Afghanistan (54 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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“A collection of haphazard, fragmented, and short-term responses” was former finance minister Ashraf Ghani’s bottom-line view regarding the aid effort.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Whether an aid program will benefit the local Afghan population, corrupt Afghans, or outside contractors depends on project-specific details.

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.

Ashraf Ghani said: “In Afghanistan, every agency has a separate set of priorities and we do not know how capable they are because they are unaccountable. Even within single international organizations, there is no coordination. When I was Minister of Finance, I found that UN agencies are not coherent; they are not co-coordinated. Under one UN program, six of the UN agencies in Afghanistan are not even willing to disclose their audits to their own board of governors. Then I went to the EU, and found that the member nations did not coordinate or share their aid allocations and priorities. As for the US, the Department of Defense was
spending money separate from that of AID.”
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Ghani’s experience underlines that the lack of capacity of the Afghan government is not solely the result of the lack of public administration skills or widespread corruption, but because it has to deal with a divided and often dysfunctional aid process to provide needed resources and has encouraged Afghans to compete for foreign money rather than work together.

With no one in charge of the aid effort, it was almost a guarantee that resources could not be effectively allocated. No one person had authority to change aid priorities and address changing situations as Afghanistan encountered emerging problems. When the insurgency escalated in 2005–06, it took almost four years afterward for resources to move through the budget cycle, be authorized, appropriated, and finally spent on the ground in Afghanistan where they were needed to be integrated with military efforts as part of an effective counter-insurgency strategy.
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Those aid efforts, such as those run by the US Department of Defense, that proved more responsive to urgent needs helped Afghanistan beyond their dollar value. Here again, the Afghan government, plagued by incapacity and corruption, has a limited ability to provide this unity of effort and direction, but minimizing its participation has often made a bad situation worse. The Afghans need to do more, while the donors need to insist on needed transparency more than micromanaging programs.

Prioritizing where aid should be allocated has been part of the problem. The things the average Afghan most looked to receive from outside aid in 2001 failed to materialize: security, non-corrupt law enforcement, effective governance, dispute resolution, economically viable agriculture, and religion that is not a tool of the Taliban and their allies. Western aid programs often focused on agendas generated by donors and ignored the inputs of those on the ground who better understand and accept the disparate nature of Afghan society.

Division in the aid effort has fed into Afghan factionalism and division, as each different donor has acquired its own Afghan clients and sources of information. This fractured system has encouraged Afghans to compete for outside resources rather than force them to make hard compromises and work together for a shared reward. This current climate has also done nothing to alleviate the culture of dependency, previously discussed, as
endemic to modern Afghan society, from local farmers to Karzai and Kabul. Each separate aid program has created a new set of dependencies, with the different donors as patrons. A more unified aid effort would both provide more to Afghans and enable the Afghan government to work better.

Aid Successes

Despite this misdirection and underallocation of aid resources, many of the successes that Afghanistan has experienced since 2001 have their roots in either aid or outside investment. Some five to six million Afghan refugees returned from Pakistan, Iran, and internal displacement, and the educational and public health systems were able to cope with these because the Afghans were able to devise programs and set priorities for the international donors that provided resources to deal with this massive influx. Communications and the spread of cell phones has proven a great success, funded almost exclusively by the private sector, and has managed to avoid corruption. This was largely carried out by Afghans working in the private sector, borrowing money and acquiring technology from outside as required, rather than relying on donor nations.

Education has been one of the ways life has become better for Afghans, and aid has made this possible. On
Nawroz
, the Afghan New Year of 2002, the state school system reopened nationwide, and it was the first act by a Kabul government since 1978 to be heartily accepted and willingly implemented nationwide. By 2008–09, there were over six million Afghan children in school (up from 750,000 in 2001), with a third of these primary schoolchildren being girls who were denied access to education by the previous Taliban regime.