Afghanistan (58 page)

Creating the New Afghanistan

The ability of aid, like foreign armed forces, to produce desired results in an Afghan context is, and will continue to be, limited. Merely throwing troops or money at the situation in Afghanistan will not be effective unless it is part of an overall strategy integrated to meet Afghan realities and encourage Afghan participation, decision-making, and responsibility, all vital if the country is to be viable with a reduced foreign troop presence and aid flow in the future. The deteriorating security situation in recent years has limited the ability for aid to reach into the areas where there is, arguably, the most need for it, especially in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Even though the situation in Afghanistan mandates more troops and more aid, neither is sufficient, individually or together, to ultimately create stability that will enable Afghans to live and grow their economy in peace and not revert to being a source for global terrorism, regional instability, and narcotics. More nuanced and responsive policies must be employed, aimed at enabling the Afghan ability to rule themselves and withstand the effects of terrorism, insurgency, narcotics, corruption, warlords, and all that would return the country to the decades of conflict that came close to destroying it.

The need to have Afghans act on behalf of Afghanistan applies to allocating aid resources as well as carrying rifles in the ANSF. Mark Ward, special advisor on development to UNAMA, said “We have got to train Afghans, not have more Pakistanis, Indians, or Iranians doing skilled jobs.”
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This course of action will ensure that local Afghans will be involved and have a direct stake in the future development while still empowering Kabul as the national government to use incentives for cooperation that only a central state could provide: roads, health, and the educational system, including universities and scholarships.

Development that is inserted, top-down, by Kabul, foreign military forces, or NGOs, without consulting local Afghans whom it will personally affect and without insisting that there be an opportunity for buy-in and a corresponding expenditure of resources—however limited—by the
local population, will remain alien and undervalued and thus the target for insurgent attack. This is the only way to create sustainable solutions that the Afghans will agree to and take ownership of and, eventually, pay for and maintain themselves. This is reflected in the Afghan government’s Nationality Solidarity Program (NSP) having a “requirement of a ten percent community contribution toward the cost of projects” to give them a stake, according to Eshan Zia, former Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.
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Contributions can be cash, labor, or donation of resources, but are vital to give the locals and their kin a stake. Other local contributions have come as a result of grass roots initiatives. Local shuras or jirgas that want development in their home area will often levy such contributions to show support and attract potential donors or patrons. Projects done by Afghans are also cheaper than those done through foreign contracting. The cost per Afghan-contracted classroom in a school comes to 13,000 dollars, which is less than a third of the cost associated with foreign contracting for the same job, according to Jim Drummond, director of the South Asia division of the UK’s DfID.
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Effective development will have to reach agriculture and religion, two areas of great importance to the average Afghan. Agricultural development will have to be tailored to each district. The Afghan state supported the emergence of cotton cultivation in the Golden Age, and there have been proposals to revive this. Afghan high-end produce, the raisins and pomegranates it has grown for centuries, have ready potential markets in the subcontinent and central Asia. Expanding such markets requires reconstructing Afghanistan’s agricultural infrastructure and removing political barriers to international trade. Friendly Islamic countries, such as Turkey, could be used as intermediaries to work with developing Afghan religion as a social force so as not to concede its role in Afghan life to those aligned with the insurgents.
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Such aid from Islamic donors can help provide mosques and maintain mullahs, while creating a system of Afghan religious education aimed at keeping radicalized pro-Taliban mullahs from holding political power or mobilizing public opinion in sermons against the Afghan government and constitution. Other foreign supporters need to be approached to mobilize their religious establishments to counter the claims that the coalition presence in Afghanistan
has become part of the international “war on Islam” that is at the heart of efforts to enlist support for terrorists and insurgents.

Afghanistan will require a strong aid effort, the “pot of gold” that rewards cooperation rather than conflict. This same philosophy should apply too when trying to shore up a much more developed but troubled Pakistan, whose impact on Afghanistan, for better or worse, is undeniable. Any aid effort is a hard sell, considering the financial downturn among the rest of the world. Years of aid have not led to a secure Afghanistan, but there is no substitute for an influx of aid as a way of helping to stabilize the region and prevent more costly wars in the future. Aid is more effective in the long term than troops in bringing security to Afghanistan, but without troops there will not be the security that aid programs require and that allows Afghans to better their own lives. Aid needs to create a non-corrupt government to enable a functional private-sector economy that offers Afghans a chance for a life above subsistence levels that will not force them into siding with the insurgents or growing poppy for lack of alternatives.

Aid and Pakistan

Aid to Pakistan, like much of the US policy in the region since 2001, has reflected good intentions but has not been effective.
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It is not unexpected that President Zardari has made requests for aid a central part of his relations with the US, telling a reporter “We have many plans including dealing with the 18,000 madrassas that are brainwashing our youth, but we have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy.”
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Yet Zardari’s political weakness, the military-led nationalist opposition to the US oversight provisions in the Kerry-Lugar aid bill, and the poor track record of Pakistani governments, civilian or military, in dealing with such fundamental problems, show that it will be difficult for aid to Pakistan to create tangible improvement. Despite this, aid to Pakistan remains an important tool to help create change in Pakistan that will contribute to reducing the security threat to Afghanistan.

Aid has become even more important with the impact of the economic downturn in Pakistan. Before then, the growth in Pakistan’s economy
provided the resources for constructive change even if political insecurity and the Musharraf government’s lack of legitimacy limited widespread application. Pakistan’s more established economy allows the US to work with international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Asia Development Bank to a greater extent than in Afghanistan. Pakistan has a well-established banking system and a governmental infrastructure, including a still-independent if flawed judicial system.

US aid to support Musharraf’s rhetoric of reviving civil society and strengthening state institutions, such as the school system, proved inadequate in scope and limited in reach. About eighty percent of the 11.8 billion dollars in aid to Pakistan provided under the Bush administration went just to the military in order to rebuild conventional forces to balance India rather than to create a counter-insurgency capability. Little went to military efforts to aid internal refugees from Pakistan’s insurgency or natural disasters. US development aid to Pakistan, targeted at the FATA, had limited effectiveness due to violence undercutting any capability for hands-on direction on the part of the US.
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There was widespread concern in the US, especially the Congress, that there was insufficient accountability for how aid funds were being spent in Pakistan. This led to the inclusion of oversight and transparency requirements being included in the 2009 Kerry-Lugar aid bill.

Pakistan needs to receive priority in stabilization efforts because the stakes are higher and the potential for collapse is not a graceful bankruptcy but the emergence of a long-feared “nuclear Somalia.” In the short term, the population’s vulnerability to increased energy and food costs must be combined with balance-of-payment and budgetary support in determining aid priorities. In the longer term, the best aid approach to Pakistan would be to remove constraints imposed by the US or European Union (EU), such as lifting textile quotas or freeing up funds for investment in regional energy pipelines. Additional funding—perhaps as much as fifty billion dollars over ten years—is required for Pakistan to start to rebuild its civil society and build up governmental and non-governmental organizations that will contribute to stability and help combat the political incapacity and internal violence that threaten its future.

In 2009, a renewed aid approach was implemented by the Obama administration, aiming to create greater leverage for the US in Pakistan. This started with the 19 May 2009 commitment of 110 million dollars in relief aid. The Kerry-Lugar aid bill passed the US Senate in October, described as “very heartening” by GEN Petraeus.
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The Kerry-Lugar bill provided Pakistan with 1.5 billion dollars a year over the course of five years with a separate provision for military aid worth over 1 billion dollars and was considered to be a necessary complement for the further 5 billion dollars in international loans pledged at Tokyo in April 2009. Yet Kerry-Lugar became an explosive issue in Pakistani politics during October 2009.
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The Pakistani military used this issue to rally nationalist sentiment against the civilian government, using the unpopularity of the US among elites and grassroots alike in Pakistan, saying that the oversight provisions were imperialist interference in Pakistan’s sovereignty and that the certification provisions were an attempt to undercut the position of the Pakistani military in domestic politics. Public dissatisfaction with US UAV attacks, despite the fact that the Pakistani military cooperates with them, also fed into this opposition.
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This reaction to the Kerry-Lugar bill also served as a public statement that the Pakistani military, even if they were forced to reluctantly take military action against domestic Islamic radicals and insurgents, were not going to be leveraged by the US to take open and public action (intelligence sharing and targeting excepted) against Afghan insurgents in their sanctuaries in Pakistan. The military objected to the bill setting conditions for the aid, which required that the US secretary of state certify that Pakistan is dismantling nuclear-proliferation networks, that Pakistan remain a democracy, that civilian control be maintained over the military and the defense budget, and that the government of Pakistan is not supporting militant groups on its territory. Even though there were provisions for the US president to waive these conditions, the precedent for questioning the military or putting it under democratic supervision was at the heart of opposition to it in Pakistan. The Pakistani military saw that accepting the provisions in the Kerry-Lugar bill called into question their self-appointed role as the guardians and definers of the country’s national security interests, which includes allocating aid received, and as attempting to empower a civilian
political system they increasingly saw as corrupt and dysfunctional. Aid will continue to prove a critical issue in the difficult US relationship with Pakistan’s military.

US policy has stressed that the crisis in Pakistan is not purely a bilateral issue. The US has encouraged the EU and other countries to make a strong commitment to support Pakistan. In 2008, the International Monetary Fund pledged a standby loan, and the April 2009 Tokyo conference brought together additional international supporters of Pakistan. The total pledges were 5.3 billion dollars. While this has the potential to help with Pakistan’s near-term economic problems, its history of using such resources to reward internal support of the government rather than address Pakistan’s more long-term and intractable problems remains worrying.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“The world ain’t going to be saved by nobody’s scheme. It’s fellows with schemes that got us into this mess. Plans can get you into things, but you got to work your way out.”

—American humorist Will Rogers (1879–1935)

I
n recent years, most of Afghanistan’s trends were not heading in the right direction. Afghanistan was plagued by a regionalized yet still bitter and violent insurgency, a crisis of legitimacy based in corruption and ethnolinguistically polarized populations that share, along with their commitments to Islam and Afghanistan, increasing disillusionment, resentment, and rage all tinged with despair over the future. Yet this amalgam of crises began before the security situations deteriorated in recent years.

There is still cause for hope and prospect for success in Afghanistan. Most of non-Pushtun Afghanistan remains largely peaceful despite increasing crime with roots in government corruption, narcotics, and lack of alternative livelihoods. Afghan cities such as Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Balkh, Bamiyan, and elsewhere, have all shared some of the economic growth experienced in Kabul. Development programs are progressing, and the foreign presence that makes them possible is still largely accepted if not welcomed, even if viewed with resentment by some Afghans.
Some districts in the east and center, including some in Nangarhar and Paktia provinces, that were previously the site of extensive insurgent activities have seen improved security situations as well as a marked fall in opium cultivation. In the first five months of 2009, there were 0.6 and 0.4 average daily insurgent attacks in those two provinces, compared to 10.7 in Helmand and 4.6 in Kandahar.
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In the spring of 2009, civilian deaths were down by 44 percent and kidnappings and assassinations were down by 17 percent.
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Polling in March 2009 reported that 35 percent of Afghans thought that the security situation had improved over the past six months while only 13 percent thought it was worse, improvements over 28 percent and 17 percent respectively answering the two questions the same way in the previous quarter.
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The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) are larger today and more effective than in previous years, though the ANA is still not capable of independent operations and the ANP requires continued reforms to cure widespread corruption and enhance their capability to defend the population from the insurgency. Some government ministries in Kabul—such as Finance, Education, and Rural Reconstruction and Development—have demonstrated an ability to work effectively and contain corruption. Other ministries, such as Interior, have made progress in increasing effectiveness even if they have not yet cured internal corruption. Even some ministries previously seen as ineffective, such as Energy and Water, have demonstrated progress.