The Crucibles and Dilemmas of US State Building in Afghanistan

The U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, which began in 2001 as a presumably swift regime-change operation to drive the Taliban from power, morphed by the mid-2000s into a full-blown counterinsurgency against the Taliban’s effort to retake control of the country. In 2009, the Obama administration inherited the U.S. and international mission there in a condition of deep crisis. The Bush administration’s economy-of-force, minimal-input approach for Afghanistan, and its prioritization of Iraq, had left a structural environment in Afghanistan that motivated national and local powerbrokers to return to their ways of narrowly pursuing immediate power and profit maximization at the expense of building effective and accountable governance. Although the Obama administration tried to reverse these negative dynamics, its imposition of a time limit on the deployment of U.S. forces only reinforced the short-term, what’s-in-it-for-me calculus of the Afghan powerbrokers. The result has been a continuing uphill struggle to devise mechanisms to improve governance and sustain security gains. Henceforth, and still prevailing at the time of this writing, the United States and its allies have been struggling with a fundamental predicament: The Taliban insurgency feeds on the condition of inept and corrupt governance; yet the United States and its international partners have been unable to induce better governance from the Afghan government and unofficial powerbrokers.

Consequently, although the U.S. narrow counterterrorism objectives of deposing the Taliban and disrupting al Qaeda might seem to be accomplished, the success of the larger project – establishing a stable and legitimate government in Afghanistan that can deliver security and other essential public goods, and anchoring it in a solid regional arrangement — remains a huge question mark. The Afghan National Army (ANA) is improving as a force capable of providing security to the Afghan population and assuring Kabul’s writ. But whether these improvements will be sufficient before the majority of U.S. troops depart in 2014 is as yet highly uncertain. Meanwhile, political trends and the quality of governance in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate and are increasingly generating pressures that could yet explode in civil war. Thus even observable increases in physical security may not indicate durable stability if Afghans’ confidence in the future does not increase.

This article assesses the effects of U.S. policies adopted in Afghanistan on the quality of governance there. It focuses particularly on the Obama administration that early on elevated Afghanistan to a top priority in its foreign policy. The article highlights the key policy dilemmas, such as ambivalence over fighting corruption, in which even the Obama administration, highly motivated to induce governance improvements in Afghanistan, found itself caught up.

The Failure of Governance in post-2001 Afghanistan

What allowed the Taliban – an amalgam of the remnants of the traditional 1990s Taliban, alienated Afghan tribes and powerbrokers, the Haqqani faction, and foreign jihadists – to regain traction with the population in Afghanistan after being driven from power in 2001 was the failure of the new Afghan government under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai to deliver good governance. Pakistan’s sponsorship of the Taliban, continuing through 2011, critically strengthened the group’s military staying power. But it has been the failure of the new Afghan state to deliver good governance that resurrected the Taliban’s in with the Afghan people.

The new state failed not only to meet the expectations of the population concerning economic development, but even to maintain elemental security. The absence of Afghan national and international forces from large swaths of the country, including much of the strategic provinces of Kandahar and Helmand until 2009, allowed the Taliban to come back and reestablish itself in its former base by the rule of its Kalashnikovs. As the 2000s decade unfolded, street crime, such as thefts, robberies, and the rise of unofficial road tolls that had made Afghans’ lives miserable during the early 1990s, once again rapidly spread throughout the country — frequently perpetrated by members of the Afghan National Police (ANP), an institution seen by Afghans as one of the most corrupt. Moreover, the anti-Taliban warlords who became members of the post-Taliban government were the source of much of the political infighting and physical insecurity during the early post-Taliban years. As a result the state has been critically challenged in its most fundamental and inescapable function: delivering public safety, for which it remains dependent on outsiders and private entities.

The lack of a multifaceted state presence, including effective law enforcement and a respected judiciary, has resulted in the absence of the rule of law. Conflicts over land and water and tribal feuds have continued to characterize local politics. At times, they have intensified ethnic and regional disputes as many Pashtuns came to believe that the Tajiks of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance have enjoyed unfair access to political and economic power in the post-Taliban political dispensations. Officials at all levels of the Afghan government have often usurped power for personal enrichment and power accumulation. They have approached their positions as governors, police chiefs, and members of Provincial Development Councils (the key governing body at the provincial level) as personal fiefs. Corruption has become pervasive, exacerbated by the bourgeoning illegal cultivation of poppy, structural deficiencies of state institutions, and predatory behavior of official and unofficial powerbrokers.

The overall governance situation in the post-Taliban era has been one of weakly functioning state institutions being subverted by influential powerbrokers for power and profit accumulation. The state has been unable and sometimes unwilling to uniformly enforce laws and policies, while many regulations have not necessarily been seen as legitimate by the population. Not surprisingly, Afghans systematically distrust state institutions (as well as unofficial powerbrokers) to equitably enforce laws and allocate resources. And after thirty years of conflict, Afghans have come to operate on short-term horizons and discount the future in favor of the present. The great uncertainties about the stability of Afghanistan post-2014 reinforce a historically conditioned sense among Afghans that one has to benefit from today’s opportunities now and a reluctance to undertake long-term institutional investments and submit to the rule of law.

Isolation from Local Populations and Limited Understanding of Complex Politico-Economic Structures

The counterinsurgency and good-governance-building efforts have been plagued by insufficient understanding on the part of outsiders of the very complex and fluid essence of the Afghan environment. The difficult questions of how much force protection is appropriate for the military and the civilians and how much interaction (and of what kind) is permissible between the international community and the Afghan population have tended to be resolved in the direction of greater protection requirements and a thin amount of direct exchanges between the internationals and the locals. Locked up at the military bases and headquarters of the provincial reconstruction teams (PRT), the development arm of the military effort, the internationals have been excessively dependent on selected Afghan interlocutors, such as government officials or powerbrokers, for much of their understanding of the local dynamics. The reliability of these Afghan interlocutors of the international community, however, has often been problematic. Frequently not able to comprehend or unwilling to deal with the deeper socio-economic and political problems in the areas of their responsibility, they are prone to provide a skewed intelligence picture, sometimes deliberately designed to maximize their power and profit. To the extent that international forces have ventured out among the population, they often have focused on very narrow intelligence gathering, such as tactical information on the Taliban, without generating a broad socio-economic, political, and ethnic understanding of the conditions in each locality and the recent and historic conflicts and cleavages within them.

Lack of Clarity Regarding the Definition of the Mission

Both the U.S. government and other members of the coalition have struggled with how to define the mission. For the United States, the question has been whether to define the objective as state-building that results in a stable central Afghan governing entity or as limited counterterrorism. At times, the Bush administration also included democracy and women’s rights in its objectives, issues that have been significantly less emphasized by the Obama administration. Moreover, even when counterterrorism was determined to be the primary objective, the question remained whether an off-shore, air-based counterterrorism approach could be effective without a state-building component.

These two competing definitions of the objectives dictate very different strategies, force postures, and civilian components of the strategy, such as development. They are premised on very different behavior on the part of the Afghans and create different expectations in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan. They also generate different expectations in the domestic constituencies of governments contributing forces to the international coalition. Thus the vacillation among these two competing definitions of U.S. objectives in Afghanistan has greatly complicated the campaign there as well as limited the amount of resources the U.S. and its ISAF allies have been willing to dedicate to the effort.

The Obama administration inherited the war at a time when the military situation on the battlefield was going poorly and the quality of Afghan governance was progressively deteriorating. Afghanistan was experiencing the greatest insecurity and corruption since 2001. The Obama administration too struggled to resolve the counterterrorism-from-air versus state-building question, with its major domestic political ramifications, about whether to intensify the U.S. involvement, including crucially its military component, or dramatically scale down the mission. Even as it greatly increased the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, the administration ultimately attempted to define the mission as essentially one of counterterrorism to satisfy the U.S. domestic public that has been increasingly opposed to the war. But that message failed to resonate with the Afghan population.

To pressure the Afghan government to step up to the challenge and Afghanize the war (so as to avoid the United States being bogged down in “another Vietnam”), the Obama administration also imposed a timeline on how long the U.S. military surge would last. But the imposition of the timeline has not induced Afghan government officials to reduce corruption and improve governance. Instead, it has jeopardized the military gains of the surge and contributed to a sense among the Afghans that the United States may not succeed in the effort and would abandon them, thus perpetuating and intensifying the kind of Afghan behavior that privileges short-term horizons and efforts to maximize power and profit as quickly as possible.

The two competing concepts of counterterrorism or state-building also have led to acute uncertainty as to whether a negotiated solution with the Taliban is possible and appropriate. The uncertainty extends to whether the Taliban can be trusted to uphold any agreement and break with al Qaeda, what the red lines for the U.S. government are, whether or not and how Pakistan should be brought into the negotiations, and whether negotiations and reconciliation involve only luring individual fighters away with economic incentives, peeling off tribes, or actual strategic negotiations with the Taliban. Nor has it been fully resolved whether the “reconciled” peeled-off groups would be given jobs and sent back to their villages, or rearmed under the various militia programs taking place in Afghanistan and sent back to fight the Taliban.

The question of whether to engage in strategic negotiations with the Taliban was all the more sensitive for the United States since it had previously vigorously opposed Pakistan’s series of negotiations with Pakistani-Taliban groups and their affiliates. Unlike Britain, which as early as 2005 embraced negotiations as an important part of the overall strategy and progressively came to focus on a negotiated solution, the United States was reluctant to embrace negotiations until 2010. But with a U.S. blessing finally, Afghan-led negotiations ultimately got underway in the spring 2010. Since then, the United States has taken a more active role in negotiations, at times making the governments in Kabul and Islamabad feel that they were being bypassed. Thus both Afghanistan and Pakistan have attempted to reassert greater control over negotiations, such as by arresting Taliban interlocutors like Mullah Baradar under the guise of counterterrorism, or leaking the identity of another interlocutor Tayyab Agha. Furthermore, international actors, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Germany, have tried to play a prominent role in the negotiations. The result has been that many different processes and initiatives have been taking place at the same time and making an already opaque negotiating situation even murkier.

The negotiations with the Taliban are also controversial within Afghanistan, with many groups fearing that their status would be severely jeopardized by any deal. Foremost among the wary are the northerners, especially Panshiri Tajiks, who have strong memories of Taliban oppression and who achieved unprecedented political, economic, and military power in the post-2001 Afghanistan settlement. Many civil society groups, such as women’s organizations, also fear a settlement. But so do the Kandahari Durrani elites. So far, the Afghan-led and U.S. independent negotiations have amounted mostly to talking about talking. The September 2011 Taliban assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a prominent Tajik, Afghanistan’s former president, and Karzai’s key man for negotiating with the Taliban, further threw the various negotiations track into disarray.

Moreover, as the subsequent discussion shows, all the strategic questions – even when resolved at the policy level – become immeasurably more complex at the operational and implementation level.

Shortcuts on the Battlefield – Militias by Any Other Name

The time limit on U.S. combat troop deployments and the corollary constraints, borne in part out of the U.S. financial crisis, on the transfer and funding of resources have also complicated the effort to “Afghanize” the war. Afghanization was supposed to proceed by speeding up the building of Afghan institutions, such as the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. Throughout much of the post-Taliban decade, the ANP has been highly underperforming, rapacious, and corrupt. Although over the past two years, some efforts to combat corruption have been undertaken, often cloaking schemes to move political allies into key positions within the ANP, the police have continued to be defined as essentially a light version of the military, to be used for counterinsurgency purposes, instead of an entity designed for fighting crime, a key grievance of the Afghan population. Although intensified U.S. training has improved the quality of the police, even their elite unit, Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), has at times fallen short of the hoped-for-results.

Receiving the most intense training focus from ISAF, the ANA has made the greatest strides. Not only has it grown in size, but also its quality has improved. The coming two years before 2014 will show how much capacity the ANA has to tackle the Taliban and other forms of insecurity. But even the ANA represents hardly a clear-cut success. Worrisomely, it appears that it is deeply riven by ethnic factions. Most of its high-level commanders continue to be northerners, and southern Pashtuns exhibit little interest in signing up for even rank-and-file positions. Thus, there is a real danger that the ANA may fracture along ethnic lines and around particular commanders when the foreigners leave.

The difficulties in standing up Afghan security institutions rapidly and in securing even the key eighty high-priority districts have led to yet another short-cut, repeated throughout the effort since 2001—namely, propping up militias under various names. Often however, the militias have proved problematic in effectively prevailing against the Taliban, while undermining the effort to build up a viable and accountable Afghan state.

Inspired by the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, whose Sunni militias, along with the U.S. military surge, were a crucial part of beating down al Qaeda in Iraq and decreasing the intensity of the civil war, the Afghan “militias” are supposed to increase security in areas where ANP, ANA, and ISAF presence has been limited to nonexistent, and to supply intelligence because of their superior knowledge of the local environment. With ISAF denying that the program amounts to a militia effort (calling the units everything else but militias and insisting that it is based on Afghan traditions, such as arbakai), the latest version of the program is called Afghan Local Police (ALP). It is slated to generate at least 30,000, and perhaps as many as 60,000, recruits.

The effort is nothing new: the Soviets in the 1980s resorted to raising tribal militias when they realized that they were not winning in Afghanistan and used the militias as part of an exit strategy. Indeed, Afghans overwhelmingly associate the militia program with the Soviets’ defeat and see it as yet another signal of the U.S. preparing to leave without a stable order in place. Since 2002, various versions of the militia option have existed, such as the Afghan Auxiliary Police, the Afghan Public Protection Program (APPP), Village Stabilization program, and the Community Defense Initiative, also known as Local Defense Initiative groups in some areas. In some of these efforts, the self-defense forces are not supposed to be paid; but many of them insist on some sort of payment, so the non-payment rule is often adjusted.

A great deal of skepticism is warranted about such efforts. Unevenness in the quality of such local forces and their long-term consequences is to be expected. It is doubtful that the militias can reliably accomplish the tactical objective of effectively fighting the Taliban. They are often weak and do not have assured lines of resupply or good in-extremis support if they come under overwhelming Taliban attack. When in Wardak, for example, the APPP forces ran out of ammunition as a result of Ministry of Interior (MoI) lack of support and shed their uniforms to avoid being targeted by the Taliban, all the U.S. military supervisor of the program could offer was to encourage them “to put on a brave face and look like they have ammo.”

Tribal structures in much of Afghanistan have been deeply damaged, and the community often is unable to resist the Taliban physically. Thus, the militias at times hedge their bets by transferring a part of their income – including from ISAF – to the Taliban to reduce its attacks and reach a modus vivendi with the Taliban. Indeed, such hedging is typical of Afghan history, with local warlords, khans, and tribes siding and making peace with those they sense would prevail in a conflict, easily breaking deals if the situation on the battlefield changes. Sometimes, the accommodation between the militias and the Taliban even results in temporary improvements in security in the locale, such as long roads, and the community welcomes it. Logar, where such an initiative is currently under way, presents a good example. But the reduction in violence often exists only at the mercy of the Taliban and the deal collapses when the Taliban chooses to renege on it.

At the same time, the militias greatly complicate state-building efforts and efforts to improve governance in Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly unpopular with Afghans of all ethnic groups, except the powerbrokers who try to sell their militias to ISAF for hefty payoffs, the militias have a long history of turning their force on local populations. The predatory behavior toward local communities in which they have engaged includes the theft of land and goods, extortion, and murder. In Kunduz, for example, after they defeated the Taliban in their villages, they started extorting the communities and demanding taxes for themselves. Not infrequently, they also turn and fight each other, instead of the Taliban. One notorious case of such infighting took place in Uruzgan in 2010.

Although the ALP is supervised by the Afghan Ministry of Interior (MoI), the Ministry has often proved unable to control the self-defense forces. Under the leadership of Bismullah Mohammadi, the MoI, long one of Afghanistan’s most corrupt and ethnically-rift institutions, has also sought to legitimize and formalize other militias not vetted like the ALP, raising worries about intensification of predatory behavior by the militias. Often none of the vetting checks found necessary for the ANA and ANP, such as government IDs, medical screening (including a drug test), and biometric screening are in place for the ALP and other militias. Although the district police chief is to remain in authority over the ALP units, that post has often been associated with some of the greatest and most consistent corruption in Afghanistan. In the ALP’s case, three village elders are also supposed to vouch for each militiaman. Yet not infrequently a powerbroker controls the village elders, dictating his preferences in a way that escapes international scrutiny. At other times, the village elders have no problem vouching for the militia members as long as they only extort a rival village. The internationals often fail to have a sufficient understanding of the local conditions to effectively control the militias. Nor have they put in place any rollback mechanisms should some militia units go rogue.

The militia program can also easily inflame ethnic tensions: An official of the National Directorate of Security in Baghlan, for example, told me that the militias were a good idea as long as they were Tajiks. He was not sure about arming the Pashtuns, however.

Proposals to extend the role of the community development councils (CDCs — described in detail below) to oversee the local ALP units are also full of pitfalls. Potentially such CDC involvement could be a useful mechanism for exercising local-community oversight and reducing the chance of the ALP abusing the local community. The CDCs have been one of the most effective and accountable mechanisms of community decision-making and involvement in local development. Widely representative of the community and enjoying credibility with the local community, the CDCs thus are prima facie an appealing oversight mechanism as well as a check on the district police chief. Yet encouraging the CDCs to monitor the ALP can backfire and subject the CDCs to untenable political pressures. One of the reasons why the CDCs have escaped the broader political manipulation and corruption that characterizes governance in Afghanistan is that they have been handling very small amounts of money – in the single thousands of dollars for a particular project. In a place flooded with millions of dollars in foreign aid and contracts, the amounts were too small to generate undesirable interest on the part of local powerbrokers in such projects. Even the Taliban has mostly not bothered to skim them. So the CDCs have largely been left free from political interference.

However, if the CDCs are tasked with monitoring the ALP, both the Taliban and local powerbrokers may start taking far greater notice of them and attempt to manipulate or coerce them. If the community’s will expressed through the CDCs prevails, a great achievement for governance and reduction in influence of the powerbrokers will be scored. If not, the ALP oversight role can easily spell the end of the CDCs effectiveness. Moreover, with effective CDC involvement, the oversight function would still extend only within a community – that is, within a village. Only the district police chief is tasked with making sure that the ALP not only stays true to the wishes of the community, but also does not beat up rival communities.

Even when the militias-by-any-other-name occasionally seem to deliver results, without close monitoring and the ability to disarm them and control them, they often go bad quickly. The 2010 experience with militias in Nangarhar illustrates this dynamic. The tribes in Achin and Shinwar regions of Nangarhar province spontaneously raised anti-Taliban militias. Enthusiastically embraced by U.S. military command in Afghanistan and promised financial sponsorship, the tribes were incorporated into the Community Defense Initiative, another version of the local militia approach. But quickly, the militias turned on a rival tribe. Using U.S.-provided weapons and claiming to have U.S. backing, they “reclaimed” land disputed between the two tribes and triggered violence in large portions of the province. Thus even when the program is performing its function of beating down the Taliban in a particular locale, it still leaves behind armed men who can and often do challenge the already weak central government and engage in predation of local communities.

Continuing Confusion over Whether to Tackle Corruption and How

The lack of resolution of the debate over whether effective counterterrorism in Afghanistan requires state-building also has produced continuing policy oscillation over whether to combat corruption and how. Reliance on corrupt and abusive warlords for intelligence, logistics, and direct counterterrorism operations often comes at the price of ignoring governance issues. Some of the most notorious powerbrokers, such as Ahmed Wali Karzai, Matullah Khan, and Gul Agha Shirzai, know how to get things done to facilitate the operations of the international community in Afghanistan. The internationals are often too isolated behind the Hesco gravel bags at their compounds to be aware how rapacious and discriminatory some of their key Afghan interlocutors have been, or just choose to ignore their problematic aspects.

Especially early on, the Obama administration accorded greater importance to fighting corruption in Afghanistan: building up various civilian structures, such as the Major Crime Task Force, and ultimately similar equivalent units within ISAF, such as its anti-corruption task force, Shafafyat. But it often demanded reform with an intensity that ignored Afghan realities and political complexities — a system in which the highest government officials as well as the lowest ones, line ministries, banking centers, and most international contracts are pervaded by corruption. The Obama anti-corruption campaign thus secured dramatic promises from President Karzai to tackle corruption, with little actual follow up. Moreover, the lack of prioritization as to what corruption needs to be addressed first and definitely, often ignores the political debts President Karzai owes and his internal entanglements and dependencies. Karzai thus often seeks (and many times succeeds) to reverse the anti-corruption efforts, such as indictments of powerful corrupt officials or the development of anti-corruption and anti-crime institutions which the internationals are trying to stand up.

But as the Obama administration decided to scale down its military presence in Afghanistan, U.S. officials started vacillating once again in their determination to take on corruption. Many in the U.S. government have begun to argue that tackling corruption is a luxury the United States can no longer afford; instead it needs to prioritize stability. This school of thought holds that limiting the military mission in Afghanistan mostly to remotely-delivered airborne counterterrorist strikes could permit working through the local warlords and powerbrokers, instead of being obsessed with the means they used to acquire their power and their criminal entanglements and discriminatory practices. Meanwhile, absent a coherent policy on corruption, the Obama administration and ISAF have failed to develop mechanisms and structures to work around and marginalize the problematic powerbrokers and often continue to be dependent on their services. As a high-ranking ISAF official in Kandahar told me in the fall of 2010, “In the current struggle for Kandahar, our nightmare is having to take on the Taliban and Wali [the then-alive Ahmed Wali Khan] at the same time. But we understand that he has alienated some people in Kandahar.” He then went on to enthusiastically describe how then-Col. Abdul Razziq – a notorious powerbroker and smuggler from Spin Boldak –recently successfully cleared Mahlajat, a troubled subdistrict of Kandahar City, off the Taliban, “something even the Soviets couldn’t do.” ISAF has since brought Razziq to Arghandab and other areas of Kandahar to conduct military operations there and he has been named police chief in Kandahar. A former high official of the U.S. PRT in Kandahar explained the difficulties the international community has faced when trying to impose on powerbrokers such as Razziq redlines, such as no undermining of provincial and district officials and no interference with the Peace Jirga (a body established by President Karzai to set up the broad framework for reconciliation with the Taliban) and parliamentary elections. “But very quickly they violated all of the redlines we gave them. But they are effective in getting things done. We can’t go after them at the same time as we are fighting the Taliban. When the Taliban is defeated, the Afghans will take care of the powerbrokers themselves.” In short, the U.S. and international community’s commitment to good governance and the tackling of corruption has been deeply conflicted. All too often, it has appeared troublingly inconsistent and half-hearted to Afghans.

The massive infusion of tens of billions of foreign aid into Afghanistan has also generated its own corruption. Large amounts of the aid money appear to have been siphoned off by clever powerbrokers. At other times, these financial flows have strengthened existing powerbrokers who can get their hands on the money and who have developed vested interests in preventing others and the population at large from accessing these financial flows. Some of the contract wars in places like Kandahar have been actual wars with rival businessmen linked to prominent tribes and powerbrokers, such as the Popolzais and Ahmed Wali Karzai on the one hand and the Barakzais and Gul Agha Shirzai on the other hand, physically shooting each other to get access to the contract money and setting up coercive monopolies under the guise of business associations to control the rents. At other times, the aid flows have given rise to new “khans,” further undermining both the traditional institutions as well as the official government that the international community has struggled to stand up. Many have financially profited from the insecurity that generates demands for private security companies and militias and that prevents effective monitoring.

The international community’s strategy has thus oscillated between tolerating corruption for the sake of other goals — with the justification that Afghans are used to corruption anyway– or confronting it head on, but with little effectiveness.

A constant challenge and dilemma has been whether to provide money through the Afghan government — “on budget ” — or directly from the international community to “the people.” In theory, channeling outside financial aid through the national government is highly desirable since it can increase fiscal capacity of the state and link the population more closely to the state, building accountability. Yet, the Afghan government at its various levels has turned out to be too corrupt and too lacking in capacity to process the money (at least what has been left after the international community’s “overhead” deductions). Bypassing the national government and channeling money directly or through NGOs have resulted at times in the money reaching the ground faster (though not necessarily in a less corrupt manner). But such mechanisms also have undermined the government’s authority and capacity and often have strengthened local powerbrokers. At the July 2010 donor conference in Kabul, President Karzai won a pledge from the international community that at least fifty percent of all economic assistance would be channeled through the national government within two years, while the United States announced it now believed it had developed a certification process to determine which Afghan ministries were qualified to receive U.S. assistance directly.

Ignoring corruption is often justified as prioritizing stability, but since corruption and the lack of rule of law are key mobilizing mechanisms for the Taliban and source of Afghans’ anger with their government, it is doubtful that stability can be achieved without addressing at least the most egregious corruption. Yet the system is so pervasively corrupt and so deeply and intricately linked to key structures of power and networks of influence, that some prioritization of anti-corruption focus is required. Although the internationals currently do not have the capacity to do without the powerbrokers, they can mitigate at least their most detrimental behavior, such as systematic discrimination against particular tribes. Anti-corruption efforts should focus on limiting tribal or ethnic discrimination in access to jobs, especially in the ANA and ANP, and on expanding access to markets and contracts. A corollary of limiting ethnic discrimination within the security services is making sure that particular ethnic groups or people from particular regions who do not have access to influential powerbrokers in the higher-level commands are not selectively posted to very violent areas for too long without being rotated out; also that command levels are not dominated by a particular ethnic group, such as the Tajiks; and salaries and leaves are distributed by superiors without discrimination.

Additionally, it is critical to focus on corruption that undermines the emergence of the already fragile markets in Afghanistan. Such severely detrimental corruption includes unofficial checkpoints and escalating bribes to be paid at the checkpoints, corruption in the banking sector, such as the theft at the Kabul Bank that threatened to unravel Afghanistan’s entire banking sector, and corruption in line ministries wherein a bribe is paid and yet the service is still not delivered and the bribe has to be paid several times over.

Finally, efforts to undermine effective local officials should not be tolerated. The international community should use the problematic powerbrokers as little as possible and only as last resort. The damage the powerbrokers can inflict on the international community’s efforts may well necessitate “having them in the tent rather than trying to pull the stakes off the tent on the outside,” as an ISAF official put it. But if the powerbrokers bring down the tent from the inside by their rapacious behavior, the state-building effort will be equally ineffective.

There is a real cost to prioritizing the anti-corruption campaign as opposed to combating corruption of any sort in a blanket way. The prioritized approach requires an intelligence picture that the international community does not have. And it can again expose the international community to the risk of being seen as inconsistent and embracing double-standards. But with the continuing dependence on problematic interlocutors, such prioritized focus is perhaps the best the internationals can currently hope to accomplish. Emphasizing all corruption equally will likely run up against the political dependencies of the current Afghan government and motivate it to do nothing on corruption to avoid rocking the boat.

However, whatever redlines the internationals do set for the powerbrokers, the internationals need to be prepared to uphold. And they need to be willing to take punitive actions if the powerbrokers violate them. The internationals thus should only set as redlines for President Karzai and for the powerbrokers such limits that they actually have the will and capacity to enforce. A consistent failure to act against behavior designated as intolerable only undermines the reputation and effectiveness of the international community.

Direct Efforts to Improve Governance — Pressuring the National Government and Going Local

Even to the extent that combating corruption in Afghanistan has at times been determined to be a key objective of the U.S. government and the international community, the international community has struggled to devise effective mechanisms to accomplish the objective.

Believing that the Bush Administration let President Karzai off the hook on corruption and poor government performance, the Obama administration arrived at the White House with a determination to pressure Karzai into changing his behavior or marginalizing him so that he would not be reelected in the 2010 presidential elections. But the pressure did not pay off: President Karzai still won the election through fraud and by coopting various powerbrokers and promising them government appointments or behind-the-scenes influence. Nor did he change his behavior and propensity to tolerate corruption, despite overt promises to the contrary.

Subsequent public criticism from the United States also failed to increase Karzai’s motivation to tackle corruption and improve governance. Nor did it succeed in getting Karzai to remove the most problematic powerbrokers and government officials from positions of influence. Having been conditioned both by his early experiences of observing tribal politics in Kandahar and by the internationals’ early reluctance to take on the warlords, President Karzai has chosen instead to shuffle the problematic powerbrokers around Afghanistan’s various ministries and provinces.

Instead of improving governance and satisfying Washington’s demand, the Afghan president has become deeply antagonistic toward and distrustful of the United States while feeling all the more beholden to various Afghan powerbrokers. Rather than encouraging Karzai to become a more reliable partner of the international community, the overt pressure from Washington has increased his paranoia, his reliance on a progressively smaller clique of advisors, mainly his immediate family, and his fundamental distrust of his international partners. A subsequent softer approach to Karzai adopted by Washington in the spring of 2010 did not succeed in assuaging his distrust of the internationals while creating the impression that the international community was caving into Karzai’s antics.

Indeed, a fundamental discrepancy in mutual understanding of what fostering good governance means continues to exist between the international community and President Karzai. Washington and the internationals define good governance as building effective and corruption-free institutions and bureaucracies. President Karzai, however, focuses on the weakness of the central state, not its lack of accountability, and defines improving governance as expanding and deepening the Kandahari Durrani power structures and his personal network while infusing those two endeavors with a national image.

Thus instead of caving to Western pressure, the Arg Palace (the presidential seat in Kabul) has responded with various counterstrategies. These have included: blaming others for Afghanistan problems, including international observers and international members of the Electoral Complaints Election for perpetrating fraud in the presidential elections; attacking the international community and repeating various anti-foreigner conspiracy theories believed by the Afghans; threatening actions directly contradictory to the war effort, such as suggesting that he would join the Taliban if the foreigners continued to put pressure on him, suggesting that in a military conflict between the United States and Pakistan, Afghanistan would side with Pakistan, or shutting down private security companies on which the international community has been dependent for logistics and security; and seeking to create divisions within the international community while and courting new friends, such as Russia and Iran.

Frustration with Karzai and a lack of progress in pressuring Kabul to improve governance resulted in the internationals’ embrace of a “going local” approach to governance. Instead of seeking to work through the central government, the international community came to focus on local officials and traditional local governance mechanisms, such as shuras (local councils of tribal elders). Given Afghanistan’s traditionally weak center and highly decentralized power arrangements, such a policy made sense. Among the mechanisms created under this new approach were the Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG), which soon became coopted by Kabul and run by a Karzai loyalist, Jelani Popal, and the Afghan Social Outreach Program (ASOP) that has sought to generate village-level and district-level governance, including in highly insecure areas, by paying local tribal elders to form shuras. The hope was that the ASOP structures could also be used more directly in the counterinsurgency effort. A corollary to going local has been an effort to rapidly dispatch district officials and local representatives of line ministries to areas cleared from insurgents through the military surge.

Nonetheless, the same deficiencies that plagued local administration prior to the military surge often continue to plague it after the surge: Local officials are still completely dependent on Kabul for their budgets in the highly centralized system that Afghanistan adopted in 2004 (even though President Karzai is often disparaged as a weak mayor of Kabul). Many local officials – be they ex-patriots parachuted to Afghanistan from abroad or local Afghans – also often have little knowledge of local conditions, limited willingness to spend time in the violent districts, and limited acceptability to local communities or powerbrokers.

The experience of Kandahar’s governor Tooryalai Wesa is just one of many examples: Wesa was brought back to Kandahar from Canada, but Kandahar’s powerbrokers, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, continued to maintain authority and ran circles around the governor. Other local officials, even while liked and embraced by the international community, such as Abdul Jabar, Arghandab’s district governor in 2010 before he was killed, subsequently turned out to be deeply corrupt, involved in criminal activities, such as skimming large sums of money from foreign aid, and even in cahoots with the Taliban.

In areas of improved security and strong international supervision, the quality of local district governors, police chiefs, and line ministry representatives has been improving. But such improvements are often highly dependent on particular individuals. The lack of institutionalization and the persisting incentive structures that privilege short-term personal gains over long-term investments in the development of quality institutions make any such improvements in governance highly vulnerable to Taliban assassinations of the good local leaders or to power-plays by other Afghan powerbrokers who are threatened by good local officials.

Many of the shuras embraced by the international community have not accurately and equitably represented local communities either. They too have often lacked the capacity to address governance problems and have been dominated behind the scenes by problematic powerbrokers. Rather, just like district government officials, the shuras need to be constantly supervised by the internationals to ensure that they fully reflect the various factions and voices of the community. But the influence of powerbrokers as well as Taliban assassinations of tribal elders often discourage such broad representation. Some of the shuras created under ASOP, for example, failed to perform altogether and only served as a way for local strongmen to extract money from the international community.

Even local leaders who have performed well have faced great challenges. The international community has attempted to reward such well-performing local leaders by channeling money and influence through them. But as the tensions between President Karzai and the international community escalated during the Obama administration, such direct international endorsement has at times become a kiss of death for the local officials, causing President Karzai to see them as a threat and to attempt to marginalize them or remove them from office.

Perhaps the most successful model of local governance in Afghanistan has been the so-called community development councils (CDCs) established under the auspices of the National Solidarity Program (NSP). Inspired by a similar program in Indonesia, the CDCs were instituted in Afghanistan in the early part of the decade by then Minister-of-Finance Ashraf Ghani. Designed to distribute small grants to village-level communities, the program has required participation of the entire community in decisions regarding development projects and their execution as well as the local community’s contribution of its own resources to the projects.

Yet the CDCs too have faced challenges and limitations. One of the reasons they escaped the corruption and rent-seeking problems that have plagued larger aid programs and contracts has been that the sums transferred to the CDCs have been relatively small. Consequently, many powerbrokers have not bothered to muscle onto the projects. Yet if such administration and policy designs were to be scaled up, they might well lose some of the representation, oversight, and joint community responsibility and could attract detrimental attention from rapacious powerbrokers. Already, insecurity has jeopardized some of the CDCs, with the Taliban demanding a cut from the CDC funds in areas of strong Taliban presence, such as Ghazni province. But these “taxes” to the Taliban shrank some of the resources to the point that the CDC programs could not be implemented. When approached for supplemental funds, the central government has mostly insisted that the local community either expel the Taliban, provide intelligence on it, or dip into its own pockets to take care of the financial shortfall. The CDCs representatives refused to undertake the anti-Taliban measures and maintained that since it was the responsibility of the government to defeat the Taliban and provide security, Kabul should pay for the Taliban tax.

Moreover, many of the governance and economic development problems, such as regional water managements or electrification, require decision-making and coordination at cross-provincial levels and simply cannot be addressed locally.

Thus, although the focus on local governance is appropriate because it is organic to Afghanistan’s traditional political arrangements and is the way most Afghans experience the government, it can only supplement national governance, not plaster over governance deficiencies of the central state.

The Love that Money Can’t Buy – Economic Stabilization Programs

Linked to the ever-shifting debate about whether the international mission in Afghanistan is one of counterterrorism or state-building, economic development efforts by the international community in Afghanistan have been plagued by a similar vacillation between two competing understandings of the purpose of economic development projects. Is the purpose of the economic projects to buy off the population and wean it off from the insurgents or are the economic efforts designed to produce long-term sustainable development?

The buy-off concept has included the so-called quick-impact projects carried out by the U.S. military with money from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) or through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) as well as the so-called “economic stabilization projects,” also known as District Delivery Program or District Stabilization Framework, carried out by USAID. The latter were designed as short-term cash-for-work programs, lasting weeks or at best months. Their goals have been to keep Afghan males employed so that economic necessities do not drive them to join the Taliban and to secure the allegiance of the population who, ideally, will provide intelligence on the insurgents. Under this concept, U.S. economic development efforts have prioritized the most violent areas. Accordingly, the vast majority of the $250 million USAID Afghanistan budget for 2010 went to only two provinces: Kandahar and Helmand. In Helmand’s Nawa district, for example, USAID spent upward of $30 million within nine months, in what some dubbed “[the] carpet bombing of Nawa with cash.” With Nawa’s 75,000 people, such aid amounts to $400 per person, while Afghanistan’s per capita income is only $300 per year.

Although U.S. government officials emphasize that these stabilization programs have generated tens of thousands of jobs in Afghanistan’s south, many of the efforts have been unsustainable short-lived programs, such as canal cleaning and grain-storage and road building, or small grants, such as for seeds and fertilizers. Characteristically, they collapse as soon as the money runs out, often in the span of several weeks. Nor has adequate consideration been given to the development of assured markets; consequently much of the produce cultivated under the USAID-contracted programs would possibly not find buyers and rot.

There is also little evidence that these programs have secured the allegiance of the population to either the Afghan government or ISAF forces or resulted in increases in intelligence from the population on the Taliban. But as many of these programs were budgeted to run only through October 2010 or December 2010 (then to be replaced by long-term sustainable development that the persisting insecurity often still prevents), their closure sometimes antagonized the population by disappointing raised expectations. Another half a billion dollars of U.S. aid was allocated for southern Afghanistan in 2011.

Because of the complexity and opacity of Afghanistan’s political, economic, and contracting scene, many of these international programs have continued to flow to problematic, discriminatory, and corrupt powerbrokers, generating further resentment among the population, and intensifying Afghanistan’s rampant corruption and lack of accountability. At other times, they have spurred new tribal rivalries and community tensions.

Nor have these programs yet addressed the structural deficiencies of the rural economy in Afghanistan, including the drivers of poppy cultivation. A microcredit system, for example, continues to be lacking throughout much of Afghanistan. In fact, many of the stabilization efforts, such as wheat distribution or grant programs, directly undermine some of the long-term imperatives for addressing the structural market deficiencies, such as the development of microcredit or the establishment of local Afghan seed-banks and seed markets and rural enterprise and value-added chains. Shortcuts such as the so-called Food Zone in Helmand and similar wheat distribution schemes elsewhere in Afghanistan are symptomatic of the minimal, short-term economic and security payoffs (but substantial medium-term costs) mode with which the internationals have operated in Afghanistan. The result: persisting deep market deficiencies and compromised rule of law.

There is a delicate three-way balance among long-term development, the need to generate support among the population and alleviate economic deprivation in the short term, and state-building. A counternarcotics “alternative livelihoods” program in Afghanistan provides a telling example: Aware of the deeply destabilizing effects of poppy suppression in the absence of alternative livelihoods and yet under pressure to reduce poppy cultivation, Helmand Governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal, widely acclaimed as a competent and committed governor, launched a wheat-seed distribution project during the 2008-09 growing season. In order not to grow poppy, farmers were handed free wheat seeds. This program proved popular with the segments of the Helmand population who received the free wheat and the program was emulated throughout Afghanistan and continued in 2010.

Poppy cultivation did decrease in Helmand in 2009, and many enthusiastically attributed the results to the wheat distribution program, rather than low opium prices. And yet there are good reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the program, at least with respect to development and even governance. Because of land density issues in Afghanistan, the lack of sustainability of the favorable wheat-to-opium price ratios under which the program took effect, and the limited ability of wheat cultivation to generate employment, wheat turns out to be a singularly inappropriate replacement crop for large parts of Afghanistan. Indeed, much of the wheat seed ended up being sold in markets rather than sown.

Due to the insecurity prevailing in Helmand at the time, the program was undertaken without any field assessment of what drives poppy cultivation in particular areas of Helmand and in Afghanistan more broadly, — a deficient policy-making processes in which policy was developed without understanding of the causes of the problem it was trying to address. Yet because most people welcome free handouts, the program was popular. But it also became politically manipulated by local administrators and tribal elders who sought to strengthen their power. Although the program was deficient from a development perspective, it brought immediate political benefits to those who sponsored it, including the political machinery of President Hamid Karzai who at that time was seeking reelection. Good governance was thus equated with the immediate handouts and their political payoff without regard for long-term economic development, best practices, and optimal decision-making processes.

At the same time, the wheat program and other economic stabilization programs often set up expectations on the part of the population of free handouts from the central government and international community without being economically viable and sustainable in the long term and without requiring commitments from the local community. Thus, many of the CERP and stabilization programs have encouraged the Afghans to expect payoffs for any activity consistent with the interests of the international community, even if the activity is also in their own interest.

The CDCs on the contrary have required strong community participation and commitments to the development projects. Modeled similarly, the approach of the Dutch PRT in Uruzgan (at least until its forces withdrew in 2010) was particularly effective in limiting both the locals’ expectations of free handouts and communal and inter-tribal tensions over the distribution of external assistance. The Dutch insisted that any economic project be sanctioned by the entire community and that the PRT would only contribute the resources or technical knowledge that the community lacked. Thus the community had to identify and carry out all that it could execute in the project on its own, and the Dutch PRT and partner NGOs would only supply the rest.

Despite such examples, political pressures from the bottom up continue to reinforce ISAF’s predilection for the short-term quick-impact projects. Sustainable development requires a lot of time, but the Afghan population has been highly impatient to see some minimal improvements and often has demanded handout programs without regard for long-term sustainability and desirability. At least some Afghan government officials, however, have become dissatisfied with the short-term cash-for-work programs and are demanding that foreign aid be instead structured as capacity-building efforts and long-term development projects.

Yet the persisting, even if substantially reduced insecurity even in high-profile focus areas, such as Marja and Arghandab, can threaten even the limited short-term “stabilization” programs. The Taliban has strongly intensified its campaign to assassinate Afghan government officials, international contractors and NGOs, and their Afghan counterparts who are cooperating with ISAF or the Kabul government. Both the implementers and Afghan beneficiaries of these programs have been killed. This intimidation campaign has scared off some Afghans from participating in the programs. U.S. and ISAF officials emphasize that in cleared areas in the south, shops have reopened on the streets and bazaars seem livelier. Yet Afghan shopkeepers often say that they are trying to make as much money as possible in a short window of opportunity because they expect security to deteriorate again and they may then lose all business opportunities.

Thus, even for these stabilization programs, security is a critical prerequisite. A major withdrawal of U.S. forces from the south to insert them into the troubled east can jeopardize all the fragile and costly improvements in the south.

Conclusions and Broad Lessons for State-Building in the Context of Insecurity

Poor governance from the center and within the periphery has enabled the Taliban insurgency to once again get traction with the Afghan population and intensify. Governance in the post-Taliban Afghanistan has been characterized by weakly functioning state institutions unable and unwilling to uniformly enforce laws and policies. Instead, official and unofficial powerbrokers have positioned themselves to be able to issue exceptions from law enforcement to their networks of clients who can thus capture high rents. The Taliban has stepped into this lacuna of state power and accountability and offered itself to marginalized communities and those unable to capture rents from the post-2001 windfalls, acting as a patron capable of redressing these deficiencies. At the same time, more often than not it has simply imposed its rule on the population through the barrels of its Kalashnikovs.

The Obama administration came into office with the determination to make the war in Afghanistan and its spillovers into Pakistan a key focus of its foreign policy. But although it significantly increased the military, economic, and civilian resources available for the war compared to the Bush administration, it has found itself facing some of the same dilemmas and challenges as the Bush administration:

First, insufficient security has prevented ISAF and other international civilians from interacting fully with the Afghans. Their isolation at the bases resulted in reliance on problematic interlocutors for information and intelligence, which they often distort to serve their interests.

Second, both the United States and the international community have struggled to resolve whether the mission in Afghanistan is one of narrowly-defined counterterrorism or whether it also includes broader state-building, and hence needs considerably more resources. Oscillation between the two definitions of the U.S./ISAF mission has both raised and disappointed the expectations of the Afghan population.

Third, the limited willingness of the United States and its allies to devote the necessary resources for the larger state-building mission, including the military aspects of counterinsurgency, has led to various problematic shortcuts on the battlefield, such as the reliance on manipulative powerbrokers and unreliable and abusive militias, both of whom undermine governance in Afghanistan. Washington is also continually conflicted over whether and how to tackle corruption.

Fourth, efforts to work through the national government in Kabul or through local officials have so far failed to redress the governance deficiencies.

Fifth, far from uniformly encouraging needed economic development, the large levels of economic aid flowing into Afghanistan without effective monitoring have generated their own problems. Often designed as short-term programs to buy love rather than catalyze sustainable development, the aid flows have encouraged some of the predatory and rapacious behavior that underlies bad governance in Afghanistan.

Yet in the context of the collapsing legitimacy of the national government, heightened ethnic tensions, and increasing influence of problematic powerbrokers, many Afghans also understand that it is the presence of the international forces that is keeping the country from exploding into a full-blown civil war.

The consequences of such an outcome and more broadly of a failure to leave a stable government behind in Afghanistan would be dire for the United States. Although al Qaeda’s capabilities in Afghanistan have been diminished, should parts of Afghanistan fall back to the Taliban – an inevitable outcome during a civil war under the current circumstances – violent jihadi groups would likely be able to reestablish significant presence in Afghanistan and once again plot dangerous terrorist attacks. Equally significant, an unstable Afghanistan with strong jihadi terror