Afghanistan (39 page)

The political counselor at the Afghanistan embassy in Washington, Mohammed Ashraf Hadiri, set out the importance of this youth bulge: “The voting age is 18, and if you recall from the 2004 presidential elections, there were 10.5 million eligible voters, 80 percent of whom turned out to cast their votes. By the following year for the parliamentary elections, the number of eligible voters at 18 years of age rose to 12.5 million. So, if we add two million eligible voters to the electorate each year since 2005, we will have at least another five million young voters. This means that the majority of the electorate in 2009 and 2010 will be between 18 and 40 years of age.”
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Any approach aimed at winning over the youth runs the risk of alienating those of the older generation currently in power. The current violence will also have a direct impact on the future; the attacks that target schools throughout the south and east mean that rural Pushtuns are less likely to be educated, continuing the downward spiral of uneducated young Pushtun men, who are susceptible to insurgent recruitment. “We need to win the insurgency by offering new things to the young men who fight,” said BG Richard Blanchette, ISAF spokesman in 2008.
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The steady flow of new recruits will have to be stemmed, not just for the short-term goal of slowing insurgent replacements but for the long-term future of Afghanistan.

Looking for Afghan Solutions

In 2001, Afghanistan was a nation desperate for a better future. Today, only desperation remains. The Afghans wanted to be part of the solution, but through a series of failures by Afghanistan’s political class, aid donors, and coalition partners, this did not happen, and now the future is not of their own making, much to everyone’s detriment. “The gap between the people and government of Afghanistan is getting bigger,”
said Dr. George Varughese, former director of the Asia Foundation in Kabul.
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The policies by the Afghan government and US alike have, for all their good intentions, not slowed the growth of this gap. It often seems that any action whatsoever will have the potential to only widen it more.

In a conservative, Islamic country where authority depends on legitimacy in Islamic and national terms, governance has been undercut by corruption as much as incapacity to govern. Too many of the Afghan political actors “forgot” that stealing was wrong. Too few of the donors refused to provide aid where it was most needed and met their objectives by spending their resources in such a way that only a fraction of every dollar pledged actually made it into the hands of Afghans. Unless this is all addressed, not only will Afghanistan never achieve a functional private sector economy, without which peace and stability are unlikely, but the threat of state failure, division, and civil war is all too likely to return.

The story of the military and developmental policies since 2001 has been one of missed opportunities. Years of failing to perceive emerging threats—whether from Pakistan or corruption and narcotics money—meant that the US and the coalition supporters were acting reactively.

Decision-makers, in Washington, London, Brussels, and elsewhere, insisted that the hard Afghan realities of conflict and corruption reported to them by soldiers, diplomats, or aid workers not be allowed to interfere with their preferred agenda. It takes a long time for sophisticated institutions to learn, identify changes, secure needed funding, implement changes, and then put in place adaptive processes. All the while, an entirely new group of crises have emerged. Then everyone rotates out from Afghanistan, tour of duty expired, and the process begins again. Even the US Army—an organization that has made a point of being open to learning and adaptation—found that at the sharp end, each new relief brought a new battalion trained with outdated tactics and led by a new lieutenant colonel eager to make his reputation in combat, and the cycle began again with too little progress.

There is great concern in Afghanistan that since the current government and ANA arrived with US and coalition forces, it will depart with them as well, starting with the reduction in US force levels in
2011 President Obama announced in his 1 December 2009 speech. The Afghans—government and electorate alike—are as conscious of their current weakness and limitations as they are proud of their achievements. In any event, the extent to which the long-term future of Afghanistan can be put in Afghan hands, for fighting at first and then for governance, then outside commitments will finally have a chance of being meaningful and the government and organizations built in Afghanistan since 2001 may actually prove enduring.

“Afghanize—let Afghans lead” is the recommendation of Jim Drummond, South Asia Division Director of the UK’s DfID.
³⁶¹
“Afghanize and the incentive to oppose the US will die out,” said Saleh Registani, Member of Parliament from Panjshir province.
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Change—even if initiated from outside—can be accepted if approached in this manner. “We’re not out to create New Zealand. We will use the local structures, appropriate for Afghanistan’s history, culture, and background,” said US Central Command combatant commander GEN David Petraeus. The US and its coalition partners have amassed a generally poor track record in picking Afghan winners. Afghan political and social forces—or even institutions—have the potential to be better at addressing these issues than outsiders that have tended to both manipulate and be manipulated by competing Afghan groups. Yet there have been few examples of where Afghan approaches have been given the chance to succeed. Doing things the Afghan way means finding a place for traditional justice, traditional and tribal decision-making and justice, and armed groups outside the ANA and ANP. The current government limits the power of local leaders in the provinces, who may lack education but are accepted by the locals and have access to local patronage networks. Their clout lies in traditional authority. Changes that may contribute to enhancing the legitimacy of Afghan democracy would include amending some of the centralization in the current Afghan constitution. Elected provincial governors would still be limited if they lacked an independent taxing authority. Real political parties could add to stability. Ways of working with traditional authority and judicial systems until the state systems are viable need to be identified and implemented.

Yet there is no agreement as to what the Afghan solution should be.
To many Pushtuns, it requires that their ethnolinguistic group retain state power despite their tribal divisions and Pakistani influence; to non-Pushtuns, this is unacceptable and no way to repair Afghanistan or enter modernity. An Afghan solution may not be one outside supporters are willing to live with. Negotiations with Taliban figures in 2008–09 made it seem to many that Kabul was being asked by the Pakistanis and Saudis who acted as interlocutors to negotiate away issues such as its commitment to a multiethnic democracy and women’s rights. More significantly, it was seen by non-Pushtuns as an ethnic Pushtun power grab to be resisted and a backward step toward conflict.

There are also real limitations as to what an Afghan solution can realistically provide, especially in the absence of US and coalition support. The Afghans cannot solve all the conflicts in Afghanistan, because they are not all of their own making. Al Qaeda’s strategy is to use Afghanistan as one of many fronts in a conflict to win the support of the world’s Muslims, one of these looming issues that has worldwide implications. Pakistani strife is being fought out in Afghanistan, demonstrated by the series of ceasefire agreements with insurgents that encouraged them to take political and cultural violence over the Durand Line to Afghanistan. The Afghan insurgency reflects issues originating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Narcotics and their suppression have their origins in the demand for illicit drugs in distant wealthy countries.

Making Governance Work

The government in Kabul still has a degree of residual legitimacy, but the hope and trust that many Afghans had in it in 2001 have eroded, wasting the good feelings, the spirit of optimism, and the political momentum over years that were instead dominated by corruption, incompetence, and violence. Until they see tangible results in their day-to-day lives, Afghans will not buy in to change and will resist taking responsibility for it. The good work that has been accomplished has largely been the result of change the Afghans did buy into. By 2009, Kabul had more reliable power and there were 600,000 reported connections to Afghanistan’s electrical power grid, a 178 percent increase since 2003. It was seen in the successful constitutional and electoral processes, improvements in
areas such as communications and healthcare, or in the better-trained units of the ANA. These successes all have the potential to point the way for improvement in other areas. If the investment in training, equipping, and enabling the ANA had been repeated in other areas—the ANP, the judicial system, civil administration, government at the provincial and local level, education, even religion—Afghanistan would be in better shape today than it is. Many Afghans expected this kind of reconstruction effort.

They did not get it. The ANA has worked out better than other Afghan institutions because it is being created and mentored by the US military, which has substantial experience in training foreign military forces and lots of trainers and resources to put behind this effort in Afghanistan. There is no comparable force, in the US or elsewhere, that has the capability, resources, and numbers to create and train the other people Afghanistan needs, such as teachers and civil administrators willing to get out and live among the people to make their life better, non-corrupt judges, agricultural engineers to rebuild irrigation systems and help the farmers, or ulema more interested in preaching the faith of their fathers than radical politics.

They also have not received security. Security more than any single issue determines legitimacy; the insurgent’s claim to legitimacy is that they can provide it. Rising crime in Kabul, Herat, and other areas hurts the Afghan government and the foreign presence. The dramatic rise in food and energy prices in 2008 further strained the Afghan economy. The government’s legitimacy has suffered through demonstrating their inability to do anything about it.
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By 2008–10, the government was also seeing its legitimacy hurt by failing to get outside Kabul and interact with the population, to be seen in the act of exercising authority versus nominally delegating it to corrupt officials or ineffective ministries that have no presence outside Kabul and provincial capitals. “Is the government able to talk to the people? Many uneducated people are able to do excellent things. . . . The state is not engaging people on the ground,” is how Massoud Kharokhail saw the situation in 2008.
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Eshan Zia, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, agreed that there was a “total disconnect between state institutions and citizens of Afghanistan.”
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Again, we come back to the
impossibility to instituting effective governance in a “top-down” manner in Afghanistan.

Currently, democracy, for all its failings to date in Afghanistan, may be the only alternative to renewed civil war and increased proxy involvement by the neighbors. The unpopularity of the Karzai government, the culture of corruption, the failure to provide effective governance and the widespread perception of fraud in the 2009 presidential election have all challenged democracy’s appeal for Afghans. There has, however, been no perceptible groundswell of support, either among elites or the grassroots, for a non-democratic alternative, either Islamic or otherwise authoritarian. War-weary though the vast majority of Afghans are, they are unlikely to accept authoritarian rule by a ruler or a group in Kabul that is not their own, even though instability, crime, and corruption have led many Afghans to wish for a strongman. There may be no alternative to a democratic Afghanistan except a war-torn Afghanistan. No single strong figure, whether dictator or president, is likely to be able to pull Afghanistan together, due to the ethnolinguistic divisions. Looking for a new “iron
amir
” is not likely to be a success. Yet a successful Afghan democracy may not resemble those in the West.

The problem with democracy, however, is that the foreign supporters have packaged it in a way that includes much cultural baggage that Afghans may not accept or will find alien. Rapid modernization, without establishing support and getting buy-in, can destroy legitimacy in Afghanistan. The West has not aimed to present democracy in the forms that the Afghans have found it appealing, either by linking it to development and schools or by showing its Afghan roots in the institution of the
jirga
and its Islamic roots in
majlis-e-shura
. Elections, while important, are a tool for democratization, not a substitute for it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

—Adam Smith, 1782

I
n recent years, effective governance in Pakistan has eluded both military and civilian governments. The current civilian government has engaged in political infighting rather than building up their credibility or addressing Pakistan’s economic and security crises. Governmental and economic power remains largely in the hands of the military, elites, and bureaucracy in a system frequently described as feudal. The Pakistani military continues to view itself as the insurer of independence, distrusting civilian rule. It is willing to run the country as well as defend it. The continuing security competition with India has provided the rationale for the Pakistani military to maintain effective control over their country’s national security policy, including that in Afghanistan. The military’s increased entrenchment in the economy and government has led to them taking on the feudal characteristics of the civilian leadership. Different elites seek to maintain their power and hold over patronage networks with what often appears to be scant regard for the national interest or for the bulk of the population.