Afghanistan (53 page)

In 2009, GEN McChrystal identified as a current need “ISAF requires a credible program to offer eligible insurgents reasonable incentives to stop fighting and return to normalcy, possibly including the provision of employment and protection.”
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Yet while many of the insurgents are fighting for money and because there are no other jobs available, simply providing more money and better jobs is not going to be sufficient to win
over sizable numbers unless they enable Afghans to legitimate their decision to switch sides in national and Islamic terms. The Soviets offered money and jobs to Afghans willing to switch sides and found few takers. Kabul has created programs to try to create a way to help insurgents switch sides while still appearing good Afghans and Muslims. The National Reconciliation Program (NRP) has aimed to bring former Taliban into alliance with Kabul through the Program Takhim-e-Sohl (PTS, strengthening peace), directed by Dr. Sibghatullah Mojadidi, the respected Naqshabandi Sufic figure and first ISA president. It allows former insurgents room for political participation and to get the “certificate of amnesty,” known in Kabul as the “get out of jail free card.” Yet, partially reflecting a lack of resources, it was estimated that perhaps only one in ten of those eligible to participate in the NRP have taken advantage of it. Those that have done so appear, at least in their public statements, to retain a great deal of sympathy toward, if not loyalty to, their former comrades, making their support sound rather empty. Lack of resources, along with the insurgents’ belief in ultimate victory, has made the NRP’s task difficult. By 2009, the US was planning to reenergize this program.
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Other times when significant numbers of the insurgents might have come over to join with the government, either at the time of the Bonn conference in 2001 or in 2003–04, they were either not invited in or there was no agreement within the Afghan government and with the coalition as to who would receive amnesty.
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It is possible that at those times, insurgent leaders such as the Haqqanis and Hekmatyar could have been persuaded to come over to the side of Kabul if they were suitably rewarded and treated as heroes. Neither the Afghans who had experienced their violence nor the US and its allies who would have to pay the bills for bringing them over saw this as an attractive option, nor did they wish to have to justify it to their constituents.

So these men continue doing what has been their life since 1978: fighting against other Afghans and foreigners with the support of Pakistani intelligence services and outside Arab allies. To these Afghans, they are waging jihad, just as they did against the infidel Soviets and the
takfir
Islamic State of Afghanistan. It will require strong actions to alter this powerful and well-financed continuity.

Former interior minister Ali Jalali asked fundamental questions about negotiations: “What is the end state? Will the opposition accept the constitution? Denounce violence? They will do so only when they can see they cannot win through violence.”
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But the insurgents are unlikely to come to this conclusion in the absence of a long-term US security commitment or trends showing that their Afghan opponents are becoming more effective and united in preventing their return to power. Otherwise, insurgent anticipation of victory will continue to prevent effective negotiations.

Ending the insurgency is likely to require having to deal with the attitude of potential spoilers in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The government of Pakistan has acted as a spoiler in the past, preventing Afghans reaching possible agreements in the 1980s and 1990s that might have ended or limited Afghanistan’s conflicts yet did not satisfy Pakistan’s strategic objectives. Therefore, they encouraged and funded rivals and proxy conflicts to spoil such agreements. This applied both to local agreements, such as when Pakistan acted to prevent the Afghan resistance from dealing with the Kabul regime in Kandahar province in 1988, or at a national level, as when they enabled HiH to attack rather than join a coalition with the ISA government in Kabul in August 1992, providing the rockets that eventually leveled much of the city. However, Pakistan declined to play the spoiler role in the 2001 Bonn agreement or throughout the political process in Afghanistan that followed, and so there is hope that Islamabad will help and not spoil any potential progress.

Since Bonn, the regional consensus when all Afghanistan’s neighbors could talk together on how best to move forward has been lost, but other processes—perhaps a new conference like Bonn—could aim to identify common grounds for cooperation. If Pakistan sees peace is needed, it may not block an agreement between Afghans. Getting Pakistan to act affirmatively to stop harboring the Afghan insurgency would be a difficult but not impossible requirement and one that would alleviate so many current problems. But in 2008–10, despite an increasing willingness to treat Pakistan’s own insurgents as a threat to the future of the country, there still remains a perception that the Afghan insurgents are less a threat to Pakistan than are the US and the government in Kabul.

CHAPTER TEN

“
Above all, it behooves us Americans, in this connection, to repress, and if possible to extinguish once and for all, our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.”

—George Kennan, 1951

“Just as the US military is reinventing itself through a counterinsurgency strategy, US civilian actors need new instruments, practices and thinking.”

—Clare Lockhart, 2009

A
fghanistan is unique in many ways, but its needs are similar to those of other countries and thus the lessons of history are applicable. Aid has helped devastated countries recover from conflicts, Mozambique being a prime example in the 1990s; or at least provide incentives for the population not falling back to conflict, as is the case with Bosnia and Kosovo. In the Cold War, aid and a strong international commitment helped devastated countries in Europe and Asia eventually become stable and prosper. Compared with these countries, Afghanistan has a less developed political system and deeper divisions in the population, and lacks infrastructure, institutions, sizable resident educated elites, and residual state capabilities. Better aid programs that aim to build up these lacking components
of civil society could have had better results and inflicted less collateral damage on society.
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Much of the aid that has been devoted to Afghanistan has been absorbed by the aid efforts themselves and only a relatively small percentage has been effective in making life better for Afghans. In addition to the aid effort absorbing resources being devoted to it and allocation often reflecting donor rather than Afghan priorities, the amount of aid has been inadequate. Afghanistan has received much less aid on a per-capita or per-area basis than other post-conflict aid efforts, despite Afghanistan’s more widespread devastation and lower level of pre-war development. One 2006 overview of the aid process is summed up as follows: “While aid has undoubtedly contributed to progress in Afghanistan, a large proportion of aid has been prescriptive and supply-driven, rather than indigenous and responding to Afghan needs. It has been heavily influenced by the political and military objectives of donors, especially the imperative to win so-called ‘hearts and minds.’ It has tended to reflect expectations in donor countries, and what Western electorates would consider reconstruction and development achievements, rather than what Afghan communities want and need. Projects have too often sought to impose a preconceived idea of progress, rather than nurture, support and otherwise expand capabilities, according to Afghan preferences.”
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Aid efforts, along with the military action by the coalition in Afghanistan, demonstrate that their ability to do good is inherently limited by the difficulty of changing Afghanistan for the better, while their ability to do harm suffers no such constraint. The result has been, in the words of Ashraf Ghani: “International technical assistance is considered to be largely wasted. . . . Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into technical assistance only to increase corruption and misgovernance.”
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Aid to Afghanistan

Afghanistan has been dependent on outside aid since its emergence as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century, with some of the aid going to development of a national government, mostly going to the state running and supporting elites who were part of various high-level patronage networks in order to ensure
their support for, or at least non-resistance to, Kabul policies. The high point of this approach by donors and Kabul alike was the Golden Age: foreign aid provided the Afghans with actual gold. In terms of creating a stable state post-2001, Afghanistan was, in effect, starting from where the former king began, when his 1933 coronation offered peace after years of civil war, not like when he was overthrown in 1973. The way the monarchy established itself starting in the 1930s was to convince the Afghan people that it was in their personal (and financial) interest to be associated with the state, including supporting and participating in state-established institutions, such as education. With the benefit of hindsight, the former king’s policies, of building a centralized state with limited capabilities, appear to have often been the wrong choice for achieving stability, as the growth of the Communist opposition, with foreign support, demonstrated. The growth of a private sector economy was neglected in favor of state-controlled and -directed investments. Making the life of the average Afghan better was not a high priority even in the nation’s supposed Golden Age, and making the life of the average Afghan woman better was more remote still.

Because previous Western governmental aid efforts with Afghanistan were largely cut off in the 1990s, many of the lessons learned by the nations supporting the Afghans during their war against the Soviets had to be re-learned, especially the pitfalls: widespread corruption and diversion, minimal accountability, and the collateral damage caused by the creation of the culture of dependency. Programs were too often judged by how many resources were allocated rather than their effects in reaching Afghan grassroots.

Outside aid for the Afghans did tremendous things in the 1980s. Covert aid enabled the Afghan resistance to endure and eventually prevail against the Soviets. Humanitarian aid kept the worlds’ largest population of refugees from starving in Pakistan. Cross-border aid kept many Afghans on their land inside Afghanistan. But parts of the aid flow contributed to Afghanistan’s continuing problems. Pakistan’s ISI allocated the covert aid and favored the Islamist HiH and other Pushtun parties it believed it could control. Arab money and the Pakistani security services enabled the rise of the Taliban Culture in Pakistan in the 1980s.

In 2009, Eshan Zia, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, said “to strengthen legitimacy we must enable government to serve the people”; this has not been a self-evident fact through Afghanistan’s history, but this historical precedent seemed to have been swept away by the assurance that pervaded the population that the US-led intervention in 2001 was going to make life better for everyone.
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The international aid effort effectively preceded the emergence of a functioning Afghan national government or a national economy, and the current divisions and direction of international aid in Afghanistan flow from the fact that in 2001–02 there was no government to engage with when the programs started to help unify its flow in the most effective manner.

Since 2001, Afghan governance has depended heavily on aid in the absence of a functioning national economy and still lacks the ability to fund itself. In 2008, 90 percent of all Afghan public expenditures depended on international assistance. The 750 million dollars that the Afghan government raised from duties and taxation itself was equivalent to what Afghanistan received from just one aid program, the US Department of Defense’s CERP (commander’s emergency response) program. Afghanistan has one of the lowest domestic revenue-to-GDP ratios in the world, around seven percent. This by itself helps create a culture of dependency, as nothing can function without outside assistance. Experience has shown that reliance on an aid flow creates rent-seeking behavior that undercuts democratic institutions; the “curse of aid” is worse than the “curse of oil.” Both aid and oil provide money in a way that counters the establishment of an effective independent government and a functional civil society alike.
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While the flow of aid has been insufficient to rebuild or stabilize Afghanistan, it has been enough to fuel the growth of the culture of corruption and dependency, and, through that, the Taliban culture that promises both Islamic rectitude and an end to the cultural chaos caused by these outside influences, be they well-meant or not. But the importance of aid means that, for all its drawbacks in Afghanistan, there is no alternative except for the Afghan government to rely on it until a functional national economy emerges.

The post-Bonn government was the first to make improving the daily life of the average Afghan a state priority; but where they have done this,
as in the provision of opportunities in education and basic health care, it was overshadowed by the raised expectations that were created by the 2001 US intervention and new frustrations with the continued corruption, lack of jobs, violence, and narcotics trade. Aid resources went to implementing the provisions of the Bonn agreement, such as the
Loya Jirgas
and presidential and parliamentary elections, not to creating a stable, legal economy, restoring agriculture or local governments and a civil society free from corruption.

At the time of the Bonn conference, the US resistance to a commitment of open-ended “nation-building” led to a donor-driven approach, where nations pledged what they wished, coordinated at international conferences, and provided criteria for Afghans as to how this aid was to be used. With a donor-centric aid approach, the Afghans have tended to get what the donor or Kabul believes they want, rather than what they are actually willing to take ownership of. Like most of Afghanistan’s problems, there is no easy solution. Each option has real costs and limitations that can only be mitigated rather than prevented.