contractors had undercut accountability. At each level, protection payments to the insurgents by contractors contributed to the deterioration of the security situation. It is unlikely that a unitary Afghan-directed aid program could have avoided these problems, but at least it had the potential to use aid to create loyalty toward Kabul as King Zahir had done.

  In 2009 GEN McChrystal recognized that aid contracting was part of the security problem: “ISAF must pay particular attention to how development projects are contracted and to whom. Too often these projects enrich power-brokers, corrupt officials or international contractors and serve only limited segments of the population.”612 Whether an aid program will benefit the local Afghan population, corrupt Afghans, or outside contractors depends on project-specific details.
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  As of March 2008, only 15 billion dollars of the 39 billion originally pledged in aid to Afghanistan had been spent, with the remainder still in the donors’ pockets or amounting to no more than promises. In May 2008, the Kabul government estimated the total cost of reconstruction at 30 billion dollars, with a further 50 billion being required for a five-year development program aimed at creating effective governance, a functioning state, and a national economy. At the fourth donor conference for Afghanistan that was held in June 2008 in Paris, the Afghan government presented the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS) as a roadmap document and received pledges for an additional 20 billion dollars over the next five years. The creation of such a roadmap was considered a needed first step for increased Afghan government participation in the aid effort and has been an improvement in the quality and direction of donor action (and not necessarily just providing more money) and has made an effort to incorporate grassroots consultation. The ANDS provides transparency, showing what the Afghans intend to do if they are given the needed resources. The Hague conference in March 2009 continued this approach.

  A Divided Aid Effort

  Aid, however well-meaning by the donors, has been slow to adapt to Afghan realities. Many Afghans tend to disregard this altruistic meaning or explain it away cynically as expressions of self-interest by the donors and instead see only the disappointing results, which many see as proof that neither Kabul nor the coalition is really interested in their having a better life. Aid to Afghanistan is, despite recent improvement, delivered in a splintered and fragmented way. The lack of a single aid effort, an effective Afghan central government, and needed infrastructure and institutions have all contributed to this result. Major aid donors, such as the US and UN, divided their programs among multiple agencies that often did not coordinate with each other, let alone other donors.