Afghanistan: Donors Wasting Their Money Unless Structural Problems Addressed - Expert

Donors are due to meet June 12 in Paris, where they are expected to pledge billions in fresh assistance for Afghanistan's reconstruction. The money risks being wasted, however, unless the international community addresses underlying structural problems with Afghanistan's development framework, a leading expert asserts.

During an early June 3 appearance at the Carnegie Council in New York, Ahmed Rashid characterized the international aid community's response to Afghanistan as "a melting pot of failure of developmental policies." Rashid was in New York to promote his new book chronicling Afghanistan's post-Taliban experience, titled Descent into Chaos. (Viking Press).

Afghanistan, Rashid said, has presented a new challenge to the donor community – posing the question of how to rebuild the country amid an ongoing insurgency. This, in turn, has created dilemmas about the best way for development agencies and militaries to interact. Getting it right is critical because the long-embattled country stands to serve as the model for a new age in international development, Rashid contended. "These are the kinds of problems that we are going to face in the next 50 years," he said. "I think there has been very little international effort to flesh them out."

Rashid offered a sober assessment of one of the primary assistance innovations in Afghanistan – a civil-military aid initiative called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). PRTs are active in many areas of the country, but they lack a unified operational strategy. Thus, much of their potential for helping Afghanistan's recovery is being squandered. "PRTs have been a very mixed bag. First of all, the problem with the PRTs is that every military that is in Afghanistan – and there are about 40 contributing countries – have their own version of the PRT, of what they will do and what they will not do," Rashid said.

"The Germans in the north, for example, will do, frankly, very little as far as helping the people, building," he continued. The US military "can actually go and build something or make something or give something, which other PRTs can't do. Other militaries, European militaries, split development completely apart from the military."

In many respects, the United States and NATO allies have no one to blame but themselves for the revival of the Islamic radical insurgency. Over the past 18 months or so, the insurgency has gained significant momentum, reaching the point now where, according to Rashid, "one-third of the country is in the hands of the Taliban – certainly at night."

US inattention to Afghanistan's reconstruction in the years immediately after the Taliban was ousted from Kabul in late 2001 was a major factor in enabling the Islamic militant movement to make a comeback. The United States, Rashid added, did not genuinely pay attention to reconstruction issues until 2004.

"From 2001 to about 2004 there was a holding policy in Afghanistan," Rashid said. The Bush administration "was not interested in rebuilding or reconstructing the nation, empowering the government, empowering the people."

If the international community had moved aggressively back then, economic development might have denied the Islamic militants the opportunity to regain a foothold in Afghanistan, Rashid suggested. "Five or six billion a year from the United States, $5 or $6 billion from the rest of the world, for five-to-ten years could have put together a minimal infrastructure and institutions of governance, which would have been more than sufficient for the Afghan people to have developed an economy that could have taken off. None of this happened," said Rashid, who described the 2001-2004 period as "wasted years."

Reconstruction challenges are being compounded by a shift in Afghan popular attitudes towards outsiders. In 2001, Rashid contended, 90 percent of Afghans welcomed the arrival of foreign troops. Now, a large portion of that popular support has dissipated. "Too many civilians have died in bombings by NATO and American heavy-handedness," Rashid said.

In addition, Afghanistan's drug trafficking problem has exploded since 2001. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. "You have an out-of-control drugs issue, for which the international community really has absolutely no policy and is throwing it back on the Afghan government to try and prosecute some of the big traffickers," Rashid said. Another major problem is systematic corruption within the Afghan government.

Despite the challenges, a window of opportunity remains open for the international aid community to achieve its aims in Afghanistan. "As far as Afghanistan is concerned, I think basically the goodwill for the international community is still there," Rashid said.

The only way for Afghanistan's reconstruction to succeed, however, is to address two issues in neighboring Pakistan, Rashid insisted. The first deals with rooting out the militants from their sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghan border. The second involves an overhaul of US policy toward Pakistan itself. Since 2001, US policy toward Pakistan has been overly focused on the personality of the country's deeply unpopular military strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Rashid said.

"There is no way you can stabilize Afghanistan without ending the sanctuaries in Pakistan. There is no point. Otherwise, how many tribesmen are you going to kill?" Rashid said. "This insurgency does not have a finite end to it as long as you keep killing insurgents. Only with the end of the sanctuaries can you then also start talking to the insurgents."

Rashid added that a prevailing notion within Pakistan's influential military establishment is that it is absolutely essential for Islamabad to have a pro-Pakistani government in Kabul. The only way to dissuade the Pakistani military from meddling in Afghan affairs is for the United States to address some of the generals' concerns. "The United States needs to really enter into a strategic dialogue with the [Pakistani] military, and to find out what the Pakistani military really wants and needs and why it does what it does. This is something that again I think the [Bush] administration has been very, very reluctant to do," Rashid said.

In aiming to keep Afghan reconstruction on track, Washington must also strengthen its contacts with Pakistan's civilian leadership. Since 2001, Pakistan received $10.8 billion in aid from the United States, but $8 billion of that total has gone to the military. "If you ask me has any Pakistani seen an American hospital or an American university or an American college or an American road or anything built in Pakistan in the last seven years, the answer is absolutely nothing," Rashid said. "So what do you expect Pakistanis to feel? Yes, you needed to help the military do certain things, but then you also needed an ally in the people of Pakistan."