Only an aid rethink can save Afghanistan
A recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded that America’s aid efforts in Afghanistan have failed. Even so, the US is likely to spend $15bn on development assistance between 2010 and 2012 – $1bn more than in its entire engagement in that country before then.
These figures risk doubling down on an already bad bet. Afghanistan may soon become a situation described in the classic quote: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”, in which significant donor assistance and armies of contractors turn out to be part of the problem, not the solution.
Indeed, if we look back on 10 years of war in Afghanistan, we face two inescapable truths: first, as is predicable in a counter-insurgency war, we cannot win simply by killing the enemy; second, as hard as we have tried, we cannot build our way to victory either. The international community’s development efforts have produced hundreds of schools, health clinics and power plants. But they have not come close to producing the stability needed to let our troops come home with reasonable assurance that they won’t be back in a few years.
So if neither guns nor major assistance works, what will? Here many speak of the failure of the US military’s counter-insurgency doctrine. But this is to misread Afghanistan’s recent history. The problem is that the US military and civilian actors have, in the name of counter-insurgency, produced precisely the opposite effect that this strategy intends.
In theory this approach is designed to create a stable foundation for security and development. It should give citizens a reason to believe in their government. But nearly 80 per cent of Afghan assistance since 2001 has been delivered through channels that bypass the country’s government. In fact, at almost every turn, the coalition (with the US in the lead) has signalled to the Afghan people that their government is incompetent, incapable of providing even the most basic services.
If Afghanistan is to stand any chance of surviving America’s departure in 2014, there is little time to reverse this sentiment. Doing so requires a significant change in the way development agencies and their contractors work. But the first step is a simple recognition that, when stability is the goal, even modest programmes delivered through the Afghan state trump blockbuster programmes delivered through donor’s own organisations.
That said, given capacity is limited and Kabul is a mess, we must look elsewhere if we are to find ways to trust the Afghan government with development funds. Rebuilding faith in the state has to start at the provincial and district levels, since local government is the only government most Afghans know.
This seems fraught with difficulty. But not only is it possible, it is actually now happening in several provinces. Afghan sub-national governments in Logar and Wardak provinces were for the first time given access to small amounts of development funds to serve their people last year. They were also given the accountability that goes with that responsibility. There was only one requirement for this right: complete transparency at every stage of the process.
These programmes show that Afghans can manage resources and respond to local needs. The early results are striking: a decision-making shura (district council) debating projects as a firefight rages around them, engrossed in their first taste of managing resources; a district sub-governor producing five sensible projects in less than four months, including two roads, a bridge and a school classroom project; and another sub-governor fighting off efforts to bring in contractors for a hospital his district has decided to build.
At present too few Afghans trust their government. Yet the work undertaken in these provinces shows that, with the right combination of money, support, transparency and trust, local governments can and will serve their people. Their projects are not the kind of big development the coalition can deliver, but they are government projects, and the people know it. Giving local governments resources to manage, and giving their people the information to hold those governments accountable, might just be our ticket out of Afghanistan.
The writer was an adviser to the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team deployed in Afghanistan’s Logar and Wardak provinces in 2010. He is a principal at the Results for Development Institute and a former World Bank senior manager.
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