NGOs began to arrive in Kabul in large numbers. “There are billions of dollars in the pipeline and armies of expatriates are waiting like some tribal militia to get into Kabul when the weather turns warm,” said a sarcastic Barnett Rubin. When NGOs and news organizations sought to rent the few private houses still standing in Kabul, rents jumped from $400 a month to $4000 and then to $20,000. Afghans would rent their house several times over, pocketing the cash and leaving the multiple tenants to sort out the mess. At the UN guesthouse, which had running water and electricity, senior UN and World Bank officials were sleeping four to a room.
International donors were helped considerably by the fact that they were dealing with Ashraf Ghani, fifty-eight, who was to play a critical role in the next few years. In exile, Ghani had been dreaming about reconstructing his country, and now he had the chance. He had left Afghanistan in the 1970s to study at Beirut University, where his contemporary was the fellow Afghan and future American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad. After the Soviet invasion of his country, Ghani taught at American universities, before joining the World Bank in 1991 as its senior anthropologist. Ghani had arrived in Kabul as an adviser to Brahimi, but then left the UN to head the country’s reconstruction effort. In June, the Loya Jirga would appoint him finance minister.
Ghani was one of the most brilliant Afghans of his generation and the most capable minister in the cabinet. He worked twenty hours a day in order to reorganize the Finance Ministry, introduce a new currency, and establish a new tax system. He encouraged educated Afghans to return home and help him, and persuaded wealthy Afghans abroad to provide investment. Ghani’s office resembled a scene from the California gold rush, as it was always flooded with tribal elders, ministers, Western executives, delegations from foreign aid agencies, Afghan expatriates in sharp suits, and assorted gold diggers waiting to see him. He would give ten-minute appointments to all comers, while his son Tarek, an undergraduate at Stanford University, took notes and became his doorkeeper.
His energy was all the more remarkable considering his poor health. He had lost a large part of his stomach to cancer, and his immune system was destroyed. He could not eat a full meal, so every hour he could be seen nibbling tiny portions of food. He did not know how long he had to live and that gave him fierce urgency and determination and lent a kind of ruthlessness to everything he did. Arthur Helton, of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, described Ghani as “a one man aid coordination agency . . . who has gained a reputation for ruffling feathers,” while Robert Finn later said, “He is very smart, with a short temper, which is a dangerous combination—but he got things done and fought with Karzai to get them done.”
19
I had known Ghani for twenty years and he never allowed anyone to come too close, remaining aloof. Many of his contemporaries read this as arrogance. Unfortunately, his explosions of bad temper and displays of arrogance with fellow Afghans and Westerners were all too frequent and soon made him a loathed figure in the Afghan cabinet. Nobody wanted to work with him. He had few friends, and as other ministers asserted themselves, they turned on Ghani, accusing him of monopolizing all decision making. The complaints about him eventually forced Karzai to let him resign in December 2004. Brahimi, who had remained Ghani’s supporter throughout, told him that he had resigned without a single minister willing to defend him.
What he achieved, though, was astounding. He built up the Finance Ministry from nothing. There had been no power or phone lines, no Internet, and no experienced staff. He hired the Chicago law firm Baker and McKenzie as consultants to help him run the AACA and asked Transparency International for help in creating mechanisms to prevent corruption. He hired the British firm Crown Agents to procure goods for the government so that donors would be satisfied that there was no corruption, and BearingPoint to provide a financial management system. Within a few months Ghani had fifty foreign advisers trying to reestablish the various departments of finance and trade while reorganizing other economic-related ministries and the central bank. Two advisers, Clare Lockhart, who had worked with Ghani at the World Bank, and an Australian economist, Michael Carnahan, who became his budget adviser, remained with him constantly.
Ghani was clear about what he wanted to do: “We want to build an efficient and transparent administration that is accountable and responsive to its citizens. We do not want the government as producer and manager of the economy, but rather as a regulator of the private sector and promoter of the entrepreneurial energies of our people.”
20
However, there was soon criticism by Afghans that Ghani was hiring too many foreign consultants at too high a price, with some of them charging up to fifteen hundred dollars a day. Ghani set about trying to raise taxes to demonstrate to the donors that the government was determined to become self-sufficient. He introduced an income tax for wealthy Afghans and a tax on rented accommodation and the import of luxury goods. Most Afghans had never paid taxes, and there was resistance. Lessons from other failed states trying to develop a taxation system were not encouraging. None had managed to collect tax revenues amounting to as little as 10 percent of national income.
Ghani riled Western donors by insisting that the government, rather than the donors, set priorities for development. ”Government ownership is critical to the establishment of a prosperous, secure Afghanistan,” he told a meeting of Western donors in Kabul on February 26, 2002. “We are fully committed to seeking partnership in this long-term process, but we must demand that it be a partnership of equals,” he added. He also fought a losing battle with Western agencies to prevent educated Afghans from leaving the government. “Within six months of starting my job as finance minister, my best people had been stolen by international aid organizations who could offer them forty to a hundred times the salary we could,” he said.
21
While civil servants earned an average of fifty dollars a month, Afghan drivers working for Western NGOs or the UN earned up to one thousand.
The lack of coordination meant that there was often an overlap in what the donors funded, as many of them wanted to fund the same high-profile projects. USAID, Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union, and the World Bank all hired separate contractors to modernize the collection of customs revenues on Afghanistan’s borders. Donors duplicated efforts to revamp Karzai’s office or fund women’s and children’s health projects and they spent far too much on foreign consultants.
In Geneva in July 2002, donors met for the first international assessment of aid to Afghanistan. The UN reported a shortfall of $397 million, which donors had pledged at Tokyo but failed to deliver. Humanitarian agencies reported such large shortfalls from donor countries that some were forced to close their programs. Nigel Fisher, the deputy head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), described the situation as “fragile,” adding that “failure to invest in Afghanistan at this critical juncture could help to fulfill our worst fears for the integrity, the economic development and the unity of Afghanistan.” The UN said that money for reconstructing roads and power plants would be unavailable until the following year. Karzai’s demands for urgent road building had met with no response. In these difficult conditions, Ghani prepared Afghanistan’s first budget in a decade, which for 2002-2003 amounted to just $460 million. It had to be funded by donors, yet by July, three months into the budget, Ghani had received only one tenth of the money.
The government was as broke as it had been in January. At Karzai’s urgent request Pakistan flew in $10 million in cash in suitcases to pay salaries. UN agencies were so lacking in funds that they could not provide for the 1.3 million refugees who had returned home in the first six months of 2002—three times more than had been expected. In November an assessment given to the UN General Assembly stated that out of $2.1 billion pledged for the current year, only $1.5 billion had been disbursed—a massive shortfall.
22
A year later, in November 2003, the Center on International Cooperation, in New York, estimated that only $110.0 million worth of reconstruction projects had actually been completed, out of a total aid disbursement of $2.9 billion. In the critical first year, when Afghan expectations were so high, the lack of leadership shown by the Bush administration was the crucial component in this shortfall, as it ignored Afghanistan and prepared for the invasion of Iraq.
It was self-evident that large investments by donors in the early years of a military intervention in a failed state pay off large dividends in the long term—something the United States and the international community had failed to foresee in Afghanistan. The United States think tank RAND calculated that a minimum investment of $100 per capita is needed to stabilize a country coming out of conflict. But, while Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526, and East Timor $233, Afghanistan received only $57 per capita in the first two years after 2001.
23
“In manpower and money this was the least resourced American nation-building effort in our history, ” said James Dobbins, who had joined RAND.
24
Nevertheless, the first year did yield some wildly successful programs. On March 23, 2002, millions of Afghan children attended school for the first time in many years as a result of a “Back-to-School” program organized by UNICEF and USAID, for an initial cost of just $50 million. Laura Bush, the American First Lady, took a keen interest in the program. Education in Afghanistan had been destroyed under the Taliban. In 1979, 54 percent of boys and only 2 percent of girls attended primary school. Under the Taliban regime, education had been decimated and girls were not allowed to study at all. So when 4,600 schools opened across the country and began classes, there was visible excitement among parents and children. I had seen girls pack their school bags three months earlier, in anticipation of going back to school. Tents were erected where there were no buildings, and ISAF provided troops and helicopters to deliver eight million textbooks to the remotest regions and supplies to fifty-two thousand teachers. “It is the largest educational program in UNICEF history and the first time that we have started nationwide primary education,” said Eric Laroche from UNICEF.
Officials expected 1.8 million children to attend on the first day, but 3.0 million turned up. In Kabul’s 160 schools, girls made up 45 percent of the enrollment, showing the commitment of Afghans toward educating their daughters. ISAF also helped rebuild schools in Kabul. On a blustery March day in a poverty-stricken slum in the southwest of Kabul, I watched hundreds of excited Hazara children milling around the six-foot-tall Edwin Fraser, a sergeant in the British army’s Royal Engineers. The Irishman and his men had rebuilt the local school, cementing broken walls, putting in doors and windows, and painting the walls to ready the school for opening day. When registration began, 2,000 children signed up, a number that soon swelled to 6,500, and headmaster Muzaffar Khan was at his wits’ end. “We will have to operate three shifts but we have only 118 teachers,” he told me.
25
What was encouraging that spring as I traveled through the south, where the Taliban had once reigned, was that the Pashtuns were demanding schools for their sons and daughters.
By 2005, 5.2 million children were attending school in grades one through twelve. Enrollment in higher education had jumped to 31,000, from 4,000 students in 2001. School going became a symbol of the new Afghanistan that could be built if adequate resources were provided. The literacy program was the largest ever undertaken in any Muslim country. If the Bush administration had remained focused on this alone, it would have served as a remarkable beacon for Muslims worldwide, impressing people with American largesse and forcing Muslim governments to take education more seriously. An equally successful program in 2002, despite the lack of funds, was the return of more than two million refugees from Iran and Pakistan out of a total refugee population of five million. In the summer, fifty thousand refugees were returning every week, overwhelming the UN and the government. The tragedy was that due to the absence of investment in agriculture, most refugees returned to the cities rather than to their villages.
Another success story was the explosive expansion of the media after the Taliban had destroyed all vestiges of it. Within three years 350 publications were registered with the government, 42 radio stations operated around the country, and there were 8 private television channels. Tolo TV, the nation’s favorite channel, ran everything from exposures on corruption and warlordism to Afghan versions of
Candid Camera
and
American Idol.
Tolo pushed the limits of what was acceptable and frequently ran into problems with the conservative Supreme Court or the government. Meanwhile, journalists and newspapers faced constant harassment from warlords, corrupt officials, and drug dealers—but they continued to publish. Several journalists were killed, but that did not restrain the enthusiasm and growth of the media or of its hungry audience.
The most significant economic achievement was the introduction of a new currency in October 2002, replacing the three different currencies still in circulation. The new currency was issued by Da Afghanistan Bank, or the central bank. Its governor, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, fifty, a former professor at an American college, and Noorullah Delawari, sixty-two, a banker from southern California, led the task force with help from the IMF, the UN, and the U.S. military. Some twenty-eight billion new Afghani notes were printed in Germany and Britain, at a cost of $16 million, and then distributed across the country, even though there was no banking system outside Kabul. The new exchange rate—50 new Afghanis to $1, compared to 48,000 Afghanis to $1 of the previous currency used in Kabul—was backed by $220 million in gold parked at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. Eight thousand workers helped in collecting eighteen thousand tons of old currency notes, which were airlifted to Kabul in U.S. Army helicopters, where they were burned and exchanged for new notes. Afghans once again showed that they were one nation acting together and not divided along ethnic lines.