Civil-Military Working Paper 8/2010: Afghanistan – Reconstruction challenges and dilemmas

Introduction

Afghanistan offers a striking example of how complex the challenges of civil-military interaction can be. ‘Postwar’ reconstruction in Afghanistan was always likely to be a taxing undertaking,¹ but the persistence and then the escalation of violence following the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001—truly creating an environment of ‘conflictual peacebuilding’²—added significantly to the problems faced by both the new Afghan government and its international backers.

Some context

At the outset, it is important to note that Afghanistan has now endured more than thirty years of conflict, and  the average Afghan—aged less than 30—has never known a truly peaceful environment. The traumas which the country has endured have been simply awful, whether measured by mortality, or forced migration, or social dislocation. In psychological terms, the Afghan population comprises millions of walking wounded, and while norms of solidarity within some lineage groups remain strong, levels of trust beyond the boundaries of these groups are often very low. This fosters a highly-competitive, ‘zero-sum’ mindset, especially at the upper echelons of the political elite. It would be easy to see this as a reflection of character or personality defects, but a more nuanced approach recognises that grasping or predatory behaviour in the here-and-now can reflect the bitter experiences of victim-hood and disempowerment in the past. Unfortunately, this also means that the raw material for building future social capital is severely damaged.

Furthermore, given the almost total collapse of the state, the institutional inheritance of the Interim Administration that was inaugurated in December 2001 was a grim one. There is no doubt that one of the principal undertakings of both Afghan and international actors in the intervening period have been state-building. However, it has been hampered by the lack of any overarching consensus on what the scope and the strength of the Afghan state should be–in other words, on what activities the state should be undertaking, and what capacities it needs to do so.³ This issue went unaddressed at Bonn, and has not been seriously addressed since. The state-building process has also been complicated by the controversial decisions, embodied in the new 2004 Afghan Constitution, to have a formally very strong presidential system, and a formally highly centralised system of government. There are strong grounds for arguing that these are exactly the structures to avoid in societies which are ethnically and socially fragmented, since they leave large numbers of people feeling alienated from the formal structures of power.⁴ Finally, the bulk of the local political elite in the post-2001 era had grown up politically in a state-free environment, and had little sense of what institutional development might involve or require.

A further contextual factor relates to the problems of prioritisation and sequencing. On the one hand, Afghanistan’s problems in 2001 were manifestly enormous. But on the other hand, the international community was not ready to fund a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, and the limited absorptive capacity of a country in which the state had collapsed meant that any attempt at ‘quick impact’ reconstruction would likely result in a range of unintended consequences, notably the empowerment and enrichment of those who happened to be best placed to offer themselves as ‘partners’ for such an undertaking. Prioritisation and sequencing were therefore activities of considerable importance. Yet behind this lay three further problems. One was that of ownership: who, exactly, would make key decisions about priorities and sequencing? The donors whose money was being spent? The new Afghan Interim Administration? Actors at the district and provincial level? A second was that that of accountability⁵: how would those making key decisions be held accountable for what they decided? A third was the tension between on the one hand the need for prioritisation in the light of resource scarcity, and on the other the practical reality of interconnectedness: that progress on one front might depend on simultaneous progress on a range of others. A good example was the justice sector, where judicial reform would manifestly count for little if there were not progress in the areas of policing, penal policy, and witness protection.⁶

An additional consideration, not relevant in 2001 but certainly relevant a decade later, is the questionable legitimacy of the Afghan government. It is easy to be critical of Hamid Karzai and his performance, and at the outset one should note that in many respects he has been poorly served by his international partners, most dramatically in their casual refocussing of attention from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003, but also in their culpable failure to address in any effective manner the destructive effects on security in Afghanistan of the blatant sanctuary accorded to the Taliban by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI).⁷ But that said, the early hopes invested in Karzai have been largely disappointed, and the fraud on which he depended for re-election in 2009 left him in an unenviable position. As the anthropologist Thomas J. Barfield has put it, ‘Fearing any possibility of rejection at the polls, he committed such blatant fraud to ensure his reelection that his victory proved truly pyrrhic. At the end of the process, he was a ruler who met neither Afghan nor international standards of legitimacy. Afghan history portents an unhappy end for such a ruler, whether at the hands of his foreign patrons or his own people. A tree whose roots are rotten may still stand, but it is only a matter of time before it crashes under its own weight or is blown over by a windstorm’.⁸

A final point to note, one unhappily relevant to many complex transitions, is that the time required to make a real difference is likely to exceed the attention span of donor elites and publics. The complications posed by electoral cycles in democratic states are easily overlooked, but one of the most significant relates to the limited capacity of governments to commit funds for the truly long-term. This reflects the importance of financial control in ensuring governmental accountability—the English Civil War, after all, was fought in large part over the issue of who should have the power to tax and spend—but it means that governments may only be able to commit funds for short periods (even if the amounts committed are quite large). If funds cannot be ‘rolled over’ for future use, the result may be intense pressure to spend in the short-run, and the risk is that this will militate against care and due diligence in contracting, and contribute to corrupt practices as a way of cutting corners.

Roles for international actors

In reconstruction processes, there are a range of important ‘on-the-ground’ tasks that can be undertaken by international actors. Understanding the dimensions of these roles is important, for coordination can only be achieved if it is underpinned by real sensitivity to diverse understandings of what behaviours are appropriate. Military, police and civilian actors are typically the product of diverse socialisation processes and organisational cultures, and do not necessarily have a good understanding of the concerns of those with whom they may be tasked to cooperate. Yet cooperation can rarely be forced, and ‘non-cooperation’ may be much more difficult to handle that active opposition.

Military roles are particularly complex. One role, of course, can be the direct pursuit of enemies by kinetic means. This remains a major task in Afghanistan where members of the Australian SAS are deployed, and will likely persist as long as insurgents can cross the border with Pakistan. But just as important may be training and mentoring of local security forces, which is now a central focus of the activities in Uruzgan of the ADF Mentoring Task Force. The logic of such an approach is to build local security sector capability so that international forces can eventually be withdrawn with minimal risk to stability. However, security sector reform is a difficult endeavour⁹ which entails the development of appropriate management structures and the evolution of a culture in which the loyalty of the security sector to civilian authorities is ensured. Beyond these two roles are several others. One can be the delivery of direct assistance to population groups: in many different contexts, of which natural disaster is perhaps the most obvious, militaries can swiftly supply transport, logistics, and construction capabilities that can be put to effective use. Another is symbolic: the mere presence of a force can create an atmosphere of ambient security, perhaps even more when arms are not put to use and the limits of a force’s capabilities remain unclear.

Police roles are quite distinct from those of the military, although the significance of the distinction is often underestimated.¹⁰ A real danger is that police can be despatched to a country such as Afghanistan as an apparently cheap substitute for more expensive troop contributions that a donor may be reluctant to undertake. Sworn police officers are community-based, endowed with discretion, and tasked with applying the law. As a community asset they crucially fill the gap between on the one hand enforcement of social norms via the mechanisms of general approval or disapproval by community groups themselves, and on the other the use of military force to ward off high-level threats. In a country such as Afghanistan, there is almost no scope for international actors to be effectively involved in direct policing of communities: their police typically lack the language skills that would be required to perform such roles successfully. However, there is scope for police to be involved in a range of other tasks. One is mentoring, although even the most effective mentoring is unlikely to address the real problem faced by isolated police officers fully exposed to the pressures that local strongmen can apply. Another, potentially more promising although it may require a longer-term commitment is the development of up-to-date procedures and administrative systems to underpin the work of sworn officers.

Civilian roles are potentially the most diverse of all. The flow of civilians into Afghanistan since 2001 has been relentless, and was boosted in 2009 by President Obama’s acceptance of the idea of a civilian surge. Civilians come in many shapes and sizes. Some are bureaucrats, attached to foreign embassies and official (government) agencies such as USAID, AusAID, JAICA, and the British Department for International Development (DfID). Others are consultants attached to Afghan departments and agencies, with others being employed by components of the UN system, or by institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. There are then civilians attached to foreign military forces, or deployed in provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs). In addition, large numbers of civilians are attached to either international or local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), themselves extremely diverse in structure and ethos,¹¹ and to private commercial contractors which are increasingly involved in project implementation. Finally, there are also civilians to be found in private Afghan organisations and firms, media organisations, in research institutions, or simply as visitors to the country. The bulk of these actors are broadly concerned with ‘development’ issues of various kinds. Particularly between foreign military personnel and foreign aid workers there is significant potential for tension. A common refrain from the latter is that ‘humanitarian space’ has been narrowed by the intrusion of the military into areas which rightly belong to the aid community, and that aid personnel are at risk of being confused with combatants as a result. This is often bolstered by a concern that militaries strive for quick impact, at the expense of sustainable capacity-building. One obvious response is that if militaries at particular times and in particular places can do things more effectively than aid agencies, what basis is there for denying them the right to do so? This is a very complex and contested area, but it highlights the importance at the very least of improving the parties’ understandings of each others’ concerns.

Contemporary challenges and dilemmas in Afghanistan

The story of post-2001 reconstruction endeavours in Afghanistan is a convoluted one, and cannot be easily summarised. Nonetheless, there are a number of core dilemmas that have been exposed by this experience, and that reflect the difficulty of working in a landscape which is (inevitably) populated by actors of extremely diverse kind.

One endemic problem has been that of coordination. The need for coordination in Afghanistan is huge: military-to-military, military-to-civilian, and international-to-Afghan. Achieving it has been far from straightforward. It is easy to forget that coordination is intimately connected to the dynamics of power: people often prefer to take the lead in coordinating, rather than be coordinated by others. In principle, the Afghan government should play a central role on account of its sovereign status, but in many respects its ‘sovereignty’ is more nominal than real, and its embryonic institutions not equal to some of the tasks involved. This has allowed for open slather on the part of donors, which have blithely bypassed the Afghan state: an estimated 77 per cent of aid entering Afghanistan between 2002 and 2009 bypassed the government entirely.¹² The creation of an Afghanistan National Development Strategy, an Afghanistan Compact, and a Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board might have seemed to be steps in the right direction, but in practice they were undermined by grossly overoptimistic and unrealistic timelines, by a general unwillingness to press too hard on the issue of non-performance, and by the disconnect between what was being mooted in Kabul and Western capitals, and what was actually occurring in Afghan provinces and districts.

A second challenge relates to the management of perceptions. What Afghans think actually matters. This problem relates not just to the activities that international actors pursue, but also to the company that they keep in the process. For example, in an interview published in December 2010, a senior Australian officer reportedly referred to the Uruzgan-based Pushtun leader Matiullah Khan as ‘our guy’.¹³ This not only reflected indifference to the wise adage that a Pushtun can be hired but never bought, but suggested little awareness of the costs that could be associated with partnering with such a power-holder.¹⁴ As the distinguished commentator Martine van Bijlert has put it, actors of this kind ‘are essentially viewed by large parts of the population as predatory tribal militias’.¹⁵ One of the tragedies of the situation in Afghanistan is that a huge reservoir of goodwill towards international forces that existed in 2001 has been substantially squandered, in part because of the perception that the internationals were unwise in their choice of friends. In Uruzgan, while Matiullah may indeed be useful in keeping open the road between Kandahar and Tarin Kowt, he is widely perceived to be advancing the interests of the Popalzai tribe – at the expense of other Pushtun tribes and sub-tribes such as the Achekzai and the Noorzai, as well as of non-Pushtun groups such as the Hazaras. When this happens, his international associates risk being tarred with the same brush. A particularly serious problem is associated with the activities of sub-contractors. A June 2010 report prepared for the US Congress raised serious concerns about the use of logistics sub-contractors in Afghanistan, demonstrating that ‘protection’ payments for safe passage were a potential source of funding for the Taliban, and that supply chain security contractors undermined US counterinsurgency strategy.¹⁶ A broad problem here is that international actors often serve in Afghanistan for relatively short periods of time, as a result of which they may not fully understand what is going on around them.

A third challenge for international actors, related to the second, is to recognise the importance of psychology in determining outcomes in a country such as Afghanistan. As Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn have recently put it, ‘The insurgency that emerged from 2003 onwards was not an inevitable response to the international intervention in Afghanistan’.¹⁷ However, the momentum of transition in Afghanistan began to be lost as early as March 2002, when the US Defense Department blocked the expansion beyond Kabul of the International Security Assistance Force, and things started to unravel from then on. In Afghanistan, it pays to look like a winner, and creating the impression that one will come out on top is central to any workable strategy. Yet this is not how humanitarian actors see their work, and there is very little evidence to support the view that hearts and minds are won with aid delivery.¹⁸ There is also far more to looking like a winner than mere troop numbers: President Obama, by linking an increase in US troop numbers to a commitment to begin withdrawing troops by mid-2011, not only failed to signal a credible long-term commitment, but left himself hostage to any unintended consequences of a heavy military footprint in areas where US troops might already have outstayed their welcome. None of this is to suggest that it is easy to strike the right balance, but at least the need to take account of the psychological effects of one’s actions should be recognised.

A fourth challenge relates to the diverse cultures as well as roles of international actors.¹⁹ As the case of the PRT in Uruzgan has revealed, different militaries have their own distinct cultures. The Dutch military were far warier about Matiullah Khan than the ADF, and the US military has a reputation at the platoon level for resorting rapidly to kinetic action (‘shooting first’).²⁰ Amongst civilians, private commercial contractors are culturally very different from NGOs, and the UN has organisational cultures all of its own.²¹ Especially problematic are private security firms, prominently on display in Afghanistan, and often a source of great annoyance (or worse) to ordinary Afghans, for whom the personnel of at least some firms have shown little respect. This is a problem by no means limited to Afghanistan,²² but it is one of considerable weight, as President Karzai’s attempt to shut down such firms during 2010 made clear. These cultural differences mean that coordination is not simply a matter of getting different individuals to work together; it is a matter of coordinating the activities of distinct complex systems.

A fifth challenge relates to local capacity-building. This is an ideal to which almost all international actors pay lip service, but which remains thin on the ground. International agencies offer salaries to Afghan staff that dwarf what the Afghan government can pay: the result is a drain of talent away from the state, contributing to the creation of what the World Bank has called a second civil service.²³ The result is that it is difficult to obtain top staff even for central agencies of the Afghan state in Kabul, and very difficult indeed once one moves to the level of provincial administration, even though it is arguably there that it is most important to make (and to be seen to be making) progress. The danger is that at the local level, positions will be distributed by strongmen to their clients, building corrupt and extractive patronage networks that will be very hard to displace. This is something to avoid at all costs.

All the issues discussed above are pertinent to the management of civil-military interactions in Afghanistan. But in conclusion, it is important to recognise one fundamental point. Better civil-military interaction is not the key to solving Afghanistan’s core problem of insecurity. That core problem lies with the sanctuaries in Pakistan from which the various components of the Taliban are allowed to operate. In August 2007, President Musharraf of Pakistan stated during a visit to Kabul that ‘There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistani soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side’.24 Addressing this problem is the responsibility not of soldiers and aid workers in Afghanistan, but of political leaders in Western states. Unless and until this problem is addressed, action within the borders of Afghanistan can amount to no more than a holding operation.

Endnotes

1. ←See William Maley, ‘Reconstructing Afghanistan: Opportunities and Challenges’, in Geoff Harris (ed.), Recovery from Armed Conflict in Developing Countries: An Economic and Political Analysis (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 225–257; William Maley, ‘The Reconstruction of Afghanistan’, in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future Global Order (London and New York: Palgrave, 2002) pp. 184–193.
2. ←See Astri Suhrke and Arne Strand, ‘The Logic of Conflictual Peacebuilding’ in Sultan Barakat (ed.), After the Conflict: Reconstruction and Development in the Aftermath of War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005) pp. 141–154.
3. ←On the dimensions of scope and strength, see Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) pp.6–14.
4. ←William Maley, Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006) p.46.
5. ←On mechanisms of accountability, see Richard Mulgan, Holding Power to Account: Accountability in Modern Democracies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
6. ←See Whit Mason (ed.), The Rule of Law in Afghanistan: Missing in Inaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
7. ←See Matt Waldman, The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents (London: Discussion Paper no.18, Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, June 2010).
8. ←Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) p.342.
9. ←See William Maley, ‘International force and political reconstruction: Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan’, in Albrecht Schnabel and Hans-Georg Ehrhart (eds), Security Sector Reform and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005) pp.297–312.
10. ←For background, see Alice E. Hills, ‘The policing of fragmented states’, Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement, vol.5, no.3, Winter 1996, pp 334–354.
11. ←See Jonathan Goodhand, Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006) p.188.
12. ←Colin Cookman and Caroline Wadhams, Governance in Afghanistan: Looking Ahead to What We Leave Behind (Washington DC: Center for American Progress, May 2010) p.22.
13. ←Dan Oakes, ‘It’s a war zone out there’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 December 2010. For more detailed discussion of Australian involvement in Afghanistan, see William Maley, ‘PRT Activity in Afghanistan: The Australian Experience’, in Nik Hynek and Péter Marton (eds), Statebuilding in Afghanistan: Multinational Contributions to Reconstruction (New York: Routledge, 2011).
14. ←See Dexter Filkins, ‘With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds Afghan Empire’, The New York Times, 5 June 2010.
15. ←Martine van Bijlert, The Battle for Afghanistan: Militancy and Conflict in Zabul and Uruzgan (Washington DC: Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative Policy Paper, New America Foundation, 2010) p.16.
16. ←Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan (Washington DC: Report of the Majority Staff, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, June 2010) pp.34, 44.
17. ←Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda: The Core of Success in Afghanistan (New York: Center on International Cooperation, New York University, February 2011) p.6.
18. ←See Andrew Wilder, ‘A “weapons system” based on wishful thinking’, The Boston Globe, 16 September 2009.
19. ←See Francis Kofi Abiew, ‘NGO-Military Relations in Peace Operations’, International Peacekeeping, vol.10, no.1, 2007, pp.24–39 at p.30.
20. ←For a careful discussion, see Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House,2005), pp 185–255
21. ←See Mark Walkup, ‘Policy Dysfunction in Humanitarian Organizations: The Role of Coping Strategies, Institutions, and Organizational Culture’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol.10, no.1, March 1997, pp. 37–60.
22. ←See P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Deborah D.Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
23. ←See Afghanistan—State Building, Sustaining Growth, and Reducing Poverty (Washington DC: The World Bank, 2005) p.47.
24. ←See Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall, ‘Afghan Rebels Find Aid in Pakistan, Musharraf Admits’, The New York Times, 13 August 2007.