Unlearned Lessons From Afghanistan’s Decade of Assistance

Snapshots of an Intervention
The Unlearned Lessons of Afghanistan’s Decade of Assistance (2001–11)
Afghanistan Analysts Network, July 2012

The decade of state-building, reconstruction and development assistance in Afghanistan has left many people confused. There have been undeniable changes: Afghanistan now has an election-based, market-driven political system and many socio-economic indicators are far better than they used to be under Taleban rule or during the civil war (although that is, admittedly, not a very high bar). There have been great, albeit unequal, opportunities in terms of education, employment and enrichment. But there is also a strong sense of missed and mismanaged opportunities, which many – Afghans and internationals alike – find difficult to understand: how could so many resources have achieved what feels like so little and so fleeting?

This edited volume explores the question by taking a closer look at a variety of key programmes and projects that were designed and implemented over the last decade, or more. It consists of a collection of 25 articles by analysts and practitioners with long histories in the country, who were closely involved in the programmes they describe. The contributions present a rare and detailed insight into the complexity of the intervention in Afghanistan – including the often complicated relations between donors and representatives of the Afghan government (with projects tending to be nominally Afghan-led, but clearly donor-driven), the difficulties in achieving greater coherence and leverage and, in many cases, the widely shared failure to learn the necessary lessons and to adapt to realities as they were encountered.

The experiences that the authors describe will probably sound all too familiar to anyone who has worked in post-conflict, aid-heavy contexts: the popularity of ‘trophy projects’ (Wiles), the proliferation of ‘encyclopaedic wish lists’ as a result of cumulative planning sessions (Leslie), the diplomatic wrangling to be given a seat at the table (Wilkens), the empty government buildings due to faulty planning (Horne), the frustration of trying to secure government buy-in for measures that threaten to disturb the political and economic status quo (Barr). They will also recognise the tendency for political expediency to trump long-term institution-building and accountability (Ruttig, Olexiuk, Kouvo) and the dubious role that post-conflict elections play in a country’s democratisation (Smith, Slavu).

The overarching lesson of the volume is probably that the key tools of the international assistance intervention – the protracted policy processes and coordination mechanisms, the large and inflexible assistance budgets, the focus on capacity building through mentoring and technical assistance – have proved to be very blunt indeed. There were successes to be found in the cracks, but mainly where a coherence of vision, realism and a fair amount of political will on the Afghan side ensured that good use was made of the resources provided.

The release of this book ahead of the Tokyo conference in July 2012 serves as a reminder of the recurring gaps between ambitious plans and conference statements on one hand and the subsequent realities of aid programming and implementation on the other. It is hoped this volume will help fortify the institutional memory of the donor community in Afghanistan, preventing future lapses and helping enable a greater capacity to learn world-wide. The lessons that have not been learned have relevance far beyond Afghanistan.

- Martine van Bijlert

Afghanistan's 'Little America' and For-Profit War

First with an ill-fated Cold War-era project and now with the war today, Helmand province has been the source of enormously lucrative private contracting that has done little to improve peoples' lives.

Visit Afghanistan's 'Little America,' and See the Folly of For-Profit War
David Rohde | Jun 1 2012

“Eight years ago, a 72-year-old American aid worker named Charles Grader told me a seemingly fantastical story. In a bleak stretch of Afghan desert that resembled the surface of Mars, several dozen families from states like Montana, Wisconsin and California had lived in suburban tract homes with backyard barbecues. For 30 years during the Cold War, the settlement served as the headquarters of a massive American project designed to wean Afghans from Soviet influence.

American engineers oversaw the largest development program in Afghanistan’s history, constructing two huge earthen dams, 300 miles of irrigation canals and 1,200 miles of gravel roads. All told, the project made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. The town, officially known as “Lashkar Gah,” was the new capital of Helmand province and an ultra-modern world of workshops and offices. Afghans called it “Little America.”

Intrigued, I hitched a ride to the town with Grader a few weeks later. A weathered New England blue blood, Grader was the last American to head the Kabul office of the U.S. Agency for International Development before the 1979 Soviet invasion. In 2004, he was back in Afghanistan working as a contractor, refusing to retire just yet and trying, it seemed, to do good.

From the moment we arrived in Lashkar Gah, I was transfixed by Little America, its history and its meaning. At enormous cost, a sweeping American Cold War effort had temporarily eased the destitution of one corner of Afghanistan but failed to achieve its lofty goals. Surveying the town, I desperately hoped America could do better.”

Click here to read the full article

Additional Resources:

Kajaki Dam and the Helmand Valley Authority

BBC Radio | How Little America was Built

Aid Effectiveness in Fragile States | Intl. Peace Institute

The International Peace Institute takes a critical look at what's worked and what's failed as international institutions explore better ways to help resolve the aftermath of conflict peacefully.

The findings focus on strengthening international peace and security institutions, including recommendations for the UN. It does not focus as much on disarmament.

The report finds that ‘compacts’ will be more effective if the following recommendations are met:

• Compacts should be considered only when a peace accord is agreed upon and where basic security is in place.
• Civil society should be given the opportunity to participate in both compact creation and implementation.
• Compact commitments should be specific, balanced, and focused on short timelines.
• Compacts should reinforce and coordinate with ongoing international and national processes.
• Compacts should include specific mechanisms for implementation, oversight, and enforcement, with host governments in the lead.

Aid Effectiveness in Fragile States: Lessons from the First Generation of Transition Compacts

“Amid growing recognition that international efforts to support fragile and conflict-affected states are falling short of expectations, donors and partner governments continue to seek new approaches. Attention has recently focused on the notion of “compacts”—instruments that allow national and international partners to agree on the most urgent priorities requiring a collective effort in support of postconflict peacebuilding in a particular country, and identify how, and from which sources and instruments, implementation will be financed.”

There is a section on Afghanistan that looks at 2006 and the immediate post-Bonn realities. Here is the conclusion.

“The Afghanistan Compact was a good idea that fell short in implementation. At first, the intensity of the negotiations and personal commitment of its drafters fostered a true sense of trust among Afghan and international partners. In that sense, the document was effective as a high-level political statement of common purpose.

However, the lack of specificity, priority, and sequencing in its benchmarks and the unwieldy membership and weak authority of the JCMB made the compact difficult to manage and implement. In the words of one of its critics, “it was dead before it had a chance to live.”

Finally, the compact came too late to influence donor behavior or practices, as it was enacted long after donor policies had been set. Since 2002, aid had been focused in the east and the south, and other areas of strategic and military priority and deployment; and such policies continued despite evidence that they were undermining overall progress on reconstruction and development. Rather than refocusing donor investment, the compact and the JCMB became beholden to the existing priorities of individual nations.”

Here is the summary chart (click to enlarge).

SIGAR Report on Relief and Reconstruction

On Monday the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released the final report for 2011. These reports are mandated by law and must be delivered to Congress each quarter. The report covers the time period that marked 10 years since the US assault in October of 2001 and carries the tag line '10 years of reconstruction 2001-2011'.

Of particular interest is the fact that 61% of the money articulated for relief and reconstruction is actually spent on funding, arming and training government forces, private militias, and undercover units that operate along the border with Pakistan.

The report confirms that 98,933 U.S. forces remained in the country at year’s end.

It does not dwell on the Afghan government demands to disband the failed military-led Provisional Reconstruction Teams linking US military strategy with development and reconstruction, or the Afghan government demand that armed private security firms be disbanded.

Nevertheless, these are authoritative figures on what the US is actually spending resources on in Afghanistan. You can see from the chart above that all assistance for humanitarian relief will be eliminated in 2012.

The chart graphically shows the growing dependance on exclusive military priorities over the years.

For this year 88% will be military.

Simply appalling and immoral.

***

I added the percentages in brackets for the text below lifted from the report.

SIGAR – 2011 Final Report - Some Figures

As of December 31, 2011, the United States had appropriated nearly $85.54 billion for relief and reconstruction in Afghanistan since FY 2002. This total has been approximately allocated as follows:

• $52.14 billion for security (61%)
• $20.28 billion for governance and development (24%)
• $5.67 billion for counter-narcotics efforts (7%)
• $2.24 billion for humanitarian aid (3%)
• $5.20 billion for oversight and operations (6%)

US Troop Levels – 31 December 2012

According to U.S. Forces - Afghanistan (USFOR-A), 98,933 U.S. forces were serving in the country as of December 31, 2011.

• 71,742 to ISAF
• 2,780 to NTM-A/CSTC-A
• 14,565 to USFOR-A
• 9,846 to other assignments (CENTCOM)

Additional Resources:

Eisenhower Research Project | War Costs $4 Trillion

3 Cents on the Dollar

Aid and Security in Afghanistan | Feinstein Int'l Center

Winning Hearts and Minds?
Examining the Relationship between Aid and Security in Afghanistan
Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder | January 2012

Another detailed study on the impact of linking aid and assistance to the military strategy in Afghanistan.

"This paper by Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder presents findings from research conducted by FIC in five provinces of Afghanistan between July 2008 and January 2010 on the relationship between aid projects and security.

Afghanistan has been a testing ground for a key aspect of counterinsurgency doctrine, namely that humanitarian and development projects can help to bring or maintain security in strategically important environments, and by "winning hearts and minds" undermine support for radical, insurgent, or terrorist groups. The assumption that aid projects improve security has lead to a sharp increase in overall development funding, an increased percentage of activities programmed based on strategic security considerations, and a shift of development activities to the military. Given what is at stake, it is essential that policy makers understand whether and how aid projects can actually contribute to security.

The paper highlights the challenges inherent in using aid as an instrument of security policy. While in some areas aid projects may have had some short-term positive security effects at a tactical level (e.g., intelligence gathering and limited force protection benefits for international forces), and may have helped to facilitate creating relationships by providing a “platform” or context to legitimize interaction between international and local actors, there was little concrete evidence in any of the five provinces that aid projects were having more strategic level stabilization or security benefits such as winning populations away from insurgents, legitimizing the government, or reducing levels of violent conflict.

***

The findings have implications for the effectiveness of aid as a stabilization tool, suggesting the need to understand the complex, intertwined, and overlapping drivers of conflict, especially political and governance-related ones; to create incentives that value quality over quantity, and thereby reduce the counterproductive pressure to spend too much money too fast; to reverse current policy and instead focus on areas where investment can yield better results than in insecure ones; to reinforce a culture of evaluation and accountability; and, to value development as a worthwhile end in and of itself. Many of the study’s findings, which were documented in the previously published case studies, have been acknowledged by the U.S. and its NATO allies, but many of the institutional incentives for why aid funds are spent in ways that can be ineffective or destabilizing remain unchanged."

Related Material:

Afghan Refugee Strategy a Big Mistake | UNHCR | 3 January 2012

Aid and Conflict in Afghanistan | ICG | 4 August 2011

3 Cents on the Dollar | Senate Foreign Relations Report | 9 June 2011

Afghan Refugee Strategy a Big Mistake | UNHCR

In 2002 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) embarked on an ambitious strategy to facilitate the return of Afghan refugees to their country.

Last Tuesday (December 27), Peter Nicolaus, UNHCR representative in Afghanistan described the strategy as the “biggest mistake the UNHCR ever made”.

“The head of the UN refugee programme in Afghanistan on Tuesday described its strategy in the war-wracked country since 2002 as the "biggest mistake UNHCR ever made".

Almost a quarter of the population of Afghanistan is made up of refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran. Many find themselves homeless, or living in slums under tarpaulin.

But Peter Nicolaus, UNHCR representative in Afghanistan, said the international community had failed to help returnees find a means of earning a living and therefore reintegrating into society.”

…

"This is what the donor community constantly forgets. This has been overlooked and it's still overlooked. Nobody has taken this seriously. It's a tragedy.

"We are now -- for the first time -- bringing this up in the spring conference."

An international conference with Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and the refugee agency is to be held in April to present the new long term strategy.

In November, The State Department Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan reported that U.S. economic and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan has peaked in 2010 at $4.1 billion and would be reduced to $2.5 billion this year.

Bringing Refugees Home, the challenge ahead spells out some of the recent history.

See this link for other resources - and poems - on Afghan refugees.

The Pakistanis Have a Point | Bill Keller

Bill Keller had this long expose in the weekend magazine section. It is an important effort to articulate the Pakistan perspective in the relationship with the United States. It also has some great graphics. Click to enlarge.

His point is really simple, “it’s hard to be an ally of the United States.”

The Pakistanis Have a Point

“The Pakistani version of modern history is one of American betrayal, going back at least to the Kennedy administration’s arming of Pakistan’s archrival, India, in the wake of its 1962 border war with China.

The most consequential feat of American opportunism came when we enlisted Pakistan to bedevil the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Pakistan — with help from Saudi Arabia — created the perfect thorn in the Soviet underbelly: young Muslim “freedom fighters,” schooled in jihad at Pakistani madrassas, laden with American surface-to-air missiles and led by charismatic warriors who set aside tribal rivalries to war against foreign occupation.

After the Soviets admitted defeat in 1989, the U.S. — mission accomplished! — pulled out, leaving Pakistan holding the bag: several million refugees, an Afghanistan torn by civil war and a population of jihadists who would find new targets for their American-supplied arms. In the ensuing struggle for control of Afghanistan, Pakistan eventually sided with the Taliban, who were dominated by the Pashtun tribe that populates the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. The rival Northern Alliance was run by Tajiks and Uzbeks and backed by India; and the one thing you can never underestimate is Pakistan’s obsession with bigger, richer, better-armed India.”

Click here for other entries on Pakistan.

Beyond Power Sharing: Options for an Afghan Peace Process

Beyond Power-sharing: Institutional Options for an Afghan Peace Process
Hamish Nixon and Caroline Hartzell | Peaceworks | December 2011

This paper is part of a joint research project to identify issues and options to support durable peace in Afghanistan. The collaborating organizations are the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI).

Hamish Nixon also published Durable Peace: Afghan Perspectives on the Peace Process in May.

The chapters

Introduction: Peace Is Possible
Challenges for a Peace Process: Analyzing the Afghan Conflict
Initiating and Structuring a Negotiation
Transitional Arrangements and Implementation Challenges
Beyond Power Sharing: Institutional Arrangements for the Long Term
Conclusions

"The Framework: Any negotiated settlement to the Afghan conflict should involve a set of transitional arrangements to govern the period between the signing of a peace settlement, a cease-fire, and the entry into force of more permanent institutions for conflict management."

A big lesson from the Iraq war of 2003 is the need for firm deadlines for the removal of foreign troops and bases. The vision and options set out in this report have a better chance of being implemented if that reality is kept at the center of all discussions and dialogue.

"Introduction: Peace is Possible

The need for a peace process to end the conflict in Afghanistan becomes clearer with each passing month, just as quickly as hopes for one often seem to recede. Despite many positive changes, ten years of deepening international involvement, both military and civilian, have been accompanied by a pattern of mounting violence. Since 2009 a dramatic escalation by NATO of both conventional counterinsurgency and special operations has certainly cost the insurgency lives and territory, and the prospects of an outright Taliban victory seem negligible. At the same time, the Taliban movement and its allies have shown resilience and flexibility, presenting a consistent tactical challenge in narrowing areas of the south and broad areas in the southeast and east, while extending their reach in the north. A string of high-profile at¬tacks and assassinations has undermined government and NATO claims of increasing security and eliminated key government allies, while deepening tensions among political factions with distinct ethnic overtones, raising the specter of a widening civil conflict."

***

"This report takes a different approach. Rather than lifting wholesale the experience of other peace processes that writ large may have limited applicability to the complexities of Afghanistan, it examines some specific challenges a peace process in Afghanistan will face, and then presents theoretical observations and some real world comparative examples that may be applicable to these challenges. The report does not aim to recommend a complete or a single set of institutions for an Afghan peace process, but rather to stimulate discussion on how to connect the particular challenges an Afghan peace process faces with the possibilities for peace that careful and innovative arrangements can and have produced even in complex and seemingly intractable conflicts."

Additional posts on Peace Building.

Bonn II Conference

President Hamid Karzai told the international gathering in Bonn this morning that Afghanistan will need the financial support of the international community for at least another decade beyond the 2014 departure of international troops.

The Associated Press has some details.

“During the one-day conference, about 100 nations and international organizations, including the United Nations, jointly pledged political and financial long-term support for war-torn Afghanistan to hinder it from falling back into chaos or becoming a safe haven for terrorists.”

Also.

“The United States announced it would free more than $650 million in support for small community-based development projects in Afghanistan, frozen because of financial irregularities in Afghanistan's key Kabul Bank.”

Jean MacKenzie writing for the Global Post has context and the reduced expectations.

Thomas Ruttig comments - Reading Between the Lines at Bonn II

“Finally, last but not least (and only because we have reported from their two-day conference on 2-3 December already), the statements from the two Afghan civil society representatives were extremely strong. They did not limit themselves – as I had feared for a moment – to politeness and indirect messages. The two who, deservedly, had more time than most foreign ministers, reiterated their message of the days before. Barry Salam said that ‘we have chosen democracy’ and ‘we want peace and reconciliation, but not when it jeopardises our fundamental rights and freedoms. […] Therefore we cannot change our constitution and compromise on our democratic rights’, Barry Salam stated. ‘We need a government that rules by law but not by the power of individuals’. His demand for the full inclusion of civil society in key decision-making processes could have been more direct, but should not be overlooked just because of this.

His female colleague, Selay Ghaffar, strongly advocated an ‘end [to] the prevailing culture of impunity’ and for transitional justice. She made clear that Afghanistan’s problems do not only lie in the Taleban or al-Qaida. She said that, ‘in the current system, there are elements in power who committed war crimes [and] need to be brought to justice. […] Giving a ministry to those who committed rapes and war crimes is like committing these crimes again.’ This is the strongest message of the day, and an explanation of the current quagmire which is not only military, but also moral. It is a message that Western governments probably still don’t want to hear.”

Last month, The State Department Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan reported that U.S. economic and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan has peaked in 2010 at $4.1 billion and would be reduced to $2.5 billion this year.

Additional Resources

Fact Sheet: Bonn Conference Unlikely to Produce Results for Afghanistan

International Afghanistan Conference in Bonn: Priorities for action

A Decade of Mistakes

We Meant Well | Peter Van Buren

We Meant Well, is an insider account of the civilian side of the surge in Iraq. The challenges and failures should be lessons for Afghanistan.

Of course there are differences; major UN agencies and well funded international NGO’s remain active in Afghanistan, and the country is one of the poorest in the world. However.

The odious role of military-controlled reconstruction teams linking humanitarian and development assistance to a military strategy is the same for both countries. As in Iraq, these opposing efforts led to confusion and resentment, becoming band-aids, symbolic measures to mitigate the destruction of escalating military action.

This book, and reports from many NGO’s on-the-ground make a clear call to end the military's role in development.

Here are the questions for Afghanistan. Will the U.S. learn these lessons as the military surge winds down in Afghanistan? Is it possible to offer transparent and sustained support to Afghan governmental and nongovernmental institutions seeking to heal the wounds of war?

We Meant Well:
How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
By: Peter Van Buren

“From a State Department insider, the first book recounting our misguided efforts to rebuild Iraq—a shocking and rollicking true-life cross between Catch-22, Dispatches and The Ugly American.

Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets without water or electricity?

According to Peter Van Buren, we bought all these projects and more in the most expensive hearts-and-minds campaign since the Marshall Plan. We Meant Well is his eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surge—that surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed. Leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team on its quixotic mission, Van Buren details, with laser-like irony, his yearlong encounter with pointless projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded in the world’s largest embassy, who fail to realize that you can’t rebuild a country without first picking up the trash.

Darkly funny while deadly serious, We Meant Well is a tragicomic voyage of ineptitude and corruption that leaves its writer—and readers—appalled and disillusioned but wiser.”

Additional Resources:

Democracy Now: State Department Veteran Defies U.S. Censors to Recount Failed Reconstruction in Iraq

Book Reviews:

Kajaki Dam and the Helmand Valley Authority

Jean MacKenzie reports about the history of the Kajaki dam project in Helmand Province. The upgrade of the dam has been billed as the linchpin of the military effort in Helmand, and key to delivering power – and of course influence – in Kandahar. It is a story of a failure.

Watershed of Waste: Afghanistan’s Kajaki Dam and USAID

It is also an update of a project with a very long history, and many previous failures. A project that was modeled in many ways on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US .

It started in 1946 when the government of Afghanistan first “hired the largest American heavy engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen, Inc. of Boise, Idaho, to build a dam. Morrison Knudsen, builder of the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and soon the launch complex at Cape Canaveral, specialized in symbols of the future. The firm operated all over the world, boring tunnels through the Andes in Peru, laying airfields in Turkey.”

It is a fascination story told by Nick Cullather.

He explores the way development was used in the post-colonial period to gain influence and sheds light on the chapter of Afghan history that is little know; when the U.S. and the Soviet Union sought influence in Afghanistan through development project and not armies.

From New Deal to New Frontier in Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State

The goal of the project was to project power – by a central government – over areas of the country it had little control. It was to modernize the country. It was political, fueled eventually by the desire of the Monarchy to create a ‘Pastunistan’ consisting of most of Northern Pakistan that would address the uncertainty of Pashtuns after the partition of India in 1947.

The long history of US companies and U.S. aid.

The Helmand Valley project “came under American supervision in 1946 and continued until the departure of the last reclamation expert in 1979, outlasting the theories and rationales on which it was based. It was lavishly funded by U.S. foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, and it was the opposite of piecemeal. It was an “integrated” development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority. Nation-building did not fail in Afghanistan for want of money, time, or imagination. In the Helmand Valley, the engines and dreams of modernization had run their full course, spooling out across the desert until they hit limits of physics, culture, and history.”

Here is how it starts.

“In May 1960, the historian Arnold Toynbee left Kandahar and drove 90 miles on freshly paved roads to Lashkar Gah, a modern planned city known locally as the New York of Afghanistan. At the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers, close against the ancient ruins of Qala Bist, Lashkar Gah’s 8,000 residents lived in suburban-style tract homes surrounded by broad lawns. The city boasted an alabaster mosque, one of the country’s best hospitals, Afghanistan’s only coeducational high school, and the headquarters of the Helmand Valley Authority, a multipurpose dam project funded by the United States. This unexpected proliferation of modernity led Toynbee to reflect on the warning of Sophocles: “the craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams.” In the area around Kandahar, traditional Afghanistan had vanished. “The domain of the Helmand Valley Authority,” he reported, “has become a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. …The new world they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River’s expense is to be an America-in-Asia.”

…..

“Nothing becomes antiquated faster than symbols of the future, and it is difficult, at only fifty years remove, to envision the hold concrete dams once had on the global imagination. In the mid-20th century, the austere lines of the Hoover Dam and its radiating spans of high-tension wire inscribed federal power on the American landscape. Vladimir Lenin famously remarked that Communism was Soviet power plus electrification, an equation captured by the David Lean film Dr. Zhivago in the image of water surging, as a kind of redemption, from the spillway of an immense Soviet dam. In 1954, standing at the Bhakra- Nangal canal, Nehru described dams as the temples of modern India. “Which place can be greater than this,” he declared, “this Bhakra -Nangal, where thousands of men have worked, have shed their blood, and sweat and laid down their lives as well? …When we see big works, our stature grows with them, and our minds open out a little.”43 For Nehru, for Zahir Shah, for China today, the great blank wall of a dam was a screen on which they would project the future.”

Aid and Conflict in Afghanistan | ICG Report

The International Crisis Group has issued a new report on Aid and Conflict in Afghanistan. It is a comprehensive survey with the two top recommendations focused on the need to stop linking development/assistance to the US military strategy and finding ways to strengthen a representative government.

To the International Community, especially the U.S. and other NATO allies and the European Union:

1. Delink non-military assistance from counter-insurgency targets, including by devising mandates and assessing requirements of civilian assistance independently of troop deployment levels.

2. Increase and broaden engagement with the Afghan state beyond Kabul and the Karzai administration to include elected provincial councils and provincial development committees in identifying funding needs, determining funding priorities and monitoring implementation.

Click here for the Executive Summary

Click here for the full report

The report finds very little to be hopeful about…

"After a decade of major security, development and humanitarian assistance, the international community has failed to achieve a politically stable and economically viable Afghanistan. Despite billions of dollars in aid, state institutions remain fragile and unable to provide good governance, deliver basic services to the majority of the population or guarantee human security. As the insurgency spreads to areas regarded as relatively safe till now, and policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals seek a way out of an unpopular war, the international community still lacks a coherent policy to strengthen the state ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign forces by December 2014. The impact of international assistance will remain limited unless donors, particularly the largest, the U.S., stop subordinating programming to counter-insurgency objectives, devise better mechanisms to monitor implementation, adequately address corruption and wastage of aid funds, and ensure that recipient communities identify needs and shape assistance policies.”

Going back to the 1980’s the report makes the point that foreign intervention has always focused on military assistance and military power.

During the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, the Western and Eastern blocs sought to advance their political agendas through not only military but also humanitarian and development assistance. The Soviet intervention in 1979 and subsequent assistance from Moscow and other Warsaw Pact countries were aimed at saving a faltering Marxist government that faced popular discontent and an armed opposition operating out of safe havens in neighbouring Pakistan and backed by countries as diverse as the U.S., Saudi Arabia, China and Iran. To regain control over territory lost to the insurgency, significant Soviet funding went to the security apparatus – army, police and intelligence services – and to the formation of pro-government militias.

The state was, however, unable to stem desertions in the military, compelling Soviet forces to increase their presence on the ground. By 1983, 105,000 Soviet soldiers were in the country, while the entire Afghan army consisted of just 50,000 men, with Moscow considering the financing of its own troops part of its official assistance.

and

After 2005, U.S. assistance focused increasingly on building Afghanistan’s security forces, particularly after the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF) was established that year. Of the $29.35 billion allocated thus far to developing the Afghan National Security Forces, $27.8 billion was appropriated after the ASFF was set up. This accounts for more than half of all U.S. reconstruction funding.

President Obama has requested an additional $11.6 billion for the ASFF in FY 201158 and $13 billion for FY 2012, which would bring the total investment in the Afghan security forces since 2005 to more than $52.4 billion.

3 Cents on the Dollar

"Our truth is an ancient one; that love endures and overcomes; that hatred destroys; that what is obtained by love is retained, but what is obtained by hatred proves a burden." - Quaker Peace Testimony

Yesterday the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations committee issued a report Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan. The two-year study painted a picture of poor planning and inefficiency.

Here is what they want you to know.

“Today, the United States spends more on foreign aid in Afghanistan than in any other country, including Iraq.”

“The State Department and USAID spend $320 million a month on foreign aid in Afghanistan.”

$320 million a month is a lot of money. However, compared to the money the U.S. military spends each month in Afghanistan ($10 billion) is translates to 3 cents on the dollar.

3 Cents on the Dollar

It’s no wonder the State Department continues to abandon needs based goals, benchmarks and expectations as they focus on supporting the military strategy.

Our strategy is ‘‘far from an exercise in nation-building’’ because it aims ‘‘to achieve realistic progress in critical areas’’ and is aligned with our security objectives.
- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (from the report)


The U.S. goal in Afghanistan was merely to help the Afghans create a “good-enough government,” not necessarily a model democracy. “We’re not out to, clearly, create a shining city on a hill…”
- Ryan C. Crocker (nominee for Ambassador to Afghanistan) in Senate confirmation hearings yesterday (8 June 2011)

The key point in the report is a World Bank estimate that “97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is derived from spending related to the international military and donor community presence.”

The government of Afghanistan has annual revenues of roughly $2.5 billion. Roughly what we spend in one week on the war.

It’s an unimaginable level of influence that can create dependence. One example is the pressure to create an Afghan security apparatus in the image of an occupation force. A strategy that will make Afghan-led efforts towards security based of dialogue, disarmament, and reconciliation more difficult.

The report rightly warns of this dependence

“These are daunting tasks. Analysts estimate that it could cost between $6 and $8 billion a year alone to sustain the Afghan National Security Forces, depending on the final size of the force. Without significant domestic revenue generation, the Afghan state will not be self-sufficient for decades and donors, particularly the United States, will have to bear the costs.”

Additional Resources:

Robert Dreyfuss has a nice summary on his blog

'Economic Depression' Looms in Afghanistan (Al Jazeera)

Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan

Report of the Majority Staff
Rep. John F. Tierney, Chair
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
June 2010

Fault Lines in Pakistan | Two Views

*Technical problems on Blogger bumped this message out of the system yesterday. I am re-posting.

Two views on the ramifications of the Osama bin Laden killing by US special forces in Pakistan reveal deep fault lines.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, argues in today’s New York Times that Pakistan has been duplicitous.

"It has been helpful in arresting some high-value Qaeda operatives and has allowed the United States to wage Predator drone attacks. But it has refused to move decisively against groups that Washington regards as terrorists and has put limits on American unilateral operations.”

Imran Khan, a former popular Cricket player turned politician argues that coercion from the U.S. has distorted the priorities of his country and that Pakistan should distance itself from Washington by rejecting all American aid to the country.

“Pakistan is now more vulnerable than at any time in its 63 years of existence following the US operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden…

"The biggest lesson to learn [from the operation] is that Pakistan should stand on its own feet, say no to aid and be a sovereign country," he said. "Our government policies have been dictated by aid, they have enslaved us by aid."

Khalilzad highlights four demands.

"First, the United States should reduce its dependence on supply lines running through Pakistan to Afghanistan. We should expand alternative supply routes through Azerbaijan and other countries in Central Asia.

Second, the United States should stay on the course set by President Obama to build, train and support Afghan security forces and reduce our own military presence while retaining the capacity to provide air support, intelligence collection and other capabilities that the Afghans currently lack. Such a posture can strengthen Afghanistan against Pakistani interference and help persuade Pakistan to embrace a settlement.

Third, the United States should conclude a longer-term agreement with Afghanistan to maintain a small, enduring military presence that would give us the capability to conduct counterterrorism operations and respond to possibilities like Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of extremists.

Fourth, the United States could consider seeking a United Nations Security Council resolution to authorize an investigation into how Bin Laden managed to hide in plain view. The inquiry should examine the presence of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Pakistan."

Khan highlights an action plan to get in the way of the violence. To protest the impact of the US drone attacks in Pakistan by blocking the NATO supply route that fuels the war in Afghanistan.

"Next week he will lead supporters of his political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice), in a "huge blockade" of NATO's military supply route that goes though Pakistan to Afghanistan in protest US drone strikes inside Pakistan.

"These drone attacks are not just a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, they are a violation of all humanitarian laws," Mr Khan said. Foreign forces in Afghanistan, including Australian troops, depend on supplies trucked in from the Pakistani port city of Karachi. Anger in Pakistan over America's raid in Abbottabad could help garner public support for Mr Khan's blockade.

"The worst is that we have completely lost our credibility and we are so vulnerable," he said. "As we have been accused of harbouring the world's biggest terrorist that means any act of terrorism that takes place anywhere, all fingers will be pointing at Pakistan … the country stands terribly exposed. We could end up paying an even higher price than we have already paid.""

To learn more see this article Reclaiming Pakistan.

"Today the Pakistani state — that is its government and security structures - stands exposed as never before in front of its own people as well as the world. Never before, since 1971, has the Pakistani nation felt so defenseless and so full of anger and shame."

Additional Resource:
A Sense of Nervous Anticipation Looms in Pakistan by Sanaa Alimia

“…over the last seven years the number of Pakistanis killed is 34,017. In 2010, over 900 Pakistanis were killed in US drone attacks, which were also supported by their own government and military. Less than two weeks ago, over twenty-five people were killed in North Waziristan, in one drone attack and the month before forty civilians were killed in another drone attack. Beyond the casualties, there are hundreds of thousands of displaced Afghans and Pakistanis who cannot return home. There are countless maimed amputees, whose disfigurement is a commonplace feature of the landscape in Peshawar.”

A Friday Roundtable - Death in Afghanistan

Kathy Kelly looks at the human cost - in Afghanistan with lives lost and here with lost opportunity.

“Recent polls suggest that while a majority of U.S. people disapprove of the war in Afghanistan, many on grounds of its horrible economic cost, only 3% took the war into account when voting in the 2010 midterm elections. The issue of the economy weighed heavily on voters, but the war and its cost, though clear to them and clearly related to the economy in their thinking, was a far less pressing concern.

U.S. people, if they do read or hear of it, may be shocked at the apparent unconcern of the crews of two U.S. helicopter gunships, which attacked and killed nine children on a mountainside in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, shooting them “one after another” this past Tuesday March 1st.”

Stephen M Walt (Hearts Minds and Gunships: What are we really doing in Afghanistan?) notes that winning hearts and minds sounds good on paper and puts a ‘humanitarian’ veneer on our troop presence. But it is a policy that is not politically neutral.

“[Using the military to protect] a local population often requires interfering with their daily lives in sometimes onerous and bothersome ways, whether through the construction of massive concrete barriers (as in Baghdad), or "strategic hamlets" (as in Vietnam), or through intrusive search missions in local villages. Even when we are in fact improving the security of the local population, that may not be how the people we are supposedly protecting perceive it. In the Pech Valley, at least, the local population mostly wanted us to get out and leave them alone.”

Nowhere to Turn: The Failure to Protect Civilians in Afghanistan.

Oxfam International with 28 aid agencies working in Afghanistan released this report in November. The goal was to influence the NATO summit that was to take place in Lisbon. The paper argues that military solutions don’t work, and that the protection of Afghans is better achieved with a comprehensive and transparent political solution. The challenges are daunting.

"2010 is the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since 2001. According to UNAMA Human Rights, there were 1,271 civilian deaths in the first six months of 2010 - an increase of 21% on the same period last year."

War-Making and Peace-Building

The counter-insurgency strategy that now guides US policy in Afghanistan seeks to win hearts-and-minds through a comprehensive plan partly based on the image of the soldier-aid worker. Attaching a larger humanitarian purpose to war by melding strategic and development tasks so that war-fighters become peacemakers and vice-versa. It is one reason war funding is so quickly approved by congress.

Humanitarian and reconstruction activities must be Afghan-centered and civilian-lead. It is essential for humanitarian organizations to work in a spirit of neutrality and reach across lines that divide com­munities. When humanitarian work is co-opted into a military strategy it is no longer seen as impartial. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT’s) merge civilian with military personnel to conduct humani­tarian, and reconstruction work. This merger has caused humanitarian workers to be seen as agents of the military and puts even those who are not col­laborating with the military at risk of being seen as legitimate targets.

John Heathershaw tackles these issues from a British perspective in a provocative article, finding

…there is an alternative between peace-building-as-war-making and inaction in the face of human suffering in wartime. Independent aid agencies and missionaries have continued to work bravely without military assistance in many of the worst conflicts for decades. They were even in Afghanistan under Taliban and will remain there long after the coalition troops have left. They are independent, impartial and they do not use force. When they have been around for long enough, they garner far more local respect than any civilian-military provincial reconstruction team. They are unable to stop genocide but they are able to lessen the suffering generated by our ‘ordered’ world whilst questioning the bases of this order.

Addition Resources: End Reliance on Military Solutions
Action: Our letter to the editor

Afghans say they've heard it all before

For Afghans, the definition of security means freedom from fear and freedom from want. It’s the standard they use to judge their own leaders, and it’s the standard they use to judge the actions of the international community. Right now 41 countries have a military presence under NATO or coalition forces.

Following Sunday’s visit to Afghanistan by President Obama Alan Gomez recorded the following observations from Afghan’s. The article was titled Afghans say they’ve heard it all before.

Over the course of his 60 years in Afghanistan, Ghulam Ghaus has heard promises from an Afghan king, Soviet commanders, mujahedin fighters and Taliban mullahs. Over the last decade, he's heard from two U.S. presidents and countless coalition officials.

So when Ghaus listened to President Obama's speech Sunday night, the Kabul-area farmer was left with a very familiar feeling.

"Many countries have come to help and they've built bridges, roads, schools and hospitals. Many presidents have come and given speeches," Ghaus said. "But what have they done for security?"

Ghaus echoed the sentiments of many Afghans in Kabul on Monday as they responded to Obama's first trip to the war-torn country as president.

Addition Resources:

Donor Financial Review by the Ministry of Finance, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

The international community has pledged $62 billion in grants and loans from 2001-2009. $36 billion has been delivered; the U.S. has been the single largest donor disbursing $23 billion.

Over $29 billion (77 percent of the total disbursed aid) was directly spent by donors with little or no Afghan government input; more than $15 of the $29 billion was disbursed directly by foreign military channels.

Over half of the funds (about $19 billion) have been spent on the security sector, particularly on the police and army.

The government of Afghanistan has received only 23 percent of foreign grants (about $8 billion).

Article: Afghanistan: Money Well Spent?