Learning From ExperienceAfghanistan stabilized after 9/11. Let's get back to what was working.
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008, at 6:59 AM ET
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StumbleUponI had the privilege to live and work in Afghanistan throughout this period. Two myths that many outsiders claim about Afghanistan have confounded me. One was that Afghans are naturally warlords, always have been, always will be. In fact, nearly all the Afghans I met craved law, order, justice, and fairness. From an old woman I met in Mazar-e-Sharif in January 2002 who demanded an accountable civil service, to the cheers in the loya jirga when it was announced that customs revenues would be properly administered, to my driver who would rather spend a night in jail than pay a 10-cent bribe to a policeman, the demand for accountability was overwhelming. I found a people of extraordinary intelligence and fair-mindedness, even after unimaginable sufferings, and, above all, a people yearning to be responsible participants in the global system. The second myth is that Afghanistan is naturally a poor country. Rather, and as the recent "Operation Rampant Lion" that mapped Afghanistan's geology shows, Afghanistan is blessed with significant natural resources, including copper, iron, emeralds, and marble. The country once had a flourishing agricultural sector famous throughout the world for its fruit and nuts. It is situated at the crossroads of Asia and the Gulf. The potential for the country to be not only self-sufficient but prosperous is very real.
What went wrong? This is not the time for a detailed account, but some elementary mistakes are worth highlighting. First, not enough money was allocated to the government at its nascent and most critical stage. In 2001, Afghanistan had 240,000 civil servants who had served through decades of war. The donors, in their infinite wisdom, allotted more than $2 billion to their own agencies—the NGOs and U.N. agencies that then used the money to set up parallel organizations to the Afghan government—but provided a mere $20 million to fund the government's entire budget for the first year. This sum barely covered fuel costs for a month, and as a result, the country's leaders spent much of this period scrambling to pay doctors, teachers, and policemen their meager $50 per month salaries. Wages went unpaid, and, eventually, competent civil servants left their jobs in droves to take higher-paying positions in donor organizations, working as drivers, assistants, and translators. The government could not collect tax or customs duties since it did not have the means to control the borders and roads, which were held by militias that served as the proxy ground forces for military operations. The state coffers remained empty, and state functionality began to erode.
Second was a failure of the donors to realize that there are some functions of the state that Afghanistan, like any nation, needs to perform for itself. Initially, donors refused to fund programs to address good governance at the local level, such as to rebuild court houses, police stations, and administrative offices in the provinces and districts and to provide training and support to the Afghan officials staffing them. Donors rejected this plan, claiming that a government-buildings program to restore basic infrastructure that had been destroyed in the years of war was not "poverty-reducing"; that a district good-governance program might be "dangerous," since the donors might not be able to reach all areas of the country to monitor; and that support for policing was outside their organizational mandates. The United States, Canada, and Great Britain did eventually step in to finance a district- and provincial-governance program, but only after two years had passed. The donors did eventually back the government's plan in 2004, and they made significant pledges for the future, but by that point the open window was closing and the reform team had been dismantled. The donors then overcompensated by supporting the government unconditionally, failing to ask for accountability in the fair budgeting and allocation of resources.
Third, there was a near total failure to invest in building the Afghan skills base. Donors insisted that the Afghan government should put no money in secondary or tertiary education for their own citizens, citing the Millennium Development Goals and the importance of primary education. While the MDG are worthy targets, it is not very wise to neglect investment in the next generation of leaders, managers, and professionals—or even bricklayers, plumbers, and electricians—in a country like Afghanistan. As a result, Afghanistan's youth remained forgotten and marginalized, yearning to contribute to their country's future but without the skills to do so.
Fourth was the extreme dysfunctionality of the aid complex in Afghanistan. Thousands of small, disparate projects were planned and implemented. This haphazardness confused villagers who might see three wells in one village but none in the next. Donor dollars were "salami-sliced" by the aid system, often through as many as four or five contractual layers. Consider the costs of security, travel, housing, and translation, and it is no surprise that a small proportion of any grant ever reaches the ground. The aid agencies wrote proposals for their projects with great enthusiasm but paid scant attention to supply-chain management, the functioning of the civil service, or the realities of implementation. There has yet to be a public audit of the first $2.7 billion of donor projects in Afghanistan that the U.N. agencies raised money for after 9/11. These agencies failed to appreciate the most fundamental lesson of post-conflict reconstruction: As one of Europe's top diplomats put it, generally it is not about what we do; it is about what they do.
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