Elections

Will: Today is Ahmad Shah Massoud day - the anniversary of the death of the renowned Northern Alliance commander who was blown up two days before 9/11 by two Algerian suicide bombers posing as journalists. It is also a national holiday and a chance to finally write a few notes for the blog.

September in Kabul is glorious and by far my favourite time of year. The internet is down, all meetings have stopped for the day, and there is only the fort to keep us entertained as we are limited to essential movements only due to instability in the city. These enforced breaks are often very refreshing. I noticed today that the pomegranates are almost ready to eat and the quinces are enormous. The apricots have all mysteriously disappeared. I suspect they were taken on the quiet by one of our Afghan staff. If you water plants here, they seem to gratefully yield fruit of generous proportions. The evenings are cool and the neighbouring roof tops are full of boys flying kites. Outside the fort though, the atmosphere in the city is tense.

The fall out from the Presidential elections continues to dominate conversations around town. Several weeks on and the paint used to mark voters’ fingers can still be seen under the fingernails of some of our colleagues. A friend cancelled lunch today as he had been called in for an emergency analysis of polling figures. There have been so many complaints that the UN sponsored Electoral Complaints Commission has been inundated. Karzai’s main rival Addullah Abdullah has called for the annulment of poll results amid accusations of ballot box stuffing. Even though the US envoy says that a rerun of the election is not possible, the Independent Electoral Commission is launching a recount in some southern areas. They say that there enough accusations of electoral fraud - mostly in the Pashtun belt - to deprive Karzai of 50% of the vote, thus forcing him into a second round. It is hard not to feel that regardless of the result, the political system here will be even less credible that it was before the elections.

I discussed this with colleagues over lunch in the old city. Some said that the country was too unstable to cope with a new President; that Karzai knew the ropes and was the best man to maintain security. Others said that Karzai’s inability to deal with corrupt and double-dealing senior officials just proved that he was part of the problem and the country would only continue to deteriorate under his leadership. One colleague told me, “Mr William, we Afghans are not political people. We know you British and Americans come here to do deals and you are very political people. We just want jobs and security.” In my experience, this is not true at all. The Afghans I have talked to are very politically aware and much better at cutting deals than the British and Americans. “Afghans will do anything for money,” he continued. ‘If you give me $100 I will go and find Osama Bin Laden for you. Are you telling me that despite all the Americans’ billions of dollars, they still cannot find him? No, it is because they do want to find him so that they can continue to keep their soldiers here into the future.”

I had a meeting at the US embassy yesterday with one of our principal donors. The US deputy Secretary of State who is responsible for a foreign assistance budget of $5 billion this year, addressed us, having just flown in from the States. He narrowly avoided being blown up by a large bomb as he left the airport along with four other senior members of the US administration. He was all the more resolute in his speech, speaking of the sacrifice that foreign service nationals and foreign service officers were making by working in this country. He painted a positive picture of the US intervention so far (no mention of the UN, EU, or other international allies) drawing attention to the heavy traffic as a sign of shopping, commerce, parents taking their children to buy new clothes for school. He was candid in explaining why Americans were in Afghanistan: to protect the US from extremists and state-sponsored terrorism. He described the enormous resources allocated by Congress, despite the economic crisis, for reconstruction in Afghanistan and emphasized his commitment to making this mission work. There followed questions about the length of tours and the number of agricultural specialists being sent to Provincial Reconstruction Teams around the country. However, it was the last question which was the most interesting. A young Afghan working at the embassy asked whether special immigration visas would be reinstated. His friends were clearly very sympathetic with the question. The deputy Secretary of State said that they had been granted for a time but that he obviously wanted talented Afghans to stay in Afghanistan and not to leave for the U.S.

This is the big dilemma. The Americans have an amazing ‘can-do’ attitude and cannot be faulted for their commitment. However, they have no viable partner with which to accomplish their mission. The prospect of leaving Afghanistan is incredibly appealing to most Afghans who work for international organizations and indeed many leave at the earliest opportunity, visa or no visa. The majority of the middle class left during the soviet occupation and civil war and most have not returned. Many of our staff are studying for MBAs before and after work hours, hoping that it will enable them to find work abroad. There are of course exceptions. I know of several highly motivated and respected young Afghans who have established NGOs or are working in business or government, determined to forge ahead and play a part in the reconstruction of their own country. Commentators talk of there being a window of opportunity between 2002 and 2004 when hope abounded and when the international community could move around the country at will. The international community is often accused of having squandered opportunities by pursuing a disjointed and unrealistic strategy of defense, diplomacy, and development. But when the light is shone on the Afghan government itself, they are equally guilty of the same charge. They have proved unable, and perhaps unwilling, to set aside their own private agendas and feuds to engage with a motivated and well resourced international community that does not really know what it is doing in Afghanistan. This is as true of the Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration programme in 2003 as it is of counter narcotics, construction, and counter insurgency in 2009. Many men of influence here appear so attached to their own fiefdoms, that peace, stability, and a functioning administration are not actually in their interests. When aid packages worth billions of dollars are published in the press, it is not surprising that their expectation are set so high; It is understandable that they should ask where all this money has gone when so little has been apparently been achieved.

Foreigners here work incredibly hard; most do so honestly and broadly for the right reasons. The problem is that Americans, and others, have no option but to deal with a very narrow sector of Afghan society in pursuit of their goals. These tend to be ministers, interpreters, public affairs officers, businessmen, most of whom have spent the majority of their lives outside Afghanistan. The majority of the population struggle with poverty, ill health, unemployment, illiteracy, poor harvests, and insecurity, while a few rich Afghans seem to get even richer. Large donors measure their success by how many clinics or schools have been built in the last year. Perhaps they should also begin to measure how many of their staff speak fluent Pashto or Dari; how many stay for longer than a year; how many have developed relationships of any sort of meaning with Afghans from different levels in society? The problem with this approach is that it requires a committed group of professionals, who are willing to settle here for a number of years and work alongside their Afghan colleagues with full support from the government. This very quickly looks like some kind of UN protectorate. Paddy Ashdown was close to being appointed the UN special representative to Afghanistan last year until his style was considered too imperial by the President and others in the Afghan government. In the Balkans, his success was partly due to the bold and assertive supervision of ministries and government departments through a team of international officers. The problem here has been that whilst ministers are often very talented and effective individuals, their departments are run by bureaucrats who struggle to get through their inbox in the morning. (Any success we’ve had as an organization has been due to the effective coupling of experienced Afghan staff operating freely in their own environment with international staff who know how to navigate the international system of funding cycles, deliverables, timelines, work plans, development strategies and reports.)

A friend told me today that they had just been given over $50 million to spend in the next eighteen months. “Too little, too late” he said. It is very hard to spend this sort of money intelligently in such a short space of time. He was expecting it to be wasted on a number of eye catching proposals, that sound exciting but lack the sort of management and commitment that are needed to make any project a success in this country or any other. “It will probably just make a few rich people even richer. We have just bought three new armoured Land Cruisers, so that’s a start” he said sarcastically.