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