Eurasia Insight:
AFGHANISTAN: NEW UN TROUBLESHOOTER AIMS TO IMPROVE RECONSTRUCTION COORDINATION
Richard Weitz: 4/30/08

At NATO’s Bucharest summit in early April, alliance members endorsed the idea of transferring greater security responsibility to the Afghan government. But the Taliban’s brazen April 27 attack in central Kabul indicates that Afghan forces aren’t yet able to guarantee security in the capital. President Hamid Karzai is on record as stating that Afghan security forces should assume responsibility for safety in the capital by this August.

The attack underscored the challenges faced by Kai Eide, the newly appointed Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Afghanistan. Having been on the job for less than two months, Eide suddenly finds himself under pressure to quell a brewing crisis of confidence in the Afghan reconstruction process.

Eide offered his views on the stabilization challenges during an April 28 presentation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. In addition to his role as UN Special Representative in Afghanistan, Eide is also the new head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

The UN envoy said recent conversations in Europe and in Washington had led him to believe that he possessed the “tools” needed for a successful UN campaign in Afghanistan. “There is strong support for the job that I and the mission right now do, and … there is strong support for an expanded UN role,” he said, adding that he also enjoyed the “strong confidence” of the Afghan leadership.

Eide identified improving reconstruction coordination as a top priority. He observed that, “everybody now talks about coordination, which is good, but what I see is also more and more countries are talking about their readiness to be coordinated, and that is a breakthrough.” Eide expressed dissatisfaction with most of the existing coordination mechanisms involving Afghanistan: “once such mechanisms are put in place, they very easily become bureaucratic [and] cumbersome. … All of a sudden it becomes a process-oriented consultation process, and not a delivery-oriented process. We have to get away from that.”

Although Eide wants to improve civil-military coordination, he described the subject as “one of the most troublesome parts of my mandate.” He insisted that he would resist a relationship in which “the military is carrying out their mission and asking the civilian leadership, ‘Where are you now?’”

“The UN and NATO/ISAF have very different roles and I do not want our political role in any sense compromised,” Eide added.

One reason Eide cited for keeping UNAMA independent of NATO is that the UN might at some point directly seek to promote reconciliation among Afghan factions. In this case, Eide stressed that UNAMA would adhere closely to its mandate, the Afghan constitution, and the principle that “any such process … must be led by the Afghan government,” with the international community playing only a supporting role.

Although relatively new to his post, Eide said it was already clear that “more resources are required” for a successful economic redevelopment campaign in Afghanistan. “We have to spend the resources we have better than we do today,” he said.

Eide decried the current practice of hiring expensive foreign consultants rather than investing in developing Afghans’ indigenous capabilities, which is essential for achieving sustainability of foreign-funded projects. He went on to propose the creation of a monitoring unit that could monitor the flow of aid from its source to its ultimate destination. Although tracking every project would prove impossible, “perhaps we should be able to conduct more spot checks in order to create a certain deterrent effect among both the Afghans and the international community.”

Editor’s Note: Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.