The independent commentary on British political affairs.
The independent commentary on British political affairs.
May 2008
Vol. 11, No. 11
A People's War: Brenda Boardman | The shadow over Brown's plan's to change the way we are governed: … More…
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If you were to ask an Afghan what his country needs, the answers would be simple and straight-forward: incomes for its people, education for its children and security. If you were to ask the same question to the Select Committee on International Development, the answer would include: improved donor co-ordination, improved local governance, a reformed judiciary, an end to narcotics trafficking and a plane for embassy personnel.
Herein lies the answer to the question, why aren’t things going better in Afghanistan? Simply put, foreign governments continue to pursue their own desire for national security while, in many cases, marginalising the needs of the Afghan people.
The Committee’s recently released report Reconstructing Afghanistan, the product of an extensive inquiry that included a week-long fact-finding mission in October 2007, is remarkable in that it affirms the need for the British government to commit to re-building Afghanistan for ‘at least a generation’. It includes some notable insights: namely that international assistance must be used to support the Afghan government and that rural areas, difficult to access as they may be, must be the focus of reconstruction and high-impact opportunities such as micro-finance.
Unfortunately, as evident in the issues examined — working in insecure environments, donor co-ordination, improving security, governance, narcotics trafficking, rural livelihoods and military-led initiatives — the Committee primarily focuses upon those issues of greatest importance to Britain rather than starting their inquiry from the perspective of an Afghan.
Admittedly, the Committee’s scope was limited by its mandate from the House of Commons ‘to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Department for International Development (DfID) and its associated public bodies’ rather than Afghanistan’s reconstruction more broadly. Yet the report tackles both areas, administration and the efficacy of reconstruction, despite its official terms of reference.
To start with a picky observation, I could not help but note that scarcely more space is dedicated to creating jobs and working farms for Afghans than is spent discussing the holiday schedules and transportation of embassy and DfID personnel. Strengthening education, a key priority for keeping children out of radical madrassas and the chief aspiration of many Afghan families, is barely mentioned.
Where it is discussed the focus is on ‘access’ rather than quality and sustainability. The same holds true for healthcare.
Security is addressed, though primarily in the context of British troops and personnel. The Select Committee does make a keen insight in noting the heterogeneity of the Taliban and the varying motivations of its members. This realisation would have been put to better use, however, had the authors emphasized a re-engagement with the more pliable and less ideological elements of the insurgent forces.
Poppy cultivation by largely impoverished Afghan farmers, termed ‘narcotics trafficking’ in the report, is a major concern for Western countries which consume opiates of Afghan origin. Yet for many Afghans poppies are the only way out of abysmal poverty. The Committee rightly highlighted the foolishness of eradicating poppies through aerial spraying, an American obsession which promotes radicalism and insurgency along with substantial health risks.
Still, alternatives such as the ‘controlled cultivation of poppy for the local production of pharmaceutical-grade morphine’, one intriguing if not controversial recommendation made by the Senlis Council to the Committee, should have made its way from the evidentiary annexes into the body of the report.
Equally disappointing are the contradictory statements regarding the role of the Afghan government. The Committee wisely proposes providing foreign assistance directly to the Government of Afghanistan, yet it promotes the donor-directed Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). The ARTF, while appearing integrated into state structures, in practice allows funds to bypass Afghanistan’s elected representatives thereby undermining the hard-won democratic achievements of the last six years.
Institutions like the ARTF are not only undemocratic and unaccountable to the people of Afghanistan but also wasteful in channelling unseemly sums of money to foreign consultants and ‘monitoring agents’ from powerful Western financial institutions.
As I first noted in Reconstructing War-Torn Societies: Afghanistan, in 2004, ‘international reconstruction plans are running ahead of Afghan preparedness and pre-empting the process of national decision making’. In other words, international zeal for reconstruction and an impatient expectation of immediate results has led the world to dictate daily events in Afghanistan in a counter-democratic manner.
The report proceeds to allay the fears of NGOs, which see themselves in competition with the Afghan government for foreign assistance, by highlighting the fact that the Afghan ministries still subcontract humanitarian organisations to provide most core services such as education and healthcare.
It is regrettable, however, that the authors did not use this opportunity to remind NGOs that they are intended to provide temporary support and that, upon the arrival of a minimally capable public administration, their mandate is to support only those most vulnerable populations which the government absolutely cannot.
It would have been wiser, should the provision of basic services remain a challenge for the Afghan government, for the Committee members to have proposed the supplanting of international with local NGOs or the development of Afghan businesses to fill the gap.
Furthermore, the report adamantly advocates a Reconstruction Czar in the form of a significantly emboldened UN Special Representative to oversee the country’s resurrection according to a strategy co-ordinated among international donors. It politely, but perhaps unwisely, criticises Afghan President Hamid Karzai for rejecting the nomination of Lord Paddy Ashdown, a man of great achievement who I admire enormously, for this powerful co-ordination role.
The Afghan government’s objection, it should have been noted, is not to the candidate but with the broad powers entrusted to his would-be office. With reconstruction currently encompassing the key functions of the state, such a powerful position would effectively place an unelected foreigner at the helm of a country much touted for its transition to democracy.
Allowing Afghans to run Afghanistan is, more than ever, critical for improving stability and ensuring the legitimacy of the Afghan government. The Afghan people will only come to see their government as legitimate when it is able to provide its people with basic services directly and when Afghanistan’s elected officials, rather than foreign governments, independently determine the country’s needs and allocate the resources to meet them.
The Committee should be commended for recognising this point and for recommending that additional British assistance be directed through government coffers. Yet it must enmesh itself in the details and ensure that institutions such as the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund do not channel funds around the people’s representatives and circumvent democracy.
If the democratic imperative to allow people control over their own future is not sufficient, there is also practical justification for Afghan control of reconstruction. At some point, the foreigners will leave. The millions of dollars spent on consultants and advisers — who, according to my experience, could earn more than £1,000 per day in war-torn countries — will dry up, and the large development agencies will downscale or abandon their operations in Afghanistan as their attention is drawn to Iraq or another global hot spot. The Afghans will be left to fend for themselves — and they will need to be ready. At the moment, however, they are not fully prepared to take the reigns of reconstruction and development.
In a highly impressive failure, the international community has worked to reconstruct Afghanistan for half a dozen years without passing along the skills to Afghans. Instead, the expertise has flown in and out of the country on the United Nations’ weekly flights to Dubai.
Furthermore, we cannot accept that nothing can be done until the last gun has gone quiet. Instead capacities that should have been built as early as the end of 2001 must be built now: this will ensure that the human skills are there to lead reconstruction, to provide the much-sought-after peace dividend and to make sure that Afghan priorities are not replaced by international ones. This lesson has been learned in Palestine, Sri Lanka and many other conflict-prone parts of the world.
This problem of human capacity can be rectified. The knowledge of how to do so exists, particularly within Britain, a leader in global education where the phrase ‘development through knowledge’ is valued. Training on post-war reconstruction planning and management is already taking place in Britain, albeit on a small and ad hoc basis.
The Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit at the University of York was attended by Haneef Atmar, the former Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development and current Minister of Education, and Mohammad Ehsan Zia, the current Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development in Hamid Karzai’s government.
Yet Haneef Atmar and Ehsan Zia should not be exceptions, the lucky few who are awarded scholarships to receive the type of training critical for large swaths of Afghanistan’s public administration. Rather, they should be among the first in a strategically and professionally trained corps of effective political and humanitarian leaders and civil servants who will be given the targeted skills desperately needed in their home countries.
It is time for Britain to launch a systematic and global effort to build reconstruction capacities so that people from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere get real chance to lead the reconstruction effort.
A strategic move on the issue of capacity building will give birth to a generation of experts who are able to lead the reconstruction of their own countries and who can accurately articulate the needs of their countries to officials and citizens of highly developed nations.
If political concerns regarding asylum seekers within Britain, a reality when speaking about individuals arriving from war-torn countries, prevent the UK universities from hosting such an effort, Egypt, Jordan or, potentially, Pakistan could be approached as a host country supported by British academia.
For the wary taxpayer this new cohort of leaders would be far less expensive and far more effective than many of the multi-million-pound projects implemented by DfID. Building ten Afghan experts can do more than building thousands of miles of roads.
Helping to rescue Afghanistan’s reconstruction from western priorities will, however, require more than training. Doing so will require that, before moving ahead, the House of Commons International Development Committee and its counterparts around the world ask: how can we facilitate, not dominate, Afghanistan’s reconstruction? They will find that doing so is, in the end, the best way of pursuing their own security within the region.