Afghanistan (57 page)

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.
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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.”
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Mark Ward agreed: “We need to get out more. Leave some armor behind. Get out with the people.”
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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.
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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.
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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
.”
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The coalition countries that run PRTs in provinces where Afghan governmental capabilities to carry out reconstruction 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Aid and Corruption

Poorly targeted and directed aid programs have hurt the legitimacy of the entire international effort over the past 10 years. They have also helped feed corruption, albeit unwittingly. When Afghans have seen foreigners either dividing aid money pledged to Afghanistan up among themselves or spending it unwisely, it appeared an open invitation to have some of it themselves as soon as they are given the opportunity. This has led to a crisis situation where corruption threatens the legitimacy of the Afghan government and the steps being taken to counter it by donors also have the potential to do more harm than good.

The Afghans saw that the aid system was siphoning off most of the money before it even reached Afghanistan. Adjusting to the rules of the new game, Afghans started to take off their share as well as soon as they could. The result, however, of this new game has been to make losers of the vast majority of the Afghan people and those elites that have not benefited from it. In 2009, the US had three inspector general organizations watching how aid flows through to Afghanistan. Yet
reducing corruption in Afghanistan is going to take a long time, and Afghanistan needs well-directed aid to avoid a short term crisis. “Spending money in Afghanistan and avoiding corruption is hard to reconcile. You have to accept some risk,” said Mark Ward, a UNAMA official working on aid issues.
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The risk is not a trivial one, considering the importance aid has had in creating the culture of corruption that threatens Afghanistan, yet it is probably better to accept policies that give the Afghans more authority and insist that they assume more responsibility, even if this means a higher risk of diversion of resources.

The perception of corruption helps ensure the reluctance by donors, especially the US, to relinquish their control over the aid process and allow the Afghan government a larger role in both determining priorities and implementing programs. Aid has also contributed to the rise of the culture of corruption by hiring many of Afghanistan’s competent former civil servants and technocrats away from the Kabul government and into their international or donor organizations. In addition, too often the aid process has demonstrated a lack of transparency and accountability by both the donors and recipients.

Aid and the Afghan Economy

Afghanistan needs a functioning private-sector national economy for long-term peace and stability. Afghans identify unemployment and the lack of a way to legally prosper as the most important single threat to national security. The insurgency is ethnolinguistically largely limited to the Pushtuns, while unemployment is a nationwide crisis that gives insurgents, warlords, and narcotics traffickers alike more power through their ability to offer jobs where there otherwise would be none. If Afghanistan’s economic situation in recent years was perceived internationally as not as critical as its security situation, this is due to the influx of aid and the money from opium cultivation. Real legal GDP growth has not reached the 14 percent experienced in 2005, but has still remained relatively high, at an estimated 7.5 percent in 2008. Inflation has been reduced from ten percent in 2008 to seven percent in 2009. However, food and energy costs increased in 2008 and the impact of the world economic downturn in 2009 created real hardship among the poor even
if it did not undo many of the post-2001 gains reflected in development in Kabul and the availability of work on development programs.
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While this did not lead to food riots or hunger, even after neighboring countries restricted their exports, it became harder for the average Afghan to live. The hope for a better life that all Afghans shared after the ouster of the Taliban receded.

Despite busy bazaars, a trading tradition, and a history of free exchange and silk-route merchants, Afghanistan’s economic development before the 1978 Communist putsch was dominated by the state. Since the 1980s, the part of the economy outside Kabul’s control has been dominated by regional markets and an economy based on illegal extraction: opium, smuggling, clear-cutting forests, and weapons trade during the Tajikistan Civil War. Much of the recent development since 2001 has been dominated by foreign donors and investors or those Afghans who have access to money and connections abroad, sometimes illegal: the trans-border transport and lumber mafias, narcotics traffickers, and the Kabul real-estate developers. Other Afghans used connections with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, dating back to the war against the Soviets, to access investments from there. The creation of an entrepreneurial Afghan diaspora since 1978 has made possible much of the recent legal economic growth. Those who did not return to Afghanistan have often provided investment and access to international markets and investment. But the global Afghan community does not have the human and natural resources nor the access to capital like China or India.

As with aid, there are examples in Afghanistan of economic success that can potentially serve as a model that can be applied to other sectors. The communications sector provided an example of a success through private investment that has avoided corruption. Media growth, also privately funded, means that even remote Afghan villages can now share Internet access and satellite television or listen to a broad range of news sources. Banking and finance, writing on an almost blank slate since 2001, have grown effectively, linking Afghanistan to the world economy and providing Afghans with a way to transfer funds other than the
hawala
system. This means ANSF personnel no longer have to leave their posts to deliver their pay to their home villages. Afghanistan
now has a thriving privately owned transportation sector, ranging from international airlines to single truck operators. The high rates of economic growth created by the development of Kabul provided employment to a large number of Afghans. If this can be recreated on a national basis, it would directly attack the economic insecurity that clouds Afghan life today. Investment in the agricultural sector to enable exports also has the attraction of being able to potentially provide employment in areas where today poppy cultivation is the only alternative. Resource development, such as the Chinese investment in copper deposits, is another potential source of economic growth. However, Afghanistan is unlikely to achieve a functioning national economy until it can offer Afghans and investors alike security and rule of law. While these remain out of reach in the areas dominated by the insurgency in the south, instability has not blocked economic growth throughout Afghanistan. Nangarhar province continues to be the location of a strong cross-border trade with Pakistan despite the insurgency. Kabul and the more secure provinces in the north and west have better economies, and these offer potential for investment and growth.

Nothing is more important for Afghanistan than creating a viable private-sector—based national economy. It can provide more resources than aid and, more than any number of troops, offers the potential for a more stable future. The problem is that the troops are required to prevent the threat of terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics from sweeping away this future in the near term. The Kabul government and foreign donors alike have recognized the importance of the private sector, but nurturing it has often proven problematic. Applying the successes in communications, media, transportation, and other sectors throughout the economy has been difficult. The impact of decades of state domination of the economy is still being felt, but privatization efforts have often been undercut by corruption and favoritism and have failed to take advantage of the collectivist nature of traditional Afghan society to give grassroots Afghanistan a stake in the process and, through that, a feeling of belonging in the future of the national economy. “Public ownership should have been through letting the locals buy shares and collect dividends,” was the view of a veteran journalist in October 2008. Instead, it has been marked by widespread accusations of corruption, most notably in the leasing of copper mining
rights to China and in the sale of state assets, such as cement plants, to foreigners working in partnership with Afghans with family connections to the Kabul government.