Final Thoughts from Kabul

In many ways, Afghanistan is an international relations/ development wonk’s juiciest wet dream. This place has it all: raging insurgency with quasi-religious bent; grinding poverty and despairing human development indicators; an economy riddled with corruption, propped up by illicit narcotics, which further fuels the insurgency; a complex patchwork of tribal identities and ancient suspicions; instability on its borders; all staged on a vast, stunning landscape.

To those who are intellectually drawn to the most acute challenges the world faces, Afghanistan offers an experimental lab, a playground where diplomats, donors, military strategists and NGOs can run riot with new ideas for how to deal with the problems that this country faces. But Afghanistan’s challenges are like a knot - many strands of gnarled old rope tangled together. Everyone wants to tug at a different strand of the knot; and with each tug, rather than loosening, the knot tightens further.

The problems facing this country are profound and complex. That may appear to be an obvious statement, but the tone of debate on Afghanistan in the British and American media does not always reflect this. Pundits and politicians often believe that there is a “solution”, and that politicians simply don’t have the courage to take tough decisions. A wave of British deaths in Helmand this week has brought about a fresh round of soul searching about our involvement. The leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats broke the cross-party consensus and said that the lives of British troops are being ‘thrown away’, and that Britain ‘must do things differently’. I don’t really know what this means, because the debate is mired in generality without anyone considering specifics. Some people want more troops, some people want less. Some people want more money, others less. Others want the focus to shift from this priority to that priority. To support Karzai, to dump Karzai. The list is almost endless. It is as if our rational notions of perpetual human progress cannot comprehend the fact there may be no obvious solution to the problem we have found ourselves in.

In his novel ‘The Quiet American’, Graham Greene writes about the US’ involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s, and describes how the innocence, naiveté and idealism of a young ambitious American wreaks disaster and chaos on the country he is purporting to ‘help’. Greene describes innocence as being “like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” The parallels with Afghanistan are painfully obvious.

I leave Afghanistan less hopeful about its future than when I arrived. I do not question the sincerity of the international community’s desire to help Afghanistan – one’s sense of humanity cannot fail to be moved when one sees or hears of the violence and suffering that Afghans have endured in the past few decades. But sincere intentions are not enough, and are potentially dangerous. I fully acknowledge that I am complicit in this industry of good intentions – arriving for short stint brimming with enthusiasm, ideas, and most of all – innocence.

I cannot offer a grand solution to Afghanistan’s woes. But from what I have seen, the component most lacking in the current approachis humility. The humility to accept the complexity of the situation; the humility to accept the limitations of our influence and power here; and the humility to embrace the fact that our vision for success now differs considerably from the one we originally envisaged. Most of all, the humility to accept that although we can support them, Afghans have to ultimately untie this knot for themselves.

Yours humbly,

Y

Poetry Night at Firaus Towers

When my flatmates invited me to poetry night at Firaus Towers three weeks ago I imagined wizened Syrian poets sitting around a café reading Qabbani and discussing the decline of the arts in Damascus. Instead poetry night is a raucous affair held in a retro jazz bar in the basement of Firaus Towers. The smoke-filled bar is packed to the gills with the Damascene art scene. It’s open mike night, which accounts for the uneven recitations – some passionate, some barely tolerable, all mostly incomprehensible to me given my very basic understanding of Arabic. I get the gist of the poems – love lost, unrequited love, first love – you get the idea. I can often tell when a poem is bad – conversations start up and the proprietor begins to hush the crowd in Arabic, English and French. He’s a bit of a character himself, often reads a few poems throughout the night, and is often blitzed by the end of the evening. It’s a regular crowd at poetry night and it’s impossible to not make friends and get a few numbers after a few visits.

One night a young Syrian girl read her own work in English – a poem about the oppressive nature of religion and the value of human rights. The Arabic translation resulted in a chorus of “Allah” from some members of the audience. Perhaps even the young, modern Syrians of today are not ready to publicly forsake their religion. Surprisingly, however, there is a high number of Syrians who have, in private, professed a break with their faith to me. One man, a plastic surgeon, who is planning to move to Canada, expressed frustration with the complete and total rule of religion over society. As an outsider I’m not really privy to the inner workings of Syrian society but I have been afforded some glimpses. Christians and Muslims are not allowed to marry – one member of the couple, generally the woman, must convert. While converting to Islam is relatively easy, converting to Christianity is more problematic. One of my Syrian friends, T, told me that if she converted to Christianity her “blood would be like water,” meaning, if she was killed, it would be no more important than spilling water on the street and no one would bother to prosecute her killer on her behalf. Sometimes it is more pleasant to live in the happy tourist bubble than delve into the darker parts of Syrian society.

The best part of poetry night is the Iraqi singer from Baghdad who comes on after the poetry. Once the crowd notices him in the audience the chanting begins: “Dury, Dury, Dury!” Dury sings classical Arabic songs in a low, beautiful voice. My last poetry night he told me he wouldn’t be performing anymore due to a falling out with the manager. I talked him into coming to our house to sing at a private party. While Dury is a bit of player, and has a penchant for flirting with young pretty girls, you can forgive him any transgression once he starts to sing. He downed arak after arak (a white, milky local Syrian drink similar to raki or ouzo) and then enchanted us all. Poetry night ends around 1 AM which is a perfect time to hop in a car and drive to the top of the mountain that dominates the Damascus skyline. From the city, it looks like barren hilltop. I had been told that the view from the top was amazing. So when offered a ride to the top for some “beer and dancing” I took up the offer.

Next thing I knew, I was in a car with my Australian roommate, a Turkish guy I met the day before, and two Syrian blokes with Arabic music blaring headed up the side of a mountain careening through traffic. M, who drove like a twitchy speed addict, was popping in the front seat and demonstrated some pretty amazing dance moves considering A) it’s Syria, and B) he was navigating some hellacious traffic at the same time. I was slightly concerned about the police until his friend told me that M’s father is a judge and no traffic cop would dare give him a ticket. In Syria, as everywhere, it pays to have connections. We got to the top and pulled over to the side of the road, opened the beers we bought at the corner store, and I realized that we were about to engage in the Syrian version of parking.

The basic idea is simple. Park your car based on the music blaring from the adjacent cars, step onto the rocky precipice, and start a dance party. Syrian couples who probably can’t find privacy anywhere else, young guys who can’t afford the entrance at a club, and crazy curious people like me all seem to make it up to the side of the mountain on a Monday night to rock out. After we had enough of the music we first encountered we drove to the next spot and M spun us some Arabic dance tunes while he did back flips in the middle of the road. It turns out M is also a TV actor and I wondered what his highly connected father thinks of his career aspirations and late-night shenanigans. I broke out some circa 1999 dance moves circa that the boys had never seen (and that I have long abandoned) and we risked life and limb in the middle of the road until 4 AM. My last night in Damascus I went to a proper club that played cheesy dance tunes like “Umbrella” and “4 Minutes” – but for a truly Syrian experience nothing compares to the nightly impromptu dance parties at the top of Jebel Qassioun.

Who Actually Runs This Place?

T

he Afghan presidential election, due to take place in mid-August, is creating a mild frission of excitement here in Kabul. Across the city, the solemn, dignified faces of the candidates stare out from makeshift billboards and posters, promising a brighter future for Afghanistan. The incumbent Hamid Karzai’s campaign is clearly much better resourced than the others, with broader coverage, and more sophisticated poses – bouncing a child on his knee or inspecting troops. Diplomats chatter away as to who the Americans are backing, while the security folks salivate at the prospect of creating a ‘ring of steel’ in Kabul to prevent a spectacular attack on polling day. But as I rumble through Kabul city each day in my tank-like SUV, I often wonder how meaningful this election actually is to the future of Afghanistan, and ask myself the basic question of who actually runs this place. Some (not many) would say that Afghanistan is a sovereign country, with its own democratically elected parliament and institutions of state. Others would say that it is a country under occupation, ruled by an American-led coalition. I would say it is neither. In fact, it is somewhere in between and this schizophrenic, hybrid system of governance contributes to Afghanistan’s continuing problems. Ashraf Ghani is a former Minister of Finance here and now a presidential candidate. In his recent book on failed states, he draws a distinction between what he calls de jure sovereignty and de facto sovereignty. He argues that Afghanistan has de jure sovereignty in that it has its own constitution and institutions and is recognised internationally as a legitimate state by the UN family. But he argues that this is meaningless in Afghanistan as it lacks de facto sovereignty, with security being controlled by NATO and the country’s finances and policy making heavily influenced by donors and foreign diplomats. Over the last few weeks, it has become clear to me just how little control the Afghan government actually has over its own affairs, and I have come to wonder where de facto sovereignty actually rests in this country. Thousands of ‘international advisers’ march the corridors of Ministries charged with ‘building the capacity’ of Afghan civil servants to run their government themselves. The depressingly low level of human capital amongst the Afghan civil servants means that these foreigners are rapidly elevated to positions of significant authority within Ministries - albeit informally - becoming the chief advisers to the Minister and dictating policy across a range of issues, on which they often have little technical competence. Their initial objective of preparing the Afghans to run the government themselves becomes muddied, as the imperative from the donors to ‘get stuff done quickly’ means that capacity substitution i.e. internationals just doing the job, becomes more important than capacity building. The Ministry that I am working in – Rural Rehabilitation and Development – is a case in point. It is nominally responsible for delivering a giant rural infrastructure programme called the National Solidarity Programme – the second largest development project in the whole world. Its high profile nature means that both the Government and the international community cannot afford to allow it to fail. Because of this, the programme has been set up so that it runs entirely independently of government – almost like an executive agency - with separate finance and procurement systems, and contracted staff brought in internationally and on much higher wages than normal civil servants. Government is allowed to take credit for its successes, but the government’s weak systems are not allowed anywhere near it. By all accounts, it has been quite a successful programme, providing infrastructure in parts of the country that has never seen clean drinking water, roads or power. But is this model of development sustainable in the long-term? I am not arguing that the international community is evil because it is violating Afghanistan’s sovereignty. Frankly, I believe the slightly intangible concept of sovereignty is secondary to providing assistance to rural communities in a country with morbid human development stats. My question is whether this half-way house we have found ourselves in is actually the best way to get stuff done. Has the mission become blurred between the long term, incremental and arduous task of building the capacity of the Afghans to take on responsibility themselves and our short termist desire to deliver services? Clearly both are needed, but by not being upfront in our objectives about how capacity building can morph into capacity substitution I fear we end up doing neither with any efficacy. This clarity of mission will be even more important with the imminent US ‘civilian surge’ which is part of Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy. What are all these people going to do? If the international community has decided that we are going to run this government ourselves, we need many more people than just a handful in each Ministry. Lets acknowledge that this is a form of colonialism – perhaps benevolent, but colonialism nonetheless – and scale up the numbers of advisers across the Afghan government. If we believe that we don’t want to do this, then lets start genuinely helping the Afghans run government themselves, and lets stop bypassing government systems to get things done. Whatever the choice, the current messy compromise is helping no one. --Y