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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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October 5, 2006
Five years after the United States mounted its campaign to topple Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership, news reports are dominated by the resurgent Taliban and reconstituted opium trade. Among the chief reasons for those two developments is the country’s backward economic state. “[I]t is so poor that we can't even tell how poor it is," Barnett R. Rubin of New York University told the Carnegie Council in March. Reconstruction has been hobbled by security concerns and lack of funds. And the Afghan parliament continues to house Islamist warlords and drug kingpins, which experts say has only added to its dysfunction. Even the scattered progress Afghanistan has made on political, religious, and social freedoms is in danger of being rolled back. U.S. officials are concerned Afghanistan could relapse once again into a “failed state.”
The resurgence of the Taliban and return of poppy farmers in provinces like Helmand and Kandahar along Afghanistan’s southeastern frontier, experts say. Profits from a booming opium trade, estimated to be as much as 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP), have fueled Islamist insurgents in the border areas. Taliban rebels have killed more than 2,000 people over the past year in suicide bombings similar to those in Iraq; they have also sabotaged a number of reconstruction projects in the region.
The Afghan government accuses the Pakistani government, especially its intelligence service, of not doing enough to secure the border. Pakistan says it has deployed 80,000 troops along the border and has intercepted a number of high-ranking terrorists and Taliban members. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)and the Afghan National Army provide the bulk of security on Afghanistan’s side of the border. NATO’s 21,000 troops—mostly based in the north, west, and south—are set to absorb about 12,000 U.S.-led coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan, which will make it the largest NATO military operation in the alliance’s history.
“[I]t is so poor that we can't even tell how poor it is," says Barnett R. Rubin of New York University.
Since the start of 2005, there have been more than 200 attacks against teachers, students, and schools, according to a July 2006 Human Rights Watch report, the bulk of them in Afghanistan’s southern provinces. There is also a growing frequency of so-called “night letters,” threatening messages that target teachers and students. Such is the concern of Afghan officials that the Interior ministry recently sent a letter to educators warning that the Taliban are importing pens with special gas mechanisms to private language schools to “render people unconscious and [erase] their memories.” (CSMonitor). The lack of adequate schooling has forced some Afghan families to send their children to madrassas across the border in Pakistan.
Lynda Granfield says "Afghans have to take community ownership too, but it is not a concept they know [because] for the past thirty years they have been fighting.”
Another problem is a shortage of girls’ schools. “There aren't enough female teachers for girls' schools in Afghanistan,” Tom Koenigs, UN special representative for Afghanistan, tells Der Spiegel.
Karzai downplays the dire warnings about Afghanistan’s education system. “Schools get burned, but not every day,” he told the CFR meeting. “If they get burned every day, we will be out of schools in the whole country. In the past two years, maybe 150 schools were burned or damaged partially.”
Some fault lead donor nations like the United States. A recent GAO report said U.S. officials continually fail to meet their reconstruction targets because of security issues, poor contractor performance, and rising opium production. The report also criticizes USAID, which “lack[s] a comprehensive strategy to direct its efforts.” Out of 286 schools it had intended to build by the end of 2004, it had completed only eight. Poor security remains perhaps the biggest challenge to distributing aid, Zafiri says. He blames former U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who early on in 2003 refused to endorse provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs)—civilian-military development units predominant in rural areas—because they were seen as nation building, but later endorsed the projects. “The PRTs were insufficient and continue to be insufficient,” Zafiri says. Other humanitarian groups objected to the PRTs because they were seen as compromising the neutrality of aid groups.
Another problem, says Stephen Biddle, CFR senior defense fellow, is that aid workers are often resented by local Afghans. “They’re doing reconstruction to win hearts and minds but if the result is this flood of Western recon personnel driving SUVs and living in what look like luxurious accommodations, who end up being a separate society within a society, people resent that.” A third problem is the lack of money and personnel. Koenigs, in his Der Spiegel interview, says the West invested ten times more per capita in Kosovo, a funding shortfall that has resulted in unfinished reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
Afghan and U.S. officials point to some positive trends. In addition to roads, hospitals, and schools, a nascent banking sector has been slowly built, with eight or more private banks now set up in Afghanistan, Amirzai Sangin, Afghanistan's minister of communications, recently told a briefing at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He also points to Afghanistan's growing telecom industry; more than 1.5 million Afghans now own phones (most of them mobile phones), a figure expected to double in the next three years. Lynda Granfield, a military liaison officer at the State Department, disputes blanket criticisms of the PRT programs, pointing to successes in Jalalabad province, where she commanded the local PRT, and in Nangarhar. She stressed that PRTs are not a cure-all for Afghanistan’s economic ailments and that “Afghans have to take community ownership too, but it is not a concept they know [because] for the past thirty years they have been fighting.”
The reconstruction of Afghanistan is based on the Afghanistan Compact, a five-year plan signed in January 2006 that succeeds the Bonn Agreement and focuses on security, rule of law, and development, while setting basic targets and timetables for international donors through 2010.
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