Authors: David Isby
Public health is another area where Afghans are today better off, with over 80 percent of the population having access to health care. This was made possible by aid, with the Afghan government playing a strong, positive role. After the Ministry of Public Health found it had no idea what facilities were being built, personnel trained, or standards achieved, it insisted that all donors in the public health field follow the Afghan guidelines, reflecting the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS). The Ministry of Public Health provided Afghan-created guidelines and priorities for donors that produced two new nationwide baseline
healthcare capabilities: the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) and the Essential Package of Hospital Services (EPHS). By having donor healthcare efforts meet Afghan-generated priorities as to their location and capabilities, the Ministry of Public Health was able to almost triple the number of health-care facilities, from 496 in 2003 to 1468 in 2008.
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These significant successes were abetted by functional and competent Afghan ministers who were able to implement a unitary Afghan approach rather than the multiple nation-specific approaches that are frequently a factor when aid comes from multiple donors. Even after these ministers have left office, these successful examples of Afghan-directed aid have been sustained by their successors. They provide an example of how aid can succeed and the Afghans can play a better role in directing its effects.
“When Afghans lead, we have greater impact,” said Mark Ward, a UNAMA official working on aid issues.
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Other ministries have provided examples of other approaches where the Afghan government can make a positive contribution to aid effectiveness. The Ministry of Rural Reconstruction and Development was licensed by the Ministry of Finance to have the freedom to put together its own funding packages from donors. This proved important because it has enabled Afghans to shift funding to meet changing needs on a more responsive basis than would be possible from relying on multiple programs carried out by outside donors bypassing the Afghan government. There have even been recent successes in the areas of the Ministries of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock, and Energy and Water, historically two of the most incapable ministries. For example, 2009 saw Kabul suffering fewer of the unscheduled power blackouts than it had in previous years and more Afghans having access to electric power. Despite the continuing problems of pervasive corruption, the Afghan government can still, if enabled rather than worked-around by its outside supporters, provide part of Afghanistan’s needed solutions. Mark Ward said: “Donor coordination needs strong government leadership and willing donors.”
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These examples show that the two can be brought together. The challenge is to apply these lessons to other sectors in Afghanistan.
There have been some improvements. The Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS) provides a shared vision and direction, which has
helped Afghan government ministries unify the aid flow in some areas, though the gap between it and Afghan realities remains large. Following the expansion of UNAMA’s mandate by the Security Council in 2008, Kai Eide, then UN Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG), retained the focus of Lakhdar Brahimi’s original approach—that the UN should increase Afghan capacity, governmental and non-governmental, with a limited presence of international staff—by enabling the Government of Afghanistan to take over functions from donors and their foreign contractors. UNAMA has acted to coordinate donor programs, although it has no authority to move around money even between UN programs, let alone that of other donors. The Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (JCMB) in Kabul has had successes in reconciling Afghan government participation and donor programs, ensuring that Afghan priorities are heard, if not always heeded, and acting to ensure that aid has a positive impact at the local level. The Afghan government’s Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) is also aiming to coordinate aid for local development out in the provinces, where it is often needed most, yet this is also where the Afghan government has the least capability. This is being countered on a slow, ministry-by-ministry basis in recent years, using the ANDS for guidance. The US is providing direct aid to some Afghan ministries that have developed effective internal controls. Another step forward has been the creation of the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), managed by UNAMA, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and other donors. This has provided greater Afghan involvement and flexibility in aid programs, by pulling together multiple donors’ contributions into a single ARTF account that can, with oversight, be used to meet what the Afghan government considers the most pressing needs.
Ashraf Ghani has pointed out that successes in some sectors does not necessarily carry over into areas where failing to secure Afghan support and participation has created alienation and undercut legitimacy. “You cannot have ownership of the country unless they are at the forefront of assuming responsibility.”
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Successes in areas such as education and public health have been difficult to apply to other ministries, each with ministers and bureaucracies jealous of their prerogatives and each having a different set of outside donors.
Achieving Afghan Ownership
The importance of having Afghan buy-in and ultimate insistence on ownership and responsibility for the results of the aid effort applies both at the national level and at the grassroots. Too often, donors saw the recipients in rural Afghanistan as passive, waiting for top-down benefits, rather than recognizing that the highly politicized society was engaged and, indeed, competitive. The donors failed to provide the believable vision of a reward for cooperation across local, political, or ethnolinguistic lines, but rather encouraged an intense competition for aid resources that has become the “real” Afghan politics today. By 2008–10, this competition for aid resources had emerged in Kabul as central to politics in Afghanistan, with policy issues (those not associated with an aid flow from a foreign donor) pushed to one side or limited to the parliament (with their goal of advancing their own or their clients’ interests). The “winners” used the resources, too often, to fuel corruption. Little of this aid reached the rural Afghan population. The lack of capability in Kabul and governance outside Kabul, especially in rural areas, means that donors (whose programs’ templates are aimed at working with governmental bodies) often lack effective Afghan partners. Effective Afghan partners can enable donors to achieve the sort of concrete successes that have been seen in these areas. Creating them remains a challenge. Donors (including international organizations and NGOs) created competition between different Afghan groups in Kabul, too often supporting “their” Afghans rather than either donor or recipient taking part in an integrated process, although actions by the US government working directly with some Afghan ministries, the UN SRSG, and the JCMB have improved this situation in recent years.
Even in a developed country, political power and influence follow money. In the absence of a viable national economy and an ability to collect revenue domestically, Afghans must look to receive money for their ministries, home provinces, and NGOs from foreign donors. Even when it is passed through the Kabul government, which the US and other donors will generally not do, reflecting the perceptions of its corruption and lack of capacity, the Afghan involvement is too often seen as
irrelevant, imposing only another layer of those taking their cuts without an evident value-added to the process. Yet, while oversight of aid is required, increased Afghan government involvement is required if there are ever to be more sectors where, like education and public health, aid has made the life of the average Afghan better. Afghans who wanted the benefits of aid went to the donors directly (or their Afghan clients and intermediaries who had influence with the donors) rather than the Afghan government. The donors provided the resources but too often failed to insist on effective transparency and oversight from the Afghan government, who they did not let distribute the aid. This has prevented Kabul from building its legitimacy and capability the way King Zahir did, who used aid money to reward those who did Kabul’s bidding in the provinces and withholding it from those that did not. In 2007–08, some two thirds of assistance, including almost all that provided by the US government, bypassed the Kabul government.
Only since 2008 has this practice slowly changed. In 2009, there were also attempts by the Afghan government and donors alike to break down the various “stovepipes” in aid program created between ministerial-level fiefdoms and their outside donor patrons. Instead, the intention is to require the government to work and distribute funds across ministries, creating four multi-departmental clusters of ministries, which prevents the least competent and capable ministries from blocking this long-overdue move towards cohesiveness, until Afghan politics allow their ministers to be replaced and a new generation of Afghans comes forward to run effective government. It has also brought Afghan ministers together for a common cause, something they have seldom been willing to do since 2001, each jealous of each other’s position and divided by politics, ethnicity, and, too often, the short-term interests of themselves and their families.
An increased Afghan role in the aid effort cannot wait on rooting out corruption from the Afghan government, a process that will take a decade even if all goes well, but needs to be implemented concurrently with it, with measures put in place to mitigate corruption. Otherwise, the current US goal for the ANSF to take over the burden of ground combat operations in Afghanistan will be undercut by the lack of an effective government.
It is not only the Afghans that compete for aid. Major coalition members have used their aid programs to push donors to make their areas of responsibility a priority; the British push for aid to Helmand province, where their troops are deployed, while the Canadians want these same resources devoted to Kandahar, which is their responsibility.
For much of the past decade, Afghanistan has seen its reconstruction “contracted out” to those selected by the donors, much as it saw its fighting similarly “contracted out” to the coalition forces that were keeping the insurgents at bay. Many Afghans are certainly willing to let the outsiders do these things for them and not take responsibility, but instead focus on short-term gain, enriching themselves and their clients and cutting out rivals. The skill in creating and implementing effective policies in Afghanistan is to require the Afghans to buy in to the process so that they have everything at stake in the ultimate outcome. This is going to mean an increasing Afghan role in both development and fighting.
Missing the Grassroots
When international aid began to flow into Afghanistan after 2001, with the intent to help the country rebuild after the fall of the Taliban, it was primarily directed toward the state, even though the state had never been a pillar of strength in Afghanistan’s society under any government throughout its history. Afghanistan has always been very different from the Afghan state. Even in the Golden Age of a centralized but limited state, Afghanistan’s strength has been its peoples, their faith, their qawms; and how society functioned on a local level. All this defeated the Soviets, though at terrible cost to each of them. The Afghan state did not defeat the Soviets; that was effectively in hostile hands in 1978–9.
While there was acknowledgement of how important it was for aid to reach the grassroots, the view of donors and Afghan elites alike still tended to focus on Kabul, even though the bulk of aid flowed from outside donors to contractors without touching the Afghan government. In an Afghan context, national does not mean the same as central. This underlines a fundamental policy dilemma facing the US and other aid donors. They need a strong and non-corrupt Afghan government, but the needs aid is intended to answer cannot wait until the Afghans achieve
that goal, which will likely take a generation. While the US and the coalition need to rebuild the Afghan government, waiting for it to become more functional and less corrupt before engaging with the Afghan grassroots is not a valid policy option. The insurgents are taking advantage of this vacuum on a daily basis. US and coalition policy needs to help Afghans have a better life. When the Afghan state can do this, it needs to be supported. Where the Afghan state is not doing this, effective aid policy requires alternative means, such as the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), to do this.
The donors—international, governments, and NGOs—have demonstrated too often a willingness to embrace quick-fix solutions and imported templates, with the context and true nature of Afghan society largely ignored. Reconciling the near-term needs of counter-insurgency, with its need to protect the population of Afghanistan with the long-term needs of effective development, is a challenge. Coalition military forces represent the bulk of each country’s presence on the ground in Afghanistan, and their efforts include much more than fighting. These military personnel are deployed on short-term tours, a year for the US, six months for the British and many other coalition partners. This has led to an emphasis on shortterm programs that, over the years, have failed to accumulate into lasting benefits. Fresh troops have had to keep learning over and over how to effectively interface with the locals. In many areas, involving both military and development, the coalition does not have eight years of experience in Afghanistan to draw upon, but rather eight one-years’ experience, which is a very different thing. International development programs are normally planned to run for 20–25 years, but in Afghanistan there has not been the long-term commitment to funding from the international community that would make such actions more than rhetoric. The military effort needs to beat back the insurgency in the next few years. The aid effort will take a generation to reach its objectives. Carrying out the near-term surge to prevent collapse while at the same time enabling the generation-long process of rebuilding that may, some day, provide Afghanistan with stability is going to be difficult, but it is a task that must be undertaken.