A ‘surge’ in Afghan aid won’t solve the big problems facing international reconstruction efforts. More aid is needed, but so are fundamental reforms to its delivery. Opportunities are being squandered by wasteful donor practices and a military strategy that overlooks humanitarian needs.
The announcement of a new Afghanistan strategy by President Obama and his NATO allies brings with it the promise of more resources for reconstruction. Encouraging news, given that the financing shortfall stands at around 48% of estimated needs. Efforts to date have been ‘laughably insufficient’, wrote Paddy Ashdown and Joseph Ingram last week: while reconstruction efforts in Bosnia and East Timor received $580 and $400 per capita respectively, Afghanistan today receives about $57 (though the lack of census data makes this figure hazy).
So, will renewed international commitment to Afghanistan help?
Unequivocally, Afghanistan needs more aid. But quantity alone is not enough. Two other challenges need addressing.
First, donors are increasingly using aid to support military and political objectives rather than to meet humanitarian need. Aid now plays a central role in counter-insurgency strategies, funding small-scale ‘quick impact projects’ to win hearts and minds . The result has been a concentration of reconstruction resources in areas of key military-strategic importance in Afghanistan’s south. The more stable but poverty-stricken northern areas are being overlooked, and this is fuelling north-south tensions in an already fractured country.
Equally troubling, aid aimed at winning hearts and minds is, in US doctrine at least, about appealing to local people on the grounds of ‘calculated self-interest, not emotion’. It relies on the provision of tangible benefits to incentivize local cooperation. If the stream of benefits is disrupted, or if people start demanding more benefits than can be provided, the basis for cooperation disappears and the possibility for insurgent influence returns. This suggests that inducement strategies in Afghanistan need a more resilient basis for ensuring local cooperation. Quick impacts are fine, but encouraging cooperation through hip pockets alone is costly and squanders opportunities to address humanitarian need. Meaningful improvement to Afghan livelihoods can provide a more sustainable reservoir of local support. Legitimizing the international presence by delivering real development assistance to local people might thus make for better military strategy, too.
The second big problem is the wastage of aid by donors before it even reaches Afghanis. Aid agencies are increasingly accused of wasting resources on short-term projects and for-profit contractors. Worse, an Oxfam report in March 2008 found that 40% of aid spent returns to donor countries through corporate profits, consultant salaries and procurement contracts.
Inadequate coordination of aid resources facilitates and exacerbates these trends. The complete absence of coordination in Afghanistan is striking, given the proliferation of international agreements on aid harmonization. Further, 80% of foreign aid is managed by the disparate array of donors. Not only does this circumvention of Afghanistan’s national budget directly undermine efforts to build Afghan state capacity, of which budgetary control is surely a central pillar, accusations of government corruption lose credibility in light of donors’ own woeful lack of accountability.
Calls for formal coordination mechanisms abound, but corralling the diverse donor mandates will require strong leadership and strategic vision. Only the US can realistically deliver this. By far the largest donor, US influence dominates both military and aid strategy. Importantly, only the US can reduce the amount stolen by Washington’s beltway bandits, whose earmarking prevents too much aid from ever reaching Afghanis. It is also unlikely that the US would cede real power to the UN, whose weak presence was ensured by its initial ‘light footprint’ approach.
Aid to Afghanistan has long been decried as incoherent and piecemeal. If Obama’s new strategy is to make a difference, it must tackle head-on the dysfunctionality with which the mission in Afghanistan has been pursued.
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What others are saying:
- Back from the Brink? A Strategy for Stabilizing Afghanistan-Pakistan An Asia Society Task Force Report, April 2009
- Afghanistan Reconstruction Project at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation
- Barnett Rubin & Ahmed Rashid From Great Game to Grand Bargain Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2008
- Security in Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group
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May 10th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Your second challenge about the lack of coordination is especially provocative. It points to a bigger issue about what exactly donors are trying to create in Afghanistan. Seven years of protracted counterinsurgency, kleptocratic public officials, and a robust narcotics industry have made most donors abandon their initial visions of a democratic and prosperous Afghanistan. As cynical as it may sound, I suspect that most donors would call a moderately stable, but still grossly impoverished, Afghan state a success. (A common quip in some circles is that Yemen is Afghanistan’s best case scenario–that means being closer to the 12th century instead of 9th century). Until donors and the Afghan government are able to come up with a more coherent and realistic meta-vision for what is to be developed in the region, the coordination that you call for will be not just piecemeal, but counterproductive to the country’s political future.
Anyways, I really like your posting. It’s good to see international aid policy in Afghanistan get such a cogent treatment.