Afghanistan

by David Isby

  Part of supporting Afghan is prioritizing aid sectors that are important for the grassroots. Agriculture aid has been identified by Afghan officials and aid donors alike as an overall failure.619 While there have been successes, aid to the agricultural sector, the source of employment for the majority of Afghans, still is behind where it should be, due to being initially underfunded. This helped create the vacuum that was filled by opium cultivation and trafficking. After the Taliban fell in 2001, there was never enough aid provided from abroad to create meaningful employment for many of Afghanistan’s former fighting men in carrying out reconstruction or learning to read, among other needed tasks for the society to deal with the damage caused by decades of conflict. The conflicts resulted in a “lost generation” that continues to provide manpower for warlords, narcotics cultivators, and terrorists and insurgents in the absence of a viable alternative. It demonstrated that outsiders were not willing to invest in making the average Afghan’s life better, only in backing a self-interested leadership and unresponsive but centralized state power in Kabul. This has led not to the grassroots support that Kabul needs to make any effective use of aid to benefit the average Afghan, but instead to increased corruption that benefits a few elites. A tribal elder in Paktia said about this: “Paktia has lots of problems, but the issue of lack of clinics, schools, and roads is not the problem. The main problem is we don’t have a good government. . . . Without a clean government, millions of dollars are stolen. If you increase the amount of money it will also be useless because the government will simply steal more. There’s a growing distance between the people and the government and this is the main cause of the deteriorating security situation.’’620 Increased oversight and transparency is an important step in achieving this, but the fundamental disconnect between the grassroots and the Afghan government that this statement addresses is going to require direct involvement by aid donors while the government is reformed and made more capable, which is likely to take longer than the current crisis in Afghanistan will permit.

  One of the reasons why aid efforts need to directly help the Afghan grassroots at the same time they try to build government capability is because most post-2001 aid efforts originally ignored rebuilding of key non-governmental groups, institutions, and networks, such as those of the ulema, crucial to conflict resolution, a source of local leadership and vital to keeping local society stable and making conditions less hospitable to insurgents and narcotics.

  Aid was thought to speak for itself in those early years, and there was little effort made to get grassroots Afghans to support the program or achieve the vital “buy-in” that is a prerequisite to their taking ownership and, ultimately, responsibility. Too often, hard as they may have competed to receive it, the aid appeared to the grassroots Afghans to have come from “out there”; and when they were not made to take responsibility for it, they did not care about it. If something is important to Afghans, they will fight to the death for it, as they fought the Soviets when they saw their country invaded and their religion threatened. Fewer Afghans are willing to fight this way for a paved road or a school. This has led to the scene, repeated multiple times throughout Afghanistan, of schools being built for which there were no teachers (because the foreigners are only funding building the physical plant rather than paying money to recruit and retain the educated Afghans who normally do not wish to be village schoolteachers in remote rural areas) and so were turned into storehouses, or new mosques where no one will preach because it was a creation of infidels. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, the insurgents burn these schools or mosques down first thing, and the local people often look the other way, indifferent. Afghans will not fight insurgents for a school or a mosque when they are the results of an aid process that they were not part of from the start. Afghans will fight anyone—Soviets, Americans, or insurgents—who appears to threaten what they value. Where there is ownership of an institution, a policy, or an object, Afghans will defend it, as they defended old Afghanistan from the Soviets or as some insurgents think they are defending Islam from invading “Crusaders and Zionists” who seek to destroy it. The challenge is to get the Afghans to transcend the culture of dependency and the continued pervasiveness of corruption—both in large part the results of collateral damage from outside aid efforts—and enlist them to work for reconstruction and against the insurgency; otherwise no progress will ever be made.

  The most competent Western soldiers and the most caring Western aid workers are no substitute for the Afghans that need to be trained to do these jobs. Afghans want to be trained for jobs that are going to provide more than a subsistence living. The roadside signs in every Afghan city and town advertising computer skills and English-language tutoring are evidence of this. But making this training available, and ensuring that the Afghans selected for training are those best suited to it rather than those with the best patronage connections, has proven to be a challenge. The international community cannot substitute for Afghans even where they can substitute for a lack of capability by Kabul. Training is important because it gives grassroot Afghans a stake in a system that, if presented to them in terms of country and faith, they may be willing to fight to preserve.

  Even though no foreigner should do a job an Afghan is capable of doing, Afghans will often disperse resources to secure patronage relationships and fob off responsibility, so their “job” actually never gets done. Then, when things do not get done, Afghan collective society can diffuse any personal responsibility for this failing. Avoiding this vicious cycle of passivity and failure requires that patronage and social collectivism be used to enforce performance rather than reinforce failure. If an Afghan group has bought into a project and they expect it to be done, failure becomes less acceptable, for then the Afghans involved will lose face by letting others down. The first step in doing this is, despite the inherent frustrations, by committing to having Afghans doing any jobs that they can be trained for, so they are the ones that have their reputations and those of their kin at stake in its success. The problem will be in ensuring that trained Afghans remain in Afghanistan to work. During the war against the Soviets, while many Afghan medical doctors operated in resistance-controlled territory, many more went into exile, some finding driving taxis in the West more appealing than undergoing hardship in a hostile environment in Afghanistan.

  Aid to Grassroots Governance

  “The unit of reconstruction of Afghanistan should be the district; unless you build there, you cannot build the nation,” said former Afghan interior minister Ali Jalali.621 In 2005, Afghanistan had 398 districts in its 34 provinces, the number changing slightly over the years due to administrative reorganizations. The district level is where the crisis of governance in Afghanistan is most intense. Most provinces are too large and diverse to permit a nuanced approach to local realities, and provincial capitals are remote from the villages. Militarily, “district and below is where the fight will be won or lost. We have 130 combat outposts, pushing troops out. We have to live with people, have to get out there,” was how BG James C. McGonville, deputy commander of RC-East, saw the situation in 2008.622 Most of these outposts were co-located with ANSF forces, although a few were US-only. Some 40 of these outposts were platoon-sized or smaller. In late 2009, a number of these outposts were abandoned or consolidated, giving up a US presence in areas where they were seen as not being effective or vulnerable to insurgent attacks. Just as there is a military rationale to deploy troops down to this level, even if it makes them more vulnerable, aid needs to take risks to fill the governance power vacuum at the district level and below.

  Yet Afghanistan has limited governmental capability at district level: an appointed governor, an elected council (elections scheduled for the summer of 2010) in those areas where they are functioning, and teachers and health personnel. In districts with a strong insurgent presence, as in much of Helmand province, this may amount to only a few dozen Afghans; in more secure districts in the north, a few hundreds. District Develo
pment Assemblies (DDAs) include two representatives from each CDC. In provinces such as Helmand, these are not currently functioning. Many DDAs were not formed until 2008–09, so it is too early to assess their value, but they have started to prove effective in districts throughout Afghanistan, especially when provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) have worked closely with them as in Panjshir and Parwan provinces.623 In some areas, non-elected district shuras have been set up and these have been successful, as they are able to provide services to the population and protect economic resources from insurgent destruction (as has been the case in eight of nine districts in Wardak province) by using traditional collective decision making and dispute resolution. As a result, the insurgents have targeted the shuras and the Afghans that take part in them, claiming that any competing approach to their own administration of Sharia law as unIslamic.

  Development at the level below district—the villages where rural Afghans live—is primarily the responsibility of the PRTs and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Afghan Subnational Government Policy program. It is far from adequate as a critical element of a successful counter-insurgent strategy in the rural Pushtun areas of the south and east where the insurgent pull is strongest. Another capability, introduced first in Wardak and Helmand provinces and which may be applied elsewhere, is the Afghan Social Outreach program in which the government identifies local leaders and has them form local shuras, which then help produce plans and direction for development on a village-by-village basis, allowing for local concerns, specifics, and leadership to be reflected.

  Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Their Security Impact

  Post-2001, the US initiated the organization of PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams), which is a military force that includes government civilians, who are supposed to spearhead reconstruction projects throughout Afghanistan. As of late 2009, there were 26 PRTs in Afghanistan, 12 of them provided by the US. US PRTs include some 80–150 personnel; coalition PRTs may be smaller, reflecting the smaller pool of resources available to providing countries such as Lithuania, or larger, in the case of Canada and the UK. Military PRT members carry weapons, but only for their own safety, not to defend the local Afghans. The PRTs are capable of self-defense but not of securing the areas in which they work and are dependent on other coalition military forces for this as well as their logistics support. The PRTs in the most hotly contested provinces, notably the Canadian-led PRT in Kandahar and the UK-led PRT in Helmand, have greatly expanded; they are among the most reliable sources of development in those provinces.

  Many of the US PRTs have limited non-military participation, usually with only a single AID (Agency for International Development) officer, a State Department officer, a Department of Agriculture representative, and a few civilian specialists, if lucky. The bulk of US PRTs are made up of non-specialist military personnel. “PRTs are essential for aid delivery in insecure areas,” said Jim Drummond, director of the South Asia division of the UK’s DfID.624 The main role of the PRT is working with local Afghans at the provincial and district levels. The Afghans help identify needed reconstruction projects. The PRTs, to the extent that their funding permits and the programs fit coalition priorities, will then pay for these projects to be carried out, creating jobs and needed capabilities. The PRT then provides oversight of the bidding process for the project and its implementation. In addition to building, PRTs administer a range of other programs, including agriculture and institution building.

  Many different coalition members are responsible for PRTs. This has resulted in highly disparate approaches to distributing aid to Afghans. PRTs have also been interpreted differently by multiple nations.625 Most of the countries providing PRTs are NATO members (including the UK, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, Spain, and Lithuania), while others (Sweden, New Zealand) are not. Non-US forces all still require backup from the US military. The US provides much of the logistics support and intelligence that enables coalition PRTs to operate. Few of the PRTs managed by non-US coalition forces have the resources available to American PRTs in terms of quick-reaction funding and so are less effective. Many countries, with personnel only on six-month tours, lack the continuity of Afghanistan experience necessary to work amidst the complexities of the culture with regards to soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers alike. They need to know who to trust, how to gain local buy-in for projects, and when oversight is best carried out by one Afghan with a bodyguard and when it requires a show of force. All of this requires a degree of local knowledge that is not easy to acquire or retain once personnel rotate.

  Working with Afghans is the PRTs’ primary mission. Some PRTs spend a lot of time in the field, cooperating with district councils and supervising projects. Some coalition members keep their PRTs largely behind barbed wire in their compounds, signing contracts for building reconstruction projects with local Afghan firms. They rely on Afghan contractors for oversight. Some PRTs tend instead to direct their funding to Afghan NGOs. Others are out becoming building “hearts and minds” or, in the case of New Zealand’s PRT in Bamiyan province, they are much loved by the Shia Hazara inhabitants, demonstrating a link to international acceptance and support from the coalition that transcends the local suspicion of Sunni-dominated rule from Kabul.626 Some PRTs have been innovative. The Netherlands PRT in Uruzgan province was one of the first to integrate social scientists among its personnel to better understand the “human terrain” in which they had to work.

  All PRT missions, regardless of their national affiliation, include monitoring aid programs. But reconciling the need to protect the PRT personnel with retaining flexibility to interact with local Afghans in an effective way is problematic. “How do you send a convoy of 15 HMMWVs to monitor a ten thousand dollar project? Will the locals protect it? The Taliban will beat the locals for giving the PRT tea and destroy the project,” according to Massoud Kharokhail.627 This essentially sums up one of the key reasons why it is hard to carry out development work, even through PRTs, in the provinces in Afghanistan threatened by the insurgency. GEN McChrystal saw the problem as not just limited to the PRTs. “When ISAF forces travel through even the most secure areas of Afghanistan firmly ensconced in armored vehicles with body armor and turrets manned, they convey a sense of high risk and fear to the population.”628 Mark Ward agreed: “We need to get out more. Leave some armor behind. Get out with the people.”629 Effective counter-insurgency operations mean getting out among the “human terrain,” it means that force protection, staying in fortified locations, cannot be the prime objective of either infantry units or PRTs.

  To make the PRTs more effective, in November 2008 ISAF restructured its oversight procedures, intended to provide analytical feedback and share lessons learned. In December 2008, the Executive Steering Committee, including ISAF, Afghan, and UNAMA representatives, was reconstituted to coordinate PRT operations with other reconstruction efforts. Elsewhere, in more secure provinces, PRTs are sometimes duplicating Afghan government functions or competing with local officials. In November 2008, President Karzai complained that PRTs were creating a “parallel government” to his own in the countryside, and other Afghans perceived that many of the resources devoted to some PRTs were absorbed by multiple layers of contractors and sub-contractors, foreign and Afghan, so that little actually reached the grassroots.630 There is concern that in secure areas “where the Afghan government has created local institutions, PRTs delivering services are doing harm. Where the government is there and has the capacity to deliver services, Afghans should go to the government,” said Mark Ward.631 Zoran Milovic, a public opinion researcher, believed that having the Afghan government provide reconstruction rather than the PRTs, once this stage of stability is reached, is important. “The face on reconstruction is important. It is important to show the government gaining strength. The image must not be that of foreigners, but that my government is doing this.”632 The coalition countries that run PRTs in provinces where Afghan governmental capabilities to carry out reconst
ruction and administration do exist, however, are unenthusiastic about redeploying their assets to the conflicts in the south and east, where the danger is considerably higher. Yet with Afghan government capability still limited, the PRTs effectively have to stay around in most provinces to ensure the continuity of their projects for the foreseeable future.

  The US has supplemented the PRTs with other military development efforts. In 2009, as US forces started to move into the Task Force Kandahar area of responsibility, they supplemented the Canadian Kandahar PRT with three District Support Teams (DSTs). The DSTs are intended to carry out PRT-type missions but are smaller and focused on an individual district. More have since been formed.

  The US military has recognized the importance of agricultural aid to their goal of a “comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy.” Agribusiness Development Teams (ADTs) are largely drawn from National Guard units from farming states and include agricultural experts. The first two deployed in 2008, followed by a further five in 2009. GEN Petraeus said he was “very grateful for them, they play an important role.”633 BG James C. McGonville, deputy commander of RC-E in 2008, said: “Some 80 percent of Afghanistan’s people know how to farm, but they are not efficient. Their value chain lacks cold storage and potentially valuable costs are often wasted. In addition, they have to rely on Pakistan for food processing and getting to markets.”634 The ADTs supplement civilian and NGO development efforts to aid the Afghan agricultural sector and have the capability to work in districts where unarmed personnel would be vulnerable.

  The US military also has its own developmental funding through the CERP. US commanders consider the CERP “one of their most critical weapons” in counter-insurgency, because it puts funding in the hands of the same commanders that carry out combat operations, ensuring that development and kinetic operations are fully integrated.635 The CERP is considered one of the most responsive aid programs in Afghanistan. CERP funds are also used to pay local Afghans for collateral damage. British officers in Afghanistan regret the lack of a similar responsive military-directed aid funding capability in their forces.636 CERP funding started at 40 million dollars in fiscal year 2003 and has expanded to 683 million dollars in fiscal year 2009. To provide jobs and reduce insurgent recruiting opportunity, some 70 percent of CERP funding goes to paying local Afghans for work, which includes tasks such as helping to create and maintain coalition forward operating bases.637 Because of the importance of jobs to Afghan perceptions of security and the insurgents’ recruitment of those without them, this is likely to provide the most effective use of CERP funds. There is a general consensus that the US military needs to allocate more personnel to administer the CERP, because the combat units that give out the funding have to rely on non-specialists for aid allocation and oversight.638