A hesitant Bush blew hot and cold over nation building, while Rumsfeld refused to involve U.S. troops in any such task. He could not make the connection that the army’s “full-spectrum dominance” on the battlefield could be achieved only if it also had the capacity to rebuild the countries it invaded.
4
The State Department was under pressure from its allies to show leadership in rebuilding Afghanistan, but no arm of government was dedicated to nation building, and Bush declined to elevate the task into a part of U.S. foreign policy.
In 1997 President Clinton had signed Presidential Decision Directive 56, which established an interagency planning and training process for handling “complex contingency operations” abroad—in other words, nation building. The order expired and was not renewed by Bush, leaving a legal vacuum in the U.S. foreign policy system. Meanwhile, before 9/11, Rumsfeld had shut down the army’s Peacekeeping Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—its only training institute for nation-building tasks. There was no institution in the U.S. arsenal to deploy for nation building. In a report after 9/11, the Council on Foreign Relations was blunt about the situation: “The stark reality is that the United States does not have the right structural capability to stabilize and rebuild nations. Responsibility is diffuse and authority is uncertain. The proper roles of the military and civilian agencies have not been articulated. And civilian players desperately need a ‘unified command’ structure to align policies, programs and resources. ”
5
The Pentagon’s own Defense Science Board asked that “the Secretary of Defense should designate stabilization and reconstruction operations as core military tasks.”
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Rumsfeld ignored all such requests.
In the weeks after 9/11, I met with development officials from around the world, including Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID. Natsios was charming, and a heartfelt humanitarian. An expert on famine in North Korea, he had written a book about it and was now desperately keen to get USAID do the right thing for Afghanistan, but he had no idea where to start.
Moreover, USAID was not the organization I knew growing up as a child in Pakistan, when it had water engineers and agronomists in the field. Its total experience of Afghanistan in the past two decades was handing out large and generous checks to the UN’s World Food Programme to buy wheat to feed Afghans. There was nobody in USAID who spoke the language or knew the country.
USAID had shrunk from thirteen thousand staff members during the Vietnam War to just twenty-three hundred in 2001. After 9/11 its budget was doubled, to $14 billion, but it hired only one hundred more people, barely enough for the huge rebuilding operations required in Afghanistan and later Iraq. In 2002 its Kabul office had just twelve staff members, a number that rose to thirty-nine the following year.
7
It hired Afghans who were not quite qualified but who could operate in the field. They were to suffer badly at the hands of the Taliban. More than one hundred Afghan staff members of USAID were killed between 2001 and 2006.
8
It was a sad epitaph for a once-vital organization, even though there had always been rumors that USAID was a CIA front. During the cold war, it planned and managed projects, deploying its own experts. Now it was just a glorified bureaucracy that wrote checks and implemented projects by hiring contractors—the notorious Beltway bandits, consulting companies with big offices inside the Beltway in Washington. After he retired, U.S. ambassador Robert Finn commented that “USAID is doing nothing itself now, it has become a contracting agency with layers of bureaucracy that did not exist in the past and too much of the money comes back to the US through consultancies.”
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I knew none of this in those early weeks after the war was won and had high hopes. I urged Andrew Natsios and people at other agencies to invest in agriculture as a surefire way to win public support and get the economy moving. Although only 12 percent of the total land area was arable, and only 30 percent of that was irrigated, 80 percent of the population lived off agriculture. One good crop cycle would revive public morale in the countryside and convince people of the worthlessness of the Taliban. From this there would be other benefits. Millions of returning refugees would be encouraged to return to their villages rather than gravitate to the cities looking for work. Agriculture would provide jobs to the militiamen who would soon be demobilized and offer farmers alternatives to growing poppies for opium, a business that was certain to boom again. There was also an urgent need to rebuild key roads between the major cities and link them to neighboring countries so that aid could flow. Later Natsios told his senior staff that “our first task is to rebuild the agricultural system . . . reconstruction has to be done in such a way to get the economy moving.”
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Natsios was quickly overruled by Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and Tenet at CIA, who were determined to ignore if not undermine USAID if such programs contradicted their own strategy. The CIA wanted every U.S. aid program to be used to help capture bin Laden and strengthen the warlords rather than to rebuild the country. The few USAID officials at the U.S. embassy in Kabul were seen as a mere nuisance. The U.S. military arbitrarily determined that all U.S. officials had to have a military escort when they ventured out, but because there were never enough soldiers to escort them, USAID officials rarely left the building. One official told me that the Pentagon did not want them to go outside and see how the warlords were being helped by the CIA. They complained that in the former Yugoslavia and other war zones, they were on the ground even during combat operations in order to direct aid. Only in Afghanistan were they forbidden to deploy by their own government.
One USAID official who eventually resigned told me:
Volatile, security risk-prone areas never stopped USAID in the past, so what was so different about Afghanistan post 9/11? Nothing—except that DOD did not want us around to see how they were aiding the wrong guys. In Washington our leadership simply lacked the motivation to stand up to DOD. We were too tame, and DOD took advantage of that. We should have established a multiagency, multidisciplinary DART [Disaster Assistance Response Team] team out of the U.S. embassy to coordinate with the other NGOs and aid credible Afghan partners rather than just hand over everything to DOD and contractors. To simply contract out America’s most important humanitarian response since the Marshall Plan was just too much for many of us.
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So USAID farmed out millions of dollars to contractors who often were not even present in Afghanistan. During the war, USAID officials based in Islamabad were ordered to pass money for quick-impact projects to the International Organization for Migration
(IOM)
, a group that works closely with the UN, because IOM supposedly had staff inside Afghanistan. In fact, IOM, which is mandated to deal only with migration issues, had just two staff members in country. Several USAID officials were to resign disillusioned with their organization, disgusted at U.S. policy, and frustrated at their failure to be effective. USAID was eventually to get swept into the State Department and lose what little independence it once had. In keeping with prevailing views in the Republican Party, USAID became a source of funds for Christian fundamentalist NGOs active in the Muslim world—giving them $57 million between 2001 and 2005 out of a total of $390 million distributed to all NGOs. Natsios was later to resign, but even then he did not take a stand against the corruption of USAID’s original purpose by the Bush team.
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The tragedy for Afghanistan was how feasible reconstruction actually could be when the entire Afghan population was supporting it. You did not need to be a rocket scientist to understand that a reconstruction program well coordinated with the UN-led political process would quickly help establish the credibility of the new government. Barnett Rubin and Ashraf Ghani, who were advising the UN and Karzai, were offering extremely sensible advice around the world, such as urging Western governments to set up a central deposit, or trust fund, to collect international donations, which the Afghan government could then draw on, rather than allowing individual donors to set up their own projects and programs, which would duplicate efforts while ignoring expensive infrastructure rebuilding such as roads. Such a trust fund could be run jointly by international organizations and the Afghan transitional government. Rubin, Ghani, and I urged donors to provide funds so that trained and qualified Afghans living in the West—many of whom we knew—could return to Afghanistan quickly and help develop the country.
A trust fund was set up in Tokyo, but few governments were keen on donating to it. Many countries had moribund aid bureaucracies, which took months to identify projects, more months to disburse the money, and then had nobody on the ground to monitor implementation. The United States was blighted with the same problems. At the end of the war it had the following agencies in Afghanistan carrying out quick-impact projects and humanitarian relief, all with their separate budgets and staff: the CIA, DOD, U.S. SOF, the State Department, and USAID. There was no central aid coordinator for the U.S. government’s efforts and zero coordination with the UN, European allies, or the Afghan government. Quick-impact projects became a Washington favorite. These were swift and cheap, such as digging a well, rebuilding a small bridge, or repairing a broken-down school building, and were supposed to convince the population that reconstruction was moving ahead. Instead, such projects invariably helped only the local warlord or commander the CIA was supporting.
Reporter Stephen Kinzer wrote that the path chosen by the United States assured that “Afghanistan would remain in ruins; that warlords would continue to control much of the country; that remnants of the Taliban would re-emerge as a fighting force.”
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All Western donors spoke the jargon of “building capacity” in the fledgling Afghan government. In a failed state such as Afghanistan, capacity would take years of patience and hard work to build. In the meantime, donors undermined their own efforts by funding programs that would benefit the population without consulting the relevant ministry. Thus as donors slowly built up capacity in the education ministry so that it could actually pay teachers around the country or devise a new curriculum, they also funded Western NGOs to build schools without ministry advice or guidance. It was tempting to do it yourself rather than spend years training Afghan officials. As a consequence, a parallel donor bureaucracy developed. Francis Fukuyama highlighted the dilemma: “The contradiction in donor policy is that outside donors want both to increase the local government’s capacity to provide a particular service . . .
and
to actually provide those services to the end users. The latter objective almost always wins out because of the incentives facing the donors themselves.”
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The Americans, too, wanted the best of both worlds, handing out multimillion-dollar contracts to consultancies in Washington for building capacity in the ministries, while at the same time hiring other consultants to carry out projects to win Afghan hearts and minds—projects that were not part of a broader plan connected to the ministry. Even five years later William Byrd, the architect for the World Bank program for Afghanistan, would lament that “the aid juggernaut is still outside the budget and outside government control—aid does not build government capacity which is what we need.”
In 2002, after the war ended, the UN and Japan organized a major donors’ conference for Afghanistan in Tokyo. The situation was dire. The Afghan government was barely functioning; the financial system was in total disarray with no banking system and three different currencies in circulation; millions of refugees were preparing to return home; while nearly one million people faced starvation. A preliminary “needs assessment” for the country, written jointly by the UN Development Program, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, estimated that Afghanistan needed $1.7 billion in the first thirty months and $10.0 billion over the first five years. Experts scathingly called the figures “guesstimates.” The European Union estimated the cost of rebuilding for the first five years at $9 to $12 billion, while planning minister Mohammed Mohaqiq insisted the country needed $22 billion in the first decade. In fact, nobody knew how much Afghanistan really required.
With sixty countries participating, Kofi Annan, Hamid Karzai, and Ashraf Ghani—who had left the UN to become de facto finance minister in Kabul—opened the Tokyo conference on January 21-22 with appeals for money.
15
Ghani now headed the government’s Afghan Assistance Coordination Authority (AACA), which would coordinate all reconstruction projects. Karzai asked for $300 million in cash to pay salaries six months in arrears for 210,000 civil servants and 25,000 policemen. The government only had $9 million from a UN start-up fund.
At Tokyo, nations pledged $4.5 billion, of which $1.8 billion was earmarked for 2002—still short of what was required.
16
The donors concluded that it would take $12.2 billion over five years to “rebuild” Afghanistan. A trust fund was established, but donors did not give it any money. The Afghanistan Interim Authority Fund, to be managed by the Afghan government, UNDP, ADB, and the World Bank, remained an orphan of the aid effort.
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However, the Tokyo meeting generated tremendous euphoria among Afghans, who believed everything was about to change for the better. It also focused international attention on the needs of nation building. What Tokyo failed to do was distinguish between money for humanitarian relief and money to rebuild the infrastructure.
In the next two years most of the funds pledged at Tokyo were to be spent on humanitarian relief rather than real reconstruction projects. No roads were built, no electricity or water was provided to the Afghans. Afghans complained bitterly that there had been no visible reconstruction, while donors would insist they had spent a lot of money. By April 2002, when even the smallest projects stalled for lack of funding, the UN called another meeting, where it was decided to carve up reconstruction responsibilities. The United States said it would take the lead in building the new army; Britain would take charge of counter-narcotics; Italy would rebuild the justice system; Japan would disarm the militias; while Germany would rebuild the police force.
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