International DevelopmentWritten evidence submitted by Lael Mohib

1. Executive Summary

This document supports the idea that the approach to development aid in Afghanistan should be delivered through local, Afghan organisations and take a community-level approach to ensure sustainability. It argues that delivering aid as a tool for generating security or stability, or to supplement or support political or military agendas, is a counterproductive approach to rural Afghanistan. Furthermore, it outlines considerations for aid distribution in Afghanistan in the build up to 2014, primarily to take action now to localize development efforts and invest in locally-trusted Afghan NGOs.

2. Author Introduction

Lael A. Mohib works in the rural development field in Afghanistan. In 2009, she worked for the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development’s National Area-Based Development Programme. From 2009 to 2011, she worked for a small rural development company, FLAG International Afghanistan, as program manager for the Local Governance and Community Engagement department. Her work focused on engaging rural communities to ensure local ownership of infrastructure projects. Currently, she is based in London, working for BBC Media Action’s media-for-development programmes in Afghanistan. She has a master’s degree in International Relations from Boston University. Her dissertation was a comparative analysis between the Afghan government’s and the foreign military’s approaches to rural development in Afghanistan.

The views expressed in this document are her own and do not reflect or represent the views of any organisation.

3. Overall Development Issues in Afghanistan

(a) Pitfalls of Mainstream Development Approach

There are many challenges to delivering aid effectively in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is unique because those supporting the insurgency regard coalition forces as belligerent occupiers and this creates confusion in the minds of some Afghans about the motivations of donor assistance”. As this quote from the inquiry announcement states, development actors have difficulty operating in rural areas because development initiatives are often used as a political opportunity for not only coalition forces and NATO donor countries, but for insurgent groups as well.

NATO countries will use development, most often distributed through Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) where they have their troops based, in an effort to “win hearts and minds” of locals, spread goodwill for international efforts, increase security and stability in the area, and to increase local governance of the Afghan government. On the other hand, insurgent groups continue to target schools, clinics, and other development initiatives because they are built with foreign funding and most often by foreign intervention.

Furthermore, sincere efforts to engage local communities or ensure local ownership of projects are often overlooked because this takes time and patience, two things which do not often fit into many large-scale donor’s agendas and Quick Impact approaches. Large scale infrastructure projects types are also more susceptible to corruption as large sums of money are passed through several hands quickly with few monitoring controls. There is no guarantee that such projects would be staffed with the human resources needed to make it function effectively. These factors lead many development efforts in Afghanistan to produce increased instability, financial waste, and no benefit to local communities or donor nations.

(b) Alternative Channels for Aid

Because international aid, especially through coalition forces’ PRTs, is often geared at supplementing political or military agendas, it is often heavily focused on tangible, physical, and thus, instant outputs. However, this approach overlooks more gradual, sustainable modes of human development which have longer-lasting, more sustainable effects, ie development through media and radio programming that can provide information to rural populations on livelihoods, health, education; vocational trainings in practical, sustainable livelihoods for rural communities; and microfinance programmes, etc.

Many of these characteristics—sustainability, gradual, patience, community engagement, local ownership, human development—are often at odds with the mainstream approach to large-scale donor funded development in Afghanistan. However, for a long-term, effective and productive development effort in Afghanistan to be sustained, these factors must be taken into account and policy should be reflect this type of approach.

(c) Development approaching 2014

As we near foreign troop withdrawals in 2014, a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the country and many development actors may be unsure how they can continue working past 2014. If aid is channelled through trustworthy, local Afghan NGOs for projects that are non-politicized and work closely with rural communities, there is no reason that 2014 could not usher in a more stable working environment for development actors, particularly if a political settlement can be reached or, at the very least, a ceasefire is negotiated. In order to ease the pain of a financial drop out suddenly effecting Kabul as foreign aid money disappears, efforts can be made now for funding to be spent in a smarter, leaner, and more effective manner that helps support Afghan institutions and makes greater efforts to more evenly distribute aid.

(d) PRTs and Development

One goal of development projects implemented through Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) is to increase local trust in the Afghan government, based on effective service delivery, as well as increasing stability and spreading good will amongst locals. However, this is rarely the end result. This is not a question of the ability of the PRT and government to effectively collaborate, but rather, a question of possibility. There is little, if any, logic in tasking foreign troops with legitimizing another country’s government, or even extending its visibility through infrastructure projects. Rural Afghans will naturally tend to associate PRT-initiated projects with the foreign military, not the Afghan government. Building government legitimacy is naturally a process internal to Afghanistan and its institutions and populous— this is outside the scope of foreigners, particularly in light of increasing and tangible tension between Afghan and coalition forces. Local governance requires local participation and consultation, while PRTs tend to work unilaterally or single-out the most accessible and powerful provincial or district level government officials, who are often corrupt and resented by the local populations.

Furthermore, the PRTs fail to link accountability of projects to the Afghan government at any level, nor are there standardized mechanisms for ensuring transparency. The military is accountable, which undermines the process of building Afghan institutions, which are often mired by corruption anyway. Local populations should play a central role in monitoring projects meant to benefit them.

(e) Assumed Links between Development and Security

While foreign policy and military circles continue to herald the use of soft power and aid as a way to foster regional and global security, it is an assumption that has backfired before in Afghanistan. A decades-old USAID report titled Retrospective Review of US Assistance to Afghanistan: 1950–1979 warns: “The use of aid for short-term political objectives...tended to…weaken the longer-term political interests of the United States. Aid as a tool of diplomacy has its limitations when politically motivated commitments are at much higher levels—and promise more—than can reasonably be delivered in economic returns.”⁽¹⁾

When assessing the validity of the assumption that development leads to security, James Boyce posed the question James Boyce: “when international actors intervene in the name of security, whose security is paramount—the human security of the populace, the national security of the government, or the security concerns of outsiders?”⁽²⁾ While empirical evidence is lacking, it appears that gradual, sustainable community-level development approaches that emphasize community participation and agency are effective at promoting micro-level human and physical security objectives, as the beneficiaries of development become the agents of it as well. Militarized development initiatives are not capable of facilitating this type of community-based development--and often overlook the importance of more intangible aspects of local sustainable development--in pursuing overarching objectives set on global and regional security as opposed to human security.

4. Recommendations for Action

(a) Focus on local ownership and community engagement

While most key decisions about development in Afghanistan often happen at the faraway desks of foreign aid officials or corporate development companies, the decisions that matter most should be made, or at least sincerely informed, by the community members, with the facilitation of outside organizations. While some international donors may be looking to check a project off their list, disburse money to increase their “burn rate,” or achieve goodwill for the donor nation through highly visible project branding, this approach often bypasses, or alienates, the opinions and concerns of local beneficiaries.

When it comes to infrastructure projects, communities are often prepared to reject development projects that are implemented without their consultation. For example, even the slightest discrepancy in fairness and equality of distribution of project output to two villages that are meant to be sharing a project, could lead the villages to abandon the project in order to avoid igniting an on-going inter-village conflict. These nuances can only be addressed when local communities are engaged from start to finish in development projects. This is merely one small example.

Engaging and involving the community takes patience, mobility and communication—multiple visits to the village, mediating conflict, revisiting issues that you thought had been solved, fielding unrealistic requests, training individuals who sometimes don’t know how to read or write. Surely, it may be easier and faster to work around the community instead of with it, but at the risk of producing a meaningless structure resented by the people it’s meant to serve.

(b) Channel funds through Afghan organisations

Truly sustainable development initiatives must be Afghan-led. Overall, the PRTs do not promote Afghan ownership, often bypassing Afghan institutions or organisations altogether, either out of mistrust or for reasons of convenience. Those projects coordinated with government functionaries are often dominated by the PRTs in all stages of the development process.

But in Afghanistan, where neither coalition forces nor the Afghan government itself, are sustainable, reliable entities, development aid can be most effective when channelled through local, trustworthy Afghan civil society and non-profit organisations. First of all, such organisations are the most cost and time effective as they are not bogged down by consultancy fees and bureaucratic processes. Secondly, many of them have been able to weather the ever-changing political atmosphere in Afghanistan. Thirdly, local Afghan organisations will be best positioned to implement projects most effectively—they will have staff who can directly access different, even hostile, regions of the country, and will ensure projects are in line with local languages and cultures. Fourth, investing in local Afghan NGOs now will help ease the transition from Kabul’s now heavily inflated war-time economy to cutbacks in aid distribution.

(c) Move away from short-term and quick impact infrastructure projects

There has been too heavy of a focus on infrastructure development, particularly on the PRTs, a trend that has begun to recede as foreign-funded infrastructure projects are increasing targeted and destroyed by insurgent groups. Just this month, Karzai publicly addressed insurgent groups, demanding that they stop attacking schools. For reasons of insecurity, restricted access to rural areas and vulnerability of infrastructure, a heavier emphasis on human development and non-physical development initiatives is a move in the right direction. More funding should be invested in media, vocational training, human capacity trainings, etc. Furthermore, efforts should be longer-term with gradual progress valued as opposed to quick impact, quantitatively measurable deliverables. Real, rooted progress takes time.

(d) Avoid politicisation of aid and assumptions surrounding development and security

Aid should not be given to support certain military or political objectives, or in hopes that pumping development funds into an area will help stabilize it. Recent studies show that this in fact contributes to further destabilization or makes no difference.⁽³⁾ Furthermore, it creates a regional imbalance—the vast majority of aid money has been invested in the south and east volatile zones of Afghanistan and in areas where coalition forces have PRTs, leaving more peaceful northern and central areas neglected. Also, making efforts to balance aid across the country now is one way to reduce corruption, conflict, and scandal that inevitably comes with pumping vast amounts of aid money quickly into one area.

References

⁽¹⁾ Retrospective Review of US Assistance to Afghanistan: 1950–1979.

⁽²⁾ Boyce, James K and Madalene O’Donnell. “Chapter 10: Policy Implications: The Economics of Postwar Statebuilding”, In Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuilding, edited by James K Boyce and Madalene O’Donnell, 271-301. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, (2007).

⁽³⁾ Andrew Wilder and Paul Fishstein, “Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining the Relationship between Aid and Security in Afghanistan”, Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, 2012.

May 2012