23
December 2021
PDF version [417KB]
Dr Angela Clare
Foreign
Affairs, Defence and Security
Executive
summary
- The Taliban’s rapid return to power in August 2021 shocked the
world and left the country without an effective government and heading towards
a humanitarian crisis. There remains huge uncertainty around how basic
supplies, security and economic activity can be restored.
- The Taliban controlled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. At that
time the war-ravaged country had among the world’s lowest life expectancy and
highest maternal mortality rates. Millions had little access to food,
housing, health or physical security.
- The country received huge inflows of aid over the following
decade, tapering off with the drawdown of military forces from 2012. According
to the World Bank, Afghanistan received US$77 billion in official
development assistance between 2001 and 2019, over $1.5 billion of which
Australia contributed.
- Afghanistan is a different country in 2021: its population has
doubled, the country’s infrastructure has modernised, and a generation of young
people and women, particularly in urban centres, has enjoyed education and
employment opportunities not previously available.
- But the challenges involved in rebuilding and stabilising the
country proved too ambitious, with the US and its partners failing to resolve
the conflict or to build the institutions needed to effectively govern the
country. Critics point to a long list of mistakes made by the US and its allies.
- Australian aid shared the international community’s broad
objective of state building, contributing to better governance and stability,
and poverty reduction through economic growth and service delivery across most
key sectors, including health, education and agriculture.
- The 2013 Senate inquiry into Australia’s aid program to
Afghanistan found that Australia’s support for service delivery
programs—particularly in health and education—was more successful than
governance and capacity building programs, in line with the broader aid
experience.
- In May 2021, Prime Minister Morrison confirmed that Australia
‘remains committed to supporting an Afghan-led peaceful resolution to the
conflict in Afghanistan, and to helping preserve the gains of the past 20
years’. He also noted that Australia’s bilateral relationship with Afghanistan
would continue, with development assistance to total $200 million over
2021–2024.
Contents
Executive summary
Introduction
Overview of aid since 2001
Figure 1: total Official
Development Assistance to Afghanistan, 2001–2019, US$
What was achieved?
Australian aid
Figure 2: Australian aid to
Afghanistan, 2001 to 2021 (2020–21 prices)
Strategic failures
Corruption
The challenge of nation-building
Future prospects
Introduction
The Taliban’s rapid return to power in August 2021 shocked
the world and left the country reeling, without an effective government and
heading towards a humanitarian crisis. The foreign aid on which the country
relied has been cut off, and there remains huge uncertainty around how basic
supplies, security and economic activity can be restored.
Since 2001 the US-led international mission in Afghanistan
aimed to ensure Afghanistan did not provide a sanctuary for terrorists and
other extremists, and that the government
was able to ‘deliver
essential services, drive economic growth and address the causes of instability’.0F[1] Non-military aid was central
to rebuilding and stabilising the country. Given the mission’s failure to build
a viable state, many are asking what the aid achieved and what should have been
done differently.
This paper surveys some of the commentary and analysis on
international reconstruction efforts since 2001, with a particular focus on the
role of non-military aid and the lessons emerging from the Afghanistan
experience.
Overview of aid since
2001
The task of rebuilding Afghanistan after the defeat of the
Taliban was immense. The Taliban controlled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001,
drawing international outrage for its violent and repressive rule and human
rights abuses, including restrictions on the rights of women and extra-judicial
killings and punishments. At that time the war-ravaged country had among the
world’s lowest
life expectancy and highest maternal mortality rates. Millions had little access to food, housing,
health or physical security.1F[2] Already one of the
world’s most severely landmine-contaminated countries, Afghanistan needed
extensive mine and cluster bomb clearance, disarmament and rebuilding of
infrastructure.2F[3]
The country received huge inflows of
aid over the following decade, tapering off with the drawdown of military
forces from 2012. According to the World Bank, Afghanistan received US$77 billion
in official development assistance (ODA) between 2001 and 2019.3F[4] Of this, Australia has contributed
over $1.5 billion (around US$1.07
billion at 2018 prices). The US was the largest donor by a large margin,
providing an estimated 54 per cent of aid over that period, while the EU,
Japan, Germany and the UK were among the next largest donors.4F[5] The US spent an estimated total
of US$146 billion on ‘nation-building’ or reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, of which
US$36.23 billion was spent on governance and development and US$4.43
billion was spent on humanitarian support.5F[6]
This aid provided real gains for Afghan people, including
increased life expectancy, improved infrastructure, economic growth, and
expanded access to education and basic health services. In 2021, Afghanistan is
a different country: its population has doubled, the country’s infrastructure
has modernised and a generation of young people and women, particularly in
urban centres, has enjoyed education
and employment opportunities not previously available.
But the challenges involved in rebuilding and stabilising
the country proved too ambitious, with the US and its partners failing to
resolve the conflict or to build the institutions needed to effectively govern
the country. Over the last 20 years Afghanistan has remained one of the world’s
most fragile states, characterised by a lack of political legitimacy,
endemic corruption, high levels of poverty, displaced populations and ongoing
conflict—conditions that undermine
economic and social development.
Critics point to a long list of
mistakes made by the US and its allies in Afghanistan, many of which are
common to state-building
efforts in other fragile states,
that suggest the present situation has been ‘20
years in the making’: a narrow and short-term focus that lacked
coordination with political and security actors and that reflected the biases
and interests of donors, often failing to align with the interests of ordinary
Afghan people or the realities of what was happening on the ground. In the end,
the Afghan people
would not risk their lives for a government critics judged to be corrupt
and self-serving.
At the peak of aid flows between 2010 and 2012 Afghanistan was the largest
recipient of aid in the world, receiving $US6.5 billion in 2010—almost twice
as much as any other country (see Figure 1). Total non-military
assistance to Afghanistan reached the equivalent of 100 per cent of the
country’s GDP, decreasing over the following decade to 43 per cent in 2020.6F[7] Security spending was the main
component of this support, comprising
30 per cent of GDP—ten times higher than the average for low-income
countries. Australian aid comprised only a small part of this total—an estimated
1.5 per cent of all aid to the country by 2013.
Figure 1: total Official
Development Assistance to Afghanistan, 2001–2019, US$
*Net ODA received, constant 2018 US$ prices.
Source: Net
official development assistance received (current US$) – Afghanistan, The
World Bank: Data, website accessed 29 November 2021.
Initial development priorities for the reconstruction effort
were to rebuild the country’s administrative and financial systems; provide
access to education—especially for girls—and health and sanitation; build
infrastructure, in particular, roads, electricity and telecommunications; and
revitalise agriculture and rural development, including food security and
irrigation systems.7F[8]
Aid was provided through bilateral and multilateral
channels, UN agencies, NGOs and the private sector. Over 20 UN agencies were
coordinated by the United Nations
Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a political and development
mission established in 2002 at the request of the government of Afghanistan.
NGOs and civil society organisations were at the fore of delivering basic
services and in providing ‘the
momentum for Afghanistan’s development as a pluralistic society’. In 2004,
the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA)
estimated
that over 180 NGOs were implementing World Food Program activities in
Afghanistan.
The largest share of aid to the former Afghan government was
through the World Bank-managed, multi-donor Afghanistan
Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), established to provide a coordinated
financing mechanism for the Afghan Government’s budget and national programs,
delivering support for agriculture, education, governance, health,
infrastructure and rural development. As at April 2021, 34 donors had contributed
more than US$13.07 billion to the fund. The ARTF was Australia’s most
significant development investment in Afghanistan, with estimated contributions
of US$460 million.
The US and its allies—including
Australia—also set up ‘Provincial
Reconstruction Teams’, comprising military and civilian
personnel based in Afghanistan’s provinces, to provide security for aid
activities and to ‘help humanitarian assistance or reconstruction tasks in
areas with ongoing conflict or high levels of insecurity’, through
which an estimated 20 per cent of aid flowed.
What was achieved?
Despite the formidable challenges involved, aid helped bring
about some ‘remarkable’
development successes in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. These include:
- Education and literacy: the proportion of girls attending
secondary school rose from 6.3 per cent in 2003 to 40 per cent in 2018, while
boys saw an increase from 18.2 to 70 per cent over this period. Literacy rates
improved markedly. In 2018 female literacy in the 15–24 age group was 56 per
cent compared to 74 per cent for men, up from 11 per cent and 46 per cent respectively
in 1979.8F[9] Banned from
participating in higher education under the Taliban, women comprised an
estimated 28 per cent of university
students by 2017.
- Women’s rights and opportunities: recognition of women’s
rights expanded,
including through legal protections and reforms, support for legal aid
organisations, and the training of women lawyers, prosecutors, and judges.
Afghanistan’s new
constitution, ratified in 2004, required that women hold at least 27 per
cent of seats in the lower house of parliament, and by 2020, 21
per cent of Afghan civil servants were women (compared with almost none
under Taliban rule), of which 16 per cent were at senior management levels.
- Improved state treatment of ethnic Hazaras, among the
world’s most persecuted peoples.
Since 2001, Hazaras have had greater access to political participation, and
gained access to university education and civil service employment.
- Improved access to basic health care contributed to a drop
in Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate from
1,300 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2002 to 638 deaths per 100,000 births
in 2017. Life
expectancy improved from 42 years in 2004 to 62
years in 2010, largely driven by declines in child mortality. Women’s life
expectancy increased from 56 years in 2001 to 66 in 2017.
- Economic growth: large flows of aid—particularly in the
decade to 2010—saw significant economic gains, with Afghanistan’s per capita gross domestic product rising
from $21.80 in 2002 to $647 in 2018. Afghanistan’s economy is now nearly five
times larger than it was 20 years ago, with GDP increasing from
US$4.05 billion in 2002 to US$19.8 billion in 2020. Access
to electricity increased from 7 per cent of the rural population in 2005 to
97 per cent in 2016.
Decades of conflict had taken a heavy toll on the country,
however, and many of the gains made were ‘partial
and fragile’. By the end of the mission almost half the population
continued to live in poverty, with ‘stark differences’ across regions. Government institutions remained
weak, dependent on external finance and unable to deliver services to remote
areas, while armed conflict continued to inflict heavy
costs on the civilian population. Since 2001 an estimated 241,000
combatants, civilians, aid workers and others have died in the Afghanistan and
Pakistan conflict zone and many thousands more have been displaced due to
conflict and violence. In 2020 alone, an estimated 400,000 were displaced.9F[10]
Cities benefited more in terms of aid and security than
populations in rural areas, where more than 70
per cent of people live. According to women’s rights group Medica
Mondiale, the significant
legislative progress female activists achieved after 2001 ‘failed to become
lived reality for most women. Patriarchal structures, religious fundamentalism,
corruption and the all-prevailing insecurity prevent this’.10F[11] Gender-based violence remains
a
major concern.
Agriculture, ‘the backbone’ of
Afghanistan’s economy and a major
source of livelihood for many living below the poverty line, has been a crucial
casualty: in 2019 UNOCHA reported that the sector was ‘a shell of its former self’, with
production half
that of its pre-1979
level. Today Afghanistan imports a
significant amount of its staples, including much of its wheat, fuel and
electricity, increasing its vulnerability to food insecurity.
Assessing the overall impact of aid in Afghanistan is a
complex task. A 2018
evaluation of aid in Afghanistan noted that there were over 30 different
international donors disbursing aid in Afghanistan, ‘each with their own agenda
and aid agreement with the government, and effective donor coordination and
harmonisation is not a practice adopted universally’. Overall, a lack of
transparency and ‘a huge shortage of impartial information’ has prevented
accurate assessments of development efforts, and long-term outcomes remain
difficult to predict.11F[12]
That said, support for basic services—namely health and
education—was more
successful than governance and state-buildings efforts. Achieving progress
in these areas was hampered not only by the inherent
difficulty of working in a fragile state, but by failures in regard to coordination, management,
resourcing and overall strategy. From the beginning the Afghan
Government and the international community recognised the importance of
coordinating and aligning assistance with the Afghan Government’s priorities,
and of increasing the proportion of funds channelled through the national
budget.12F[13] But aid could not
be easily disentangled from the international community’s strategic and
security objectives, which did not always align with Afghanistan’s development
interests. The Taliban’s resurgence
from 2006 has been linked with a rise in anti-Western sentiment among Afghan people, feelings
‘nurtured by the sluggish pace of reconstruction, allegations of prisoner abuse
at U.S. detention facilities, widespread corruption in the Afghan government,
and civilian casualties caused by U.S. and NATO bombings’.
Australian aid
The Australian Government viewed its aid to Afghanistan as
part of ‘an integrated whole-of-government effort involving interlinked
security, diplomatic and development objectives’.13F[14]
Prime Minister John Howard emphasised
the link between the Government’s security and nation-building goals in his announcement
of an Australian Defence Force Reconstruction Task Force in 2006:
The security challenge is
twofold: first to provide a secure environment to allow Afghans to rebuild
their society free from violence and extremism; and secondly to strengthen
Afghanistan’s institutions so that they can provide a stronger framework for
democratisation, religious tolerance and economic growth. Of course, the two
elements are linked. Removal of the immediate dangers facing the Afghan people
is essential, but so too is ensuring that Afghanistan has the infrastructure
and institutions to support its democratically elected government and dealing
with those who may attempt to threaten Afghanistan’s democracy and security in
the future.14F[15]
Australian aid has shared the international community’s
broad objective of state building, contributing to better governance and
stability, and poverty reduction through economic growth and service delivery
across most key sectors, including health, education and agriculture. As a
relatively small donor its aid was delivered through pooled funding mechanisms
to maximise effectiveness—such as the ARTF and the UN Development Programme’s Law and Order Trust Fund for
Afghanistan (LOTFA). It also worked with NGOs ‘in
niche areas where we can add the most value’, and delivered aid through the
Uruzgan Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).
As shown in Figure 2, Australia’s aid flows tailed off
significantly from their high in 2011–12, following the Government’s cuts
to the aid budget in 2014 and the tapering of international flows after the
2014
transition.
Figure 2: Australian aid
to Afghanistan, 2001 to 2021 (2020–21 prices)
Note: 2021–22 figures do not include any post-Budget
commitments.
Source: DFAT statistical summaries of the aid budget, various years.
2013 Senate inquiry
The comprehensive 2013 Senate
inquiry into Australia’s aid program to Afghanistan found that Australia’s
support for service delivery programs—particularly in health and education—were
more successful than
governance and capacity building programs, in line with the broader aid
experience. The inquiry also found
that funds directed through the Afghan government systems, notably
through the generally well-regarded World Bank-managed Afghanistan
Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), were ‘more successful in promoting government
ownership and aligning projects with government priorities’.15F[16]
Commenting on the 2013 Senate
inquiry, the only major review so far undertaken, Stephen Howes and Jonathan
Pryke from ANU’s Development
Policy Centre argued
that the overall objective of Australia’s aid at that time—‘building the Afghan
Government’s capacity to deliver services and provide economic opportunities to
its people’—was inappropriate:
Capacity building is the holy
grail of aid, but […] the ability of aid to build capacity is severely limited.
The roots of shallow capacity are typically political rather than technical.
Government capacity shows little sign of improvement in Afghanistan, so if that
is the objective of Australian aid, then it has failed.16F[17]
Fortunately, they went on to argue, most Australian aid did
not in fact involve capacity-building but the delivery of services, largely
delivered through the ARTF and NGOs. Australia also funded multilateral
agencies such as the World Food Program to provide humanitarian support, and
partnered with agencies such as the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research to coordinate its support of sectoral support for
agriculture.17F[18]
The Senate inquiry largely supported Australia’s mix of aid
investments, noting
that ‘promoting government ownership and aligning projects with government priorities’
through the ARTF helps ‘prevent wastage of funds, encourages stronger
coordination between projects (less duplication and better targeted) and is
better suited to counter corruption’. It also acknowledged the important role
of NGOs in filling the gap in the Afghan Government’s ability to deliver
frontline services.
It expressed concerns about the ADF’s involvement in aid
delivery, however, which largely occurred in Uruzgan province. The Committee
heard concerns that too close a link between military and development
activities could be counter-productive, inadvertently intensify conflicts, and
encourage corruption—the so-called ‘militarization
of aid’.18F[19] The Senate report
noted that this strategy—widely criticised for its ‘ad
hoc approach to security and development’—posed a potential danger to aid
workers and potentially undermined local leadership by linking aid to military
rather than humanitarian purposes. In 2010 around 20 per cent of
Australia’s aid was delivered through the Uruzgan PRT.19F[20]
To ensure development gains made were not lost, the Senate
report concluded that Australia should consolidate its focus on those areas in
which Australia’s aid had been most effective: education, agriculture, mining,
and promoting the status of women. The Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade’s annual
program performance reports for Afghanistan show that the aid program has
continued to evolve over the last few years, with a broad focus on better
governance and economic growth, women’s and girls’ empowerment (including
education), and humanitarian support. Since 2020, Australia has supported
the country’s COVID-19 response.
Strategic failures
In its August
2021 assessment of US reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, the US Government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction (SIGAR)—the office tasked with reviewing US reconstruction
funding in Afghanistan—described the US effort as ‘20 one-year
reconstruction efforts rather than one 20-year effort’.
SIGAR noted in its 30 October
Quarterly Report to Congress that it had reported for years on serious,
systemic problems which applied ‘to all U.S. assistance in Afghanistan’ in
areas such as security, rule of law, corruption, government capability and
legitimacy, fiscal capacity, and sustainability of institutions and programs’.
The report identified five primary areas of concern:
• inadequate planning
• poor quality assurance
• poor security
• questionable sustainability
• pervasive corruption.
SIGAR argued that the US lacked the information and
understanding of local conditions critical to stabilising and rebuilding the
country, that US officials underestimated the time and resources needed,
‘prioritized their own political preferences for what they wanted
reconstruction to look like, rather than what they could realistically
achieve’, and set ‘timelines in the mistaken belief that a decision in
Washington could transform the calculus of complex Afghan institutions,
powerbrokers, and communities contested by the Taliban’:
By design, these timelines
often ignored conditions on the ground and forced reckless compromises in U.S.
programs, creating perverse incentives to spend quickly and focus on
short-term, unsustainable goals that could not create the conditions to allow a
victorious U.S. withdrawal. Rather than reform and improve, Afghan institutions
and powerbrokers found ways to co-opt the funds for their own purposes, which
only worsened the problems these programs were meant to address. When U.S.
officials eventually recognized this dynamic, they simply found new ways to
ignore conditions on the ground. Troops and resources continued to draw down in
full view of the Afghan government’s inability to address instability or
prevent it from worsening.20F[21]
This lack of understanding meant that inappropriate models
were imposed on Afghan institutions, often with damaging effects, according to
the SIGAR report. The US Government:
… clumsily forced Western
technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces
in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain;
imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 per cent of its
disputes through informal means; and often struggled to understand or mitigate
the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls. Without this
background knowledge, U.S. officials often empowered powerbrokers who preyed on
the population or diverted U.S. assistance away from its intended recipients to
enrich and empower themselves and their allies. Lack of knowledge at the local
level meant projects intended to mitigate conflict often exacerbated it, and
even inadvertently funded insurgents.21F[22]
The report claimed that the mission also lacked effective
leadership, with the Department of State insufficiently resourced to undertake
this role and the Department of Defence lacking the expertise to lead a complex
reconstruction effort ‘with large economic and governance components’.22F[23]
William
Byrd (US Institute for Peace) also links the inability to stabilise the
country with the strategic failure to engage with local political conditions,
citing the example of programs for demobilisation, disarmament, and
reintegration (DDR) of combatants:
DDR has absorbed more than
$360 million in aid over the past two decades. Aside from programmatic
weaknesses, poor implementation and corruption, the first two DDR programs
targeted anti-Taliban armed forces and militias while the programs for Taliban
fighters sought, unsuccessfully, to encourage defections and weaken the
insurgents but did not support reconciliation between the two sides.
The most important lesson
from Afghan and international experience is to shift from combatant-focused DDR — which
can increase strains within communities and between combatants and victims,
exacerbating grievances — to a community-based approach.23F[24]
US analyst James
Dobbins also argued that the US and its allies did not invest enough in the
‘foundational security required to build a functioning state’, comparing the
amount invested in Bosnia—US$1,600 for each person each year for ‘the first
several years after that war’—with the ‘paltry sum’ of US$50 per person in
Afghanistan. Dobbins also contends that ‘critical mistakes’ were made in regard
to security and reconstruction policies, permitting the eventual
re-emergence of the Taliban:
There were no substantial
early efforts to build a national
Afghan army or police force,
which left security in the hands of predatory local warlords and made
confronting returning Taliban fighters more difficult. There was no single
point of leadership for the international reconstruction effort, which
consequently lacked coherence. And, perhaps most significantly, it took U.S.
officials several years to realize that although Pakistan had withdrawn its
support for the Taliban government, it hadn’t abandoned the Taliban as an
organization. After they were routed from Afghanistan, the Taliban’s leadership
and the group’s remaining members were given sanctuary in Pakistan, where they
recuperated, retrained, resupplied, and later restarted an insurgency in
Afghanistan.24F[25]
Corruption
A legacy
of systemic corruption is seen as one of the most corrosive failings of the
reconstruction effort. Reports routinely suggest that little
aid made its way to the local level, and was instead siphoned off in large
contracts, expensive consultancies and corruption. SIGAR found
that of the $63 billion in US aid to Afghanistan since 2002, ‘a total of
approximately $19 billion or 30 percent of the amount reviewed was lost to
waste, fraud, and abuse’, a significant proportion by Western
companies.25F[26]
Sarah Chayes (Foreign Affairs) paints a
disturbing picture of a system that served merely to enrich corrupt local
officials and heads of companies bidding on US-funded contracts, undermining
trust in the institutions the international community was trying to build:
… No one was comparing the
actual quality of raw materials used with what was marked down in the budget.
We Americans had no idea who we were dealing with.
Ordinary Afghans, on the
other hand, could see who was getting rich. They noticed whose villages
received the most lavish development projects. And Western civilian and
military officials bolstered the standing of corrupt Afghan officials by
partnering with them ostentatiously and unconditionally. They stood by their
sides at ribbon cuttings and consulted them on military tactics. Those Afghan officials could then credibly threaten
to call down a U.S. raid or an airstrike on anyone who got out of line.26F[27]
A UK House of Commons Library report noted that a ‘rentier
effect’ became increasingly evident, where vast quantities of aid were
disbursed with little accountability to local communities, while foreign donors
gained disproportionate influence. This resulted in a growing distrust of
government by ordinary Afghans, reflected in voter turnout for presidential
elections, which fell from 84 per cent in 2004 to just 19 per cent in 2019.27F[28]
Corruption
fuelled distrust of the US-backed Afghan Government, according to Clemence Landers and Rakan Aboneaaj (Center for Global Development),
‘to the point that over half of Afghan citizens believed corruption levels to be lower in Taliban-controlled
areas’. It also ‘hollowed out’ the security forces, Kate Clark (Afghanistan Analysts
Network) argued:
Fuel,
food, medicine for wounded soldiers, jobs, all have been sold over the years,
and this continued even as Afghanistan fell to the Taleban; on 1 August – less
than three weeks ago – it was revealed that aviation fuel at the Zabul garrison
had been sold, allegedly by the garrison commander. “These people,” said one
resident, quoted by Tolonews, “have
become accustomed to embezzlement”.28F[29]
Jennifer Murtazashvili (Brookings) argues that ‘the longer
the US was there, the worse these governance outcomes were’:
People lost complete faith in
the central government. That's why you saw the Afghan army collapse like it did
because people had nothing to fight for. Of course, they could fight against
the Taliban, but their alternative was this corrupt government in Kabul who
nobody felt represented their interests. People lost complete faith in the
central government. And once the donor support left, once the U.S. was gone,
all of this was really laid bare. So it became impossible to ask Afghans to
fight for an illegitimate government.29F[30]
The challenge of
nation-building
The attempt to
build a state through foreign aid in Afghanistan provides some salient lessons
for global development.
Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, argues
that the nation-building process the US and its allies pursued in Afghanistan
was part of a ‘venerable
tradition’ in political science which assumes that ‘if you can
establish overwhelming military dominance over a territory and subdue all other
sources of power, you can then impose your will’. At best this theory is only
half right, he argues, but in Afghanistan ‘it was dead wrong’:
Of course, Afghanistan needed
a functioning state. But the presumption that one could be imposed from above
by foreign forces was misplaced. […] this approach makes no sense when your
starting point is a deeply heterogeneous society organized around local customs
and norms, where state institutions have long been absent or impaired.30F[31]
Others identify a lack of will and commitment on the part of the US to
the construction effort. Landers and Aboneaaj point to a damaging neglect of the country’s political dynamics:
Statebuilding was
a core feature of the US enterprise in Afghanistan. But at the heart of this
mission lies a central paradox: using foreign assistance to establish core
government institutions—such as judicial systems, security and police, and
executive agencies—while purposefully ignoring the political dynamics
undermining the very institutions it seeks to establish.31F[32]
US analyst Michael O’Hanlon describes fluctuating
levels of interest and resources invested in international reconstruction
efforts in the decade post-2001, ‘when
American and NATO forces made very modest efforts to help Afghanistan form a
government as well as security forces’. This was nicknamed the ‘light
footprint’ approach, of which he noted:
In
this phase, Washington was preoccupied with Iraq, as were some NATO allies; no
one in the alliance really prioritized Afghanistan, and the U.S. role there
focused on counterterrorism, since Al Qaeda was still around in various pockets and
places. Yes, we should have done more to build up the Afghan state during this
golden window, when Taliban resistance was lighter. But much of the reason we
chose not to try to do too much in Afghanistan then is because, as many are
saying today, it was not a promising place to attempt nation-building, given
all its problems. So the light footprint approach was a mistake, but a partly
understandable one.32F[33]
The surge in US forces between
2009 and 2011 and US attempts to rapidly strengthen Afghan security forces in
response to the re-emergence of the Taliban also ‘did not work so well’,
O’Hanlon submits: ‘Afghan
government corruption in some ways got worse, as we poured resources into the
impoverished country faster than it could absorb them’. By the end of
2014, US and NATO roles had scaled back, with ‘overall U.S. troop strength […] about 90 percent less than
it had been during the surge’.33F[34] Economic development and state-building efforts continued,
though with less presence in the field and generally lower expectations’.
These changing strategies created a number of problems, according to O’Hanlon:
This yo-yo tendency in our Afghanistan
strategy led to at least two more derivative problems. First, never really
settling in for the kind of steady, long-term effort that was needed, we failed
to build an adequate talent pool of Americans (in the military, State
Department, and aid agencies) who could become specialists on Afghanistan and
go back on a predictable basis two or three times, between stints at home. As a
result, personal relationships had to be reforged every twelve months or
so, over a twenty-year period. (Yes, many Americans did deploy repeatedly, but
in an improvised and choppy way that did not sustain the long-term working
relationships needed with key Afghans.) Second, we failed to focus on
marginalizing the most corrupt actors in Afghanistan. At first, we often did
not know who they were, or did not expect to be in Afghanistan long enough to
weaken their influence. Then during the surge, we thought we needed some of
them too much in order to achieve short-term battlefield gains, so we often
tolerated them—worsening the government’s image among its people and therefore
facilitating Taliban recruiting efforts.
But the key challenge was in
trying to help rescue an Afghan society and political system that was badly
broken, in the face of an insurgency that was supported by a neighboring
country. It would have been hard to stabilize the situation regardless of
strategy; this was a wicked problem. The implication is that this kind of
intensive state-building and stabilization enterprise should only be undertaken in the most
extreme of cases, because even when done well, there is no guarantee of success
and a high likelihood of high cost. Perhaps there was no real choice in
Afghanistan, after the 9/11 attacks, but the lesson needs to be kept in mind
for the long-term future.34F[35]
In 2013 Justin Sandefur (Center for Global Development)
argued that with a ‘conceptually flawed’ counterinsurgency strategy,
humanitarian and development aid ‘will never stop lunatics with guns from
shooting at schoolgirls’. But this does not mean that aid in such situations is
futile:
When America musters its
civilian as well as its military resources, and allocates aid for the sake of
saving lives rather than winning hearts and minds, it can be incredibly
effective, even in the inauspicious conditions of rural Afghanistan. As the
United States finds itself trying to rebuild failed states in war-torn
societies — from Afghanistan to Mali to Somalia and so on — we have more
effective tools at our disposal than aid critics suppose. Our infatuation with
military responses to humanitarian crises cannot be blamed on a lack of
alternatives.35F[36]
Future prospects
As they withdrew
their forces from Afghanistan this year
both the US and its allies—including Australia—reiterated their commitment to
continue supporting the Afghan people. In his announcement
of the closure of Australia’s embassy in Kabul, Prime
Minister Morrison confirmed that Australia ‘remains committed to supporting an
Afghan-led peaceful resolution to the conflict in Afghanistan, and to helping
preserve the gains of the past 20 years’. He also noted that Australia’s
bilateral relationship with Afghanistan would continue, with development
assistance to total $200 million over 2021–2024.
Aid groups are urging the international community to step up
its aid efforts to address the unfolding humanitarian crisis. On 9 September
2021, the UNDP
estimated that up to 97 per cent of the population may be at risk of
sinking below the poverty line unless urgent action is taken, while on 22
September the WHO
warned that the country’s health system, battling with the COVID-19
pandemic as well as lack of funds, was ‘on the brink of collapse’.
On 13 September donors pledged
a total of US$1.3 billion in aid to Afghanistan, with many donors putting
conditions on their funding, including maintaining the rights of women and
girls, in the hope of holding the Taliban to account and encouraging
the establishment of an inclusive government.
Afghanistan observers argue that threatening
to withhold funding in the hope of improving governance has not worked in
the past and is not likely to work now. Such a strategy fails
to acknowledge the international community’s role in creating present-day
Afghanistan and its dependence on external finance to provide the
basics—including, critically, food—and that ‘playing politics’ with funding as
a means of pressure would be a ‘cynical, superficial, and dangerous policy’.36F[37] Instead of freezing the
country’s aid and assets, writes Adam
Tooze (Foreign Policy), what Afghanistan needs is ‘an amply funded
multilateral humanitarian effort to ensure life can continue as far as possible
and millions of people are preserved from disaster’.37F[38]
The international community is struggling to balance
Afghanistan’s humanitarian needs without bestowing legitimacy on the Taliban
regime. On 12 October an emergency
meeting of G20 countries resolved to ‘tackle the humanitarian crisis in
Afghanistan, even if it means having to coordinate efforts with the Taliban’:
There was unanimous agreement
among the participants about the need to alleviate the crisis in Afghanistan,
where banks are running out of money, civil servants have not been paid and
food prices have soared, leaving millions at risk of severe hunger.38F[39]
The European Commission has asked its
member states to endorse the resumption of limited development work in
Afghanistan, on the condition that it be carried out by NGOs and international
organisations, not through the Taliban.
The US and its allies are also concerned with the shift in
power relations that may see China and Russia—both of whom have offered
support for reconstruction—filling the void left by their departure. On 20 October
2021 the
Taliban gained the support of Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan for the idea of a UN donor conference to
help the country stave off economic collapse and a humanitarian catastrophe. China has already pledged
A$42 million in humanitarian support for
Afghanistan. Analysts
caution, however, that China and Russia ‘must also confront the dangers that could
emanate from Afghanistan at the regional level’.
[1]. UK House of
Commons Library, Afghanistan:
development, UK aid, and the future, Research Briefing, September 2021,
p. 5.
[2]. Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and
Trade, Australia’s
overseas development programs in Afghanistan, The Senate, Canberra, 16
May 2013, p. 53.
[3]. Ibid.
[4]. Inclusive,
constant 2018 prices.
[5]. UK House of Commons Library, Afghanistan: development,
UK aid, and the future, op. cit., p. 11.
[6]. The US Government’s
Special Inspector
General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)—the office tasked with reviewing
US reconstruction funding in Afghanistan—30 October
2021 Quarterly Report to Congress, p. 164. The total cost of Afghanistan
reconstruction efforts cited in reports often does not distinguish between ODA
and non-ODA-eligible expenditure. The OECD DAC defines
Official Development Assistance (ODA) as aid ‘administered with the
promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries as
its main objective’, and excludes the provision of military equipment and
services, anti-terrorism activities and most peacekeeping expenditures. The
cost of using armed forces to deliver humanitarian aid is eligible as ODA,
however. For the purposes of this report, aid generally refers to ODA eligible
expenditure. SIGAR reported
that the US$146 billion appropriated for Afghanistan relief and reconstruction
since 2002 was used to ‘build the Afghan National Security Forces, promote good
governance, conduct development assistance, and engage in counter-narcotics and
anti-corruption efforts.
[7]. UK House of
Commons Library, Afghanistan: development, UK aid, and the future, op.
cit., p. 25.
[8]. Senate Standing
Committee, Australia’s overseas development programs, op. cit., pp.
22–23.
[9]. UK House of
Commons Library, Afghanistan: development, UK aid, and the future, op.
cit., p. 23.
[10]. UK House of
Commons Library, Afghanistan: development, UK aid, and the future, op.
cit., pp. 5, 32.
[11]. John Allen and
Vanda Felbab-Brown (Brookings
Institution) also note: ‘… gains for women
have been distributed highly unequally, with the increases far greater for
women in urban areas. For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but
also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much
from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still
fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care,
attend school, and work. Many Afghan men remain deeply conservative. Typically,
families allow their girls to have a primary or secondary education—usually up
to puberty—and then will proceed with arranged marriages. Even if a young woman
is granted permission to attend a university by her male guardian, her father
or future husband may not permit her to work after graduation. Without any
prodding from the Taliban, most Afghan women in rural areas are fully covered
with the burqa’.
[12]. Senate Standing
Committee, Australia’s overseas development programs, op. cit., citing
Stephen Howes and Jonathan Pryke’s (Development
Policy Centre) submission to the inquiry, p. 226.
[13]. Senate Standing
Committee, Australia’s overseas development programs, op. cit., p. 26.
[14]. Ibid., p. 28.
[15]. J Howard (Prime
Minister), Ministerial statement to Parliament on the Australian
Defence Force commitment to Afghanistan, speech,
9 August 2006.
[16]. Senate Standing
Committee, Australia’s overseas development programs, op. cit., p. xv.
[17]. In their 2013
Devpolicy Blog, ‘The
effectiveness of Australian aid to Afghanistan: our thoughts on the Senate’s
tough evaluation task’, Howes and Pryke argued that ‘It is widely accepted
that most of the corruption involving aid in Afghanistan has occurred with aid
distributed outside the government system. By contrast, the ARTF, which has
been extensively and publicly reviewed (see here), seems to be an
effective aid delivery mechanism. There are risks and downsides to the
provision of budgetary support, but the experience in Afghanistan suggests that
there are also strong benefits’.
[18]. Senate Standing
Committee, Australia’s overseas development programs, op. cit., pp.
79–80.
[19]. The Senate
Standing Committee report cited Professor William Maley: ‘The risk is that
areas in which ordinary Afghans have done their best to produce local security
will be neglected by aid agencies, and that this will send the signal that the
way in which to secure aid money is to generate local insecurity’ (p. 112). The
report also cited AID/WATCH, one of a number of NGOs highly critical of the
military’s approach, which argued that while militarised aid could advance
short-term military goals, in the long term it ‘tended to intensify conflicts
associated with the war in Afghanistan’ (p. 113). In his evidence to the
inquiry, Brendan Sergeant (Department of Defence) noted that the ADF was aware
of this tension and acknowledged that aid was used for tactical purposes, and
tried to minimise the risk to non-military aid workers: ‘One of the
difficulties in this conflict is that it is a civil war and that the enemy will
exploit circumstances to try to persuade or coerce parts of the population to
either not cooperate with the government or to support them. That is one of the
unfortunate things that happen. In our approach to it we try to avoid or
minimise that happening, but it is part of the nature of the conflict’ (p.
118).
[20]. Senate Standing
Committee, Australia’s overseas development programs, op. cit., p. xvi. Similar
concerns have been voiced in regard to US aid, which routed an estimated 20
per cent of its humanitarian and development aid through the US military.
[21]. SIGAR, What
we need to learn: lessons from 20 years of Afghanistan reconstruction,
August 2021, p. xi.
[22]. Ibid., p. xi.
[23]. Ibid., p. viii.
[24]. W Byrd, ‘As U.S. troops leave
Afghanistan, can aid help in pursuing peace?’, United States
Institute of Peace, 7 July 2021.
[25]. J Dobbin, ‘Afghanistan
was lost long ago: defeat wasn’t inevitable, but early mistakes made success unlikely’,
Foreign Affairs, online article, 30 August 2021.
[26]. Official aid
does not represent the full amount of funds dedicated to reconstruction
efforts. VOA
reported that the SIGAR ‘noted that the U.S. Congress has appropriated
nearly $134 billion for Afghan reconstruction programs since the ouster of the
Taliban in late 2001’.
[27]. S Chayes, ‘Afghanistan’s
corruption was made in America’, Foreign Affairs, online article, 3
September 2021.
[28]. UK House of
Commons Library, Afghanistan: development, UK aid, and the future, op.
cit., p. 25.
[29]. K Clark, ‘The
Taleban’s rise to power: as the US prepared for peace, the Taleban prepared for
war’, Afghanistan Analysts
Network, 21 August 2021.
[30]. D Dollar and J
Murtazashvili, ‘Why
did state building efforts in Afghanistan fail?’ Dollar & Sense
podcast, The Brookings Institution, 30 August 2021.
[31]. D Acemoglu, ‘Why
nation building failed in Afghanistan’, Project Syndicate, 20 August
2021.
[32]. C Landers and R Aboneaaj, ‘Giving
up the “statebuilding” ghost: lessons from Afghanistan for foreign assistance
in fragile states’, Center for Global Development, 16 September 2021.
[33]. ME O’Hanlon, ‘A
preliminary verdict on Afghanistan strategy’, Brookings Institution, 5
October 2021.
[34]. NATO provides
troop numbers under its ‘Resolute Support Mission’ in International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF): key facts and figures, and also provides
an archive of
updates.
[35]. O’Hanlon, ‘A
preliminary verdict’, op. cit.
[36]. J Sandefur, ‘Here’s
the best thing the United States has done in Afghanistan’, Center
for Global Development, October 2013.
[37]. A Tooze, ‘Don’t
abandon Afghanistan’s economy too’, Foreign Policy, online article, 27 August 2021.
[38].
Major donors, the World Bank and the IMF have frozen aid and assets,
including the country’s US$9.4 billion foreign exchange reserves held by the US
Federal Reserve.
[39].
Australian Broadcasting Commission/AFP-Reuters, ‘G20
pledges help for Afghan humanitarian crisis at special summit’, 13 October
2021.
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