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Posts tagged ‘Afghanistan’

Jun 4

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The Attack on the ICRC and the Changing Conflict in Afghanistan

By Jason Lyall

US Army photo by Sgt. Benjamin Tuck.

US Army photo by Sgt. Benjamin Tuck.

On 29 May, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)’s compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, was breached by three suicide bombers from an as-yet unidentified insurgent organization. The attack left one Afghan guard dead while wounding another (expat) ICRC staffer.

While the war in Afghanistan has largely slipped from the public’s radar screen (and that of the media), the ICRC attack merits a closer look since may represent a qualitatively new phase in the war. Indeed, in the words of Kate Clark, the attack has “crossed a red line” in the war, for the ICRC occupies a unique position as the most respected NGO in Afghanistan — including by the Taliban itself. Relying exclusively on its reputation for neutrality for protection, the ICRC monitors compliance by all sides with the laws of war; arranges for the return of war dead to their homes for burial; conducts site visits of prisons; and provides medical assistance to civilians and combatants regardless of their allegiance.

Wednesday’s attack represents the first time that its offices have been targeted since the ICRC first arrived in Afghanistan in 1987. There’s little question that this attack was deliberate rather than accidental. So why attack the ICRC?

Two reasons stand out. First, the ICRC attack should be placed in the wider context of an on-going campaign by insurgents to target the international (aid) community in a bid to sever Kabul’s financial lifelines. Nearly all of the major aid programs, including those by USAID, the World Bank, and other international donors, are currently in the midst of wide-ranging assessments of how (and whether) to provide assistance in areas no longer secured by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

As ISAF draws down, these aid organizations and NGOs — now used to working near, if not with, ISAF — must now determine whether they can continue programming in areas secured only by Afghan forces. In just the past week, attacks against the International Organization of Migration (IOM) on 24 May (which I watched from my rooftop), the ICRC, the governor’s compound in Panjshir province, and several foiled suicide attacks in Kabul have underscored the potentially precarious nature of security for foreign organizations and their government partners.

There is, then, a strategic logic at work in these attacks. Cut Kabul’s financial lifeline by forcing aid programming to grind to a halt, and it becomes much easier to subvert or erode the reach of shaky government ministries. Even if these organizations and NGOs do decide to continue their efforts (if at a reduced scale), these attacks reinforce and deepen the divide between aid workers and the local populations they are trying to help. As Roland Paris recently noted, one of the principal reasons behind the failure of state-building in Afghanistan has been the disconnect between international aspirations and Afghan needs created by the absence of local knowledge. Attacks like those against the ICRC will undoubtedly force a new round of security measures that will only further build a wall between aid workers and local populations at a time when NGOs are already struggling just to visit their aid sites.

A second, perhaps indirect, reason for the attack stems from the nature of ISAF operations in Afghanistan. One legacy of sustained airstrikes and night raids against senior and mid-ranking insurgent leaders has been the decentralization and radicalization of the Taliban (and Haqqani) insurgency.

At this point in the war, it is misleading to speak of “an” insurgency. Even the Taliban, perhaps the most centralized insurgent organization in Afghanistan, has become increasingly staffed and driven by young local commanders with little connection to the “old” Taliban. In a telling sign, there are now reports that Pakistan-trained Taliban cadres are being inserted back into Afghan Taliban command structures in an effort to reverse this trend. In the past two years, insurgent groups in eastern Afghanistan have borne the brunt of these airstrikes and raids, and so it unsurprising that these new commanders have chosen to demonstrate their mettle by launching high-profile suicide attacks, including four in Jalalabad alone just since December 2012.

“Radicalized” does not mean “crazy,” however. It is apparent that the responsible group took precautions to avoid Afghan civilian casualties when attacking the ICRC. (UPDATE: The Taliban have denied responsibility for the attack.) The attack was timed for 6pm, when all Afghan workers would have gone home for the night. And the location itself — in Jalalabad, a city (and region) with strong Taliban support — appears chosen to minimize fallout if the attack did kill Afghans. Populations with strong pro-insurgent support tend to be much more forgiving of civilian casualties inflicted by the rebels, for example, than they are of similar casualties inflicted by the counterinsurgent.

In short, while new facts will undoubtedly come to light, the 29 May attack against the ICRC may foreshadow the changing nature of war over the coming year in Afghanistan. If the ICRC attack is any guide, we are likely to witness a continued shift away from insurgent violence against dwindling foreign forces and toward a deliberate targeting of aid organizations and government ministries in high-profile attacks. These attacks, in conjunction with efforts to destroy or subvert Afghan security forces, will place international organizations and NGOs in an increasingly tight bind: continue programming and suffer losses, or head for the exit?

May 7

NATO and Churchill Yet Again

By Steve Saideman

Almost since the alliance was created, there have been worries about the inefficiency and potential demise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]. The alliance’s burden-sharing has always been uneven, raising resentments among those who over-pay. In Afghanistan, the burden-sharing problem has been far more problematic as it is measured in blood, rather than spending as percentage of GDP. The perceived lack of effectiveness in Afghanistan and NATO’s refusal to engage in Syria feed these fears about the alliance. So, it should be no surprise that in this time of austerity there is much concern about the future of NATO once again.

The reality is, as always, just a bit more complex. If we want to ask “is NATO worth it?” by looking at its past efforts, we need to keep in mind the goals of each operation. If we remember that in most cases NATO’s goals were somewhat limited, then the alliance has been rather successful. In Bosnia, NATO did not end organized crime or produce functional democracy, but it did provide a far more credible force than UNPROFOR, enforcing much of the Dayton Accords. In Kosovo, NATO ended the threat Serbia posed to Kosovo’s Albanian (and Muslim) majority. The effort took months, rather than days, and produced a peacekeeping mission that continues to this day. But in terms of preventing the conflict in Kosovo from spilling over to create regional tensions, the intervention worked. In its aftermath tensions rose in Macedonia, which, for once, NATO jumped on quickly, producing an agreement that required relatively minimal effort to enforce.

Afghanistan is far more complex than these other missions, and NATO certainly over-reached. Building a self-sustaining Afghan government turned out to be far harder than previous efforts. The stresses revealed the seams in the alliance far more than the previous or more recent missions. Even in this case, NATO did not utterly fail. Yes, there were problems with caveats, nationally imposed restrictions on what countries were willing to do, and other means of control that impacted NATO’s effectiveness, but more countries provided more real effort in Afghanistan, despite the costs and the uncertainties than the “willing” countries in the coalition of the willing in Iraq.

The Libyan mission is an interesting contradiction, as NATO had far more limited objectives here but these objectives were far more than what some of those who legitimated the mission (Russia, China, the Arab League) expected. The aim of civilian protection became regime change (because the former logically required the latter), although everyone will deny that. Still, NATO made no commitment to do anything after Qadhafi’s government fell, so the alliance achieved what it set out to do. Sure, the burden-sharing was visibly lop-sided with less than a third of the alliance willing to drop bombs, but NATO’s history of procuring and practicing inter-operability meant that planes were able to refuel in the air many, many times without significant incidents.

Much more quietly, NATO has played a key role in fighting piracy off the shores of Somalia. In the past year, pirate attacks have dropped to near zero. Non-events tend not to get much news, especially when they “occur” at sea. To be sure, this change is not just due to NATO’s efforts, but the coordination provided by the alliance has certainly made a difference.

Sure, NATO is in a crisis right now, as the budget cuts throughout the alliance will only make it harder for the alliance to deploy and will probably exaggerate the burden-sharing problems. Moreover, Europe is more than a bit worried about the American pivot to Asia. Yet the reality is that there is no substitute for NATO in European security. It is easy to dismiss suggestions that the European Union will supplant NATO. The EU has repeatedly failed when called up to act in a crisis, only deploying after NATO does all of the hard work. All efforts to develop a European Security and Defense Policy are stymied by disagreements among the members. Coalitions of the willing may develop when NATO cannot come to a consensus, but these coalitions have all of NATO’s problems (caveats, burden-sharing) and none of NATO’s advantages (legitimacy, practiced inter-operability, etc.)

It always comes down to this: NATO is the worst form of multilateral military cooperation… except for all of the other forms. NATO is generally better than unilateralism, far more functional than UN or EU security cooperation, and mostly superior to coalitions of the willing. Consequently, despite the anxieties, NATO will continue to stick around for a while longer. It may not intervene again in any place soon, but when leaders look around for some military cooperation, NATO will be there.

Feb 7

Army Training, Suh!

By Steve Saideman

NATO operations in Afghanistan are a complex exercise in cooperation and shared responsibility. Members of the ISAF not only divvied the country into different areas of operation, but also created functional division of responsibilities as well. The Germans got policing, the British counter-narcotics, and the Italians judicial reform — yeah, incredibly problematic and more than just a bit funny, that last one.

Anyway, the Germans were poorly suited to the police training role for several reasons, but particularly because of two key restrictions: their army and police were not allowed to cooperate much due to historical reasons, and German troops faced geographic limits on where the could operate. So, other than Kabul, training Afghan police could only take place on German bases in RC-North (I could be slightly wrong here, but I am basing this on interviews with Germany Interior Ministry folks as well as others who experienced/observed some of this).

Eventually, the US took over the role and poured a heap of resources into it. But it led to a perception I don’t think was accurate: that police training was just a few years behind training the Afghan National Army, illustrated thusly:

* I hereby demonstrate why I did not major in graphic arts

I hereby demonstrate why I did not major in graphic arts

The green line on the left represents Afghan National Army (ANA) training, the blue line on the right Afghan National Police (ANP). The basic idea is that both training efforts have the same trajectory, with ANP training simply delayed. The problem with this perception is that training police may be fundamentally and inherently more difficult than army training. Police must perform a wide variety of tasks, need to be deeply engaged with local populations, face constant temptation to exploit those that they should be protecting and serving, and so on. While being a member of an army unit also has its own challenges, most enlisted troops have fewer skills to master, local knowledge and engagement is less important (again, for the enlisted folks), and so on. So, I would expect the comparison between the ANA and ANP training to look more like this:

chart2

The basic point here is that we cannot simply blame the Germans for delaying ANP training, nor should we expect police training to progress at the same rate as army training (if a few years behind). Of course, this all assumes that training the ANA itself has been proceeding swell, an unreasonable assumption — army training can only be done overnight in the movies:

This piece was originally posted on the author’s personal blog.

Jan 28

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The Great Drug Bust

By Oliver Kaplan and Jacob Shapiro

Opium field targeted for eradication in Afghanistan. ISAF Photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Monica R. Nelson.

Opium field targeted for eradication in Afghanistan. ISAF Photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Monica R. Nelson.

One of the main policies pursued in the war on drugs has been crop eradication. Instead of hurting drug producers and reducing the flow of narcotics as intended, these efforts have proven to be a great bust, and one that can be measured. At least this is the finding from recent scholarship on crop eradication in both Afghanistan and Colombia, which indicate that counter-narcotics efforts have largely not decreased supply, and, at least in Afghanistan, have had the perverse effect of increasing resource flows to insurgent groups. This should not be surprising, since when demand for any good is inelastic, restricting supply from what you’d have in a fully competitive market yields a more than proportional increase in prices, i.e. more profit.

A new paper on opium production in Afghanistan by Jeff Clemens shows that this is exactly what has happened in the Afghan opium trade. Because demand for opium is largely price inelastic and eradication efforts in Afghanistan disproportionately targeted government controlled areas, the net effect of crop eradication was to increase resources flowing to farmers in Taliban-heavy districts, who benefited from the removal of their competitors’ crops. Given the widespread evidence that the Taliban effectively tax opium in territory where they have a strong presence, this dynamic was almost surely a financial boon to the Taliban.

Similar studies, including work by Colombian economist Daniel Mejía focusing on crop eradication in Colombia, show that aerial spraying has done little to put a dent in the production of coca, from which cocaine is made. Again, these studies find that demand for drugs is price inelastic, so that small increases in price do not greatly affect consumption but do increase profits. Mejía finds that interdiction of drug trafficking is a relatively more efficient policy compared to eradication but that counter-narcotics resources have been relatively mis-allocated toward the latter. For these reasons as well as adaptations by producers to eradication, Mejía concludes, “The amount of cocaine reaching consumer countries remains relatively stable seven years after the initiation of Plan Colombia, and the price of cocaine at different stages has not risen.”

In sum, crop eradication efforts appear to be a net benefit for armed groups while depleting government coffers. Surely the resources allocated to crop eradication could be better spent.

Oct 22

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Can Climate Anomalies Explain Conflict Patterns?

Guest post by Lionel Beehner

Do spikes in temperature or rainfall cause greater conflict? General John Allen, America’s top commander in Afghanistan, waded into this debate last month after hinting to reporters that recent cases of “green-on-blue” killings by Afghan troops were motivated by the August heat. In Syria, a similar theory was floated by C.J. Chivers of the New York Times. In a blog post, he suggested the success of rebels to rainfall patterns aligned with the northern region’s unpredictable rainy season. Rain, his theory goes, leads to abundant harvests, which in turn fuels the insurgency by keeping its fighters well-fed.

Last summer, Nature magazine made waves after publishing an article claiming that the warming effects of El Niño can explain over one-fifth of all civil wars. Yet the push to link climate change to conflict gained steam a decade back when UN researchers suggested that environmental degradation was partly responsible for civil violence in Darfur. Other studies around this time found similar results. UC Berkeley’s Edward Miguel predicted that given current temperature trends, incidences of armed conflict may increase by more than one-half by 2030, or an additional 393,000 battle deaths. Last January, the Journal of Peace Research devoted an entire issue to climate change and conflict.

The recent uprisings across the Arab world have also renewed inquiry about the effects of climate change on collective action and political violence. One theory posits that unusually warm temperatures in Russia in 2010 hampered food production, which in turn raised food prices globally and was one factor that contributed to the recent instability across the Arab world. Another theory drawn from social psychology finds that extremely warm weather can increase aggression by indirectly heightening feelings of hostility and aggressive thoughts.

But the linkages remain fuzzy, to say the least. Environmental shocks can lead to poverty and weaken states, which then makes it more difficult to mitigate against their effects, thus fueling violence and creating a vicious circle. But often it is unclear which way the direction arrow goes. The conventional wisdom among Neo-Malthusian scholars is that higher temperatures lead to lower agricultural yields, which can heighten conflict due to droughts, food insecurity, and the social dislocations of migratory rural workers. Others stress the internal migration of rural workers in search of jobs, either to cities or to regions less vulnerable to climate swings, and the social unrest this dislocation creates.

But during most cases of climate anomalies, even in adversely affected regions, conflict is not the norm. Many regions that suffer unpredictable patterns because of, say, an El Niño rarely see violence. Scholars who privilege grievances as a result of environmental degradation tend to over-predict violence and fall prey to environmental determinism, without fully accounting for why internal violence more often than not does not erupt. They fail to explain how states and societies over the centuries have learned to adapt to severe climate patterns.

Part of the problem linking climate change to conflict stems from methodological flaws. A case in point is the aforementioned Nature study, which focused on macro-level conflict by country, despite the fact there is substantial variation within countries in both patterns of violence and climate phenomena. Climate change is measured in longer-term trends and annual variations, which are too static to map onto wider conflict patterns. The authors, for example, rely on a heuristic, lumping the last half-century into El Niño (treatment group) and La Nina (control group) years and the world into two regions “tele-connected” or “weakly affected” by El Niño. This assumes that the ecology of the tropics is monolithic, when we know it is not (Generally, El Niño leads to hotter and drier conditions in the treatment group away from coasts, but it can also produce heavy rainfall and flooding along the coasts due to higher ocean evaporation from warming). To understand how El Niño acts as a driver of conflict requires an explanation of such diverse climatic phenomena, as presumably rebel violence would vary in response to droughts versus floods.

So what does this mean for Syria, Afghanistan, and other states embroiled in conflict today? There is ample evidence that insurgent attacks in Afghanistan pick up after the snow thaws – a so-called “spring offensive.” On Syria, there is some evidence of the effects of rainfall patterns on violence. Edward Miguel has found that rainfall shocks impact civil war through the channel of negative economic growth. Yet others have found that civil conflicts are reversely correlated with rainfall patterns – that negative rainfall shocks actually reduce the risk of conflict outbreak. Hence, the success of Syrian rebels last spring, when rainfall and crop yields were higher than usual, could very well be a coincidence.

That much was confirmed by my own research. Examining micro-level violence data and precipitation levels by province in Ethiopia during two wars that coincided with El Niños, its border war with Eritrea in 1997-1999 and its insurgency in the Somali region in 2007-2010, I find that micro-level variation in El Niño-related precipitation only partly maps onto violence patterns at best. Months with highly volatile precipitation swings in any province were not correlated with heavier violence, even when lagged. Perhaps climate patterns are more robust at predicting other forms of collective action short of violence, like we might see in the Arab Spring? I also looked at land occupations by peasants in Northeast Brazil, a popular form of protest in a poor, agrarian region. Though I found some correlation between precipitation levels and land occupations at a macro level, upon closer inspection — that is, when the data is broken down by province and by month from 1997-1999, when an El Niño slammed into the region – the results (pardon the pun) wash out.

This is not to suggest that climate anomalies have zero impact on patterns of violence. But again, climate factors interact with so many intervening variables that it is nearly impossible to isolate them as the sole motivator of civil violence. At best, all we can say is that extreme or unpredictable climate events may exacerbate conditions on the ground that can heighten the likelihood of conflict, but that gives us little predictive power. To say that the heat or rains are influencing attacks in Afghanistan or Syria is at best an educated guess. Perhaps the only thing harder to predict than the weather may be patterns of civil conflict.

Lionel Beehner is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a doctoral student at Yale University, and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a former senior writer. An expanded version of this piece was first published at World Policy Blog.

Oct 16

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Timetables and Deadlines

By Andrew Kydd

Barack Obama watches the October 11th Vice Presidential debate. White House photo by Pete Souza.

The Vice Presidential debate featured some interesting exchanges on foreign policy, too many for some but probably just the right amount for loyal readers of PVGlance. I was particularly struck by the confab over withdrawal from Afghanistan. Ryan accused the Obama administration of having a fixed deadline for withdrawal; Biden defend the plan to get all troops out by 2014. Though focused on Afghanistan, this argument was, of course, but a pale shadow of the enormous row over “time tables” for withdrawal from Iraq during the 2008 Presidential campaign, where McCain accused Obama of having a time table for withdrawal that would surely lead to defeat. In fact, Obama’s policy in the end was not significantly different from Bush’s, the US withdrawal continued more or less on the schedule that had already been laid out, as dictated by political reality in both Iraq and the US.

The new fusillades may strike one as a somewhat contrived effort to generate differences that matter in theory but probably would not in practice, or at least they strike this one as such. But it reminded me of the deadline issue, and its potential for interesting strategic analysis. The Ryan/McCain thesis is that deadlines are bad because they announce a specified time at which one side will quit fighting, even if that side has not won by that point. In wars of attrition this would appear bad, because it publicly announces to the other side ‘if you can only hold out that long, then you can win’. The unstated assumption is that the opposing side will then be encouraged to hold out until the announced withdrawal when they would not otherwise.

However, I have not seen a model that actually exhibits that result, and it would be interesting to see if it really holds true. These war of attrition models arose to study biology, so let’s use a biological example. Let’s say two lions are fighting over a certain piece of territory with lots of antelope on it. One lion, call him Lion A, is forced by domestic political circumstances to admit to the other lion, Lion B, that it can only fight for ten years and will then have to give up because the war will become unpopular among the pride at home. This might seem like a problem for the domestically constrained Lion A. However, if Lion B was only planning to fight for ten minutes, ten years will seem like an eternity, and the deadline could hardly influence the ultimate outcome in Lion B’s favor. Shorten Lion A’s deadline and I’m not sure at what point Lion B starts fighting longer.

Image by Wikimedia user Brocken Inaglory.

Specifically, if we assume that each lion has a privately known length of time that they are willing to hold out and then Lion A has to admit its deadline publicly, if that deadline is longer than the pre-existing privately known quit time of Lion B, will Lion B then decide to hold out longer to outlast Lion A? If I were less lazy I could probably do the model instead of finish this blog post, but for now I merely conjecture that the answer is no, because Lion B is comparing the utility for quitting now with the utility for holding out one more instant, and quits when they are equal, and Lion A has announced that it will quit at some time later than the next instant. This actually means it will discourage Lion B from holding out further because previously it thought there was some chance Lion A would quit in the next instant, and now it knows that it won’t. This logic holds except in the case where Lion B’s privately known quit time happened to be the instant before the announced quit date of Lion A, in which case Lion B would say whoopee and keep fighting one more instant, confident that they could outlast Lion A. Bottom line: I’m not sure the Ryan/McCain thesis actually works even in the simple model that they seem to be envisioning. But I could be wrong. I leave the proof as an exercise for the reader.

A second issue has to do with the cost of war and whether it occurs at all. We know from game theoretic analysis that if both sides were able to/forced to announce truthfully how long they were able to hold out, then the war could be avoided and the two sides could simply cut to the chase and award the disputed good to the more patient party. What happens if only one side is able to do this? How does it affect the likely outcome, and the expected costs paid? I suppose it’s just a war of attrition with one sided uncertainty but I don’t recall the results, in comparison with the two sided case.

All this doesn’t even address the Obama/Biden comeback. The Obama/Biden thesis is that only by setting a deadline can one light a fire under the host government’s posterior and get them to assume the burden of fighting the insurgency in a serious way. The funny thing is that this analysis should appeal to Mitt Romney, who has labeled 47 percent of Americans are shiftless, not to mention his running mate, Ayn Rand Fan Club Secretary Paul Ryan. Host governments are on welfare, and entitlement reform is the only way to get them to take charge of their lives and fight their own fights. Here, the simple model clearly supports the Obama/Biden/Rand analysis; in a straight up public goods model, why contribute at all when Uncle Sam is footing the tab? The best response is to free ride.

However, the simple model in this case may be too simple. The core problem with counterinsurgency is that the host government is weak to start with, which is why they need help in the first place. Cut off the help to early and the host government may fail altogether  However, it’s hard to tell when a host government can really stand on its feet at all, given the incentives to free ride. A model that incorporated this tradeoff would have very wide applicability to problems like unemployment benefits, etc. One can imagine an equilibrium strategy that involves phased reduction of benefits (in the counterinsurgency model, troops) to see if the host can cope, so that the situation can be retrieved if they cannot. But an alternative equilibrium may be the cold turkey approach: support host governments up to a certain announced time, and then cut them off to sink or swim on their own.

A model that incorporated all three issues — war of attrition, public goods/free riding, and uncertainty about host government strength — would be very interesting.

Sep 13

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Implications of Designating the Haqqani Network a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

Guest post by C. Christine Fair

In September, 2011 Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, astonished the American public when he declared the Haqqani Network to be a virtual arm of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI.  Before then, Admiral Mullen had been one of the most outspoken defenders of Pakistan and its military’s efforts to combat Islamist terrorist. Since then, Congressional pressure mounted on the Obama administration to take a stronger position on Pakistan’s intransigent support for one of the most lethal organizations killing Americans and allied forces in Afghanistan.  At long last, on September 7, the Obama administration announced that it would designate the network of Jalaluddin Haqqani to be a foreign terrorist organization.

The question arises as to what outcomes will emerge from this latest round of designating entities based in and operating from Pakistan. First, this designation gives the US government greater leverage in targeting the group’s vast licit and illicit funding network spanning the Gulf and South Asia. Second, it finally clarifies what the official position is with respect to the network.  The US inter-agency has long been conflicted about the relevance of the network to a resolution in Afghanistan with some believing that the Haqqanis are important while others rubbish the notion. In either case, Pakistan has long exploited the inter-agency friction as an excuse for inaction. Pakistan can no longer hide behind this ruse. Third, it could give some hope to Afghans that hard earned democratic gains will not be forfeited to entrepreneurs of violence, like the Haqqanis.

However, it is not clear whether this designation will pave the way to declare Pakistan a state that sponsors terror, a club populated by Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan.  In fact, the US State Department rule this out categorically. With this off the table, Pakistan is likely to behave with the same insouciance with which it greeted the previous designations of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, among numerous others. Without some threat of meaningful sanctions, Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency are unlikely to take this designation any more seriously than those of the past and will indeed double down on their support for the organization as a further signal of resistance to Washington’s preferences in the region.

Jul 12

4 Comments

Kabuki Theater at the Afghanistan Donors’ Conference

By Roland Paris

US soldier in Afghanistan. US Navy photo by Lt. Benjamin Addison, via ISAF Media.

I have an op-ed article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, which the editors titled “Is corruption the cost of saving Afghanistan?” The first few lines of the article convey the gist of my argument:

It was fitting that last weekend’s international donors’ conference on Afghanistan took place in Tokyo: The event resembled the city’s famous kabuki theatre, with its ritualized drama of grand gestures and hidden meanings.

The centrepiece of the meeting was a pledge by donors, including Canada, for $16-billion in development aid to Afghanistan over the next four years in exchange for the Kabul government’s commitment to fight corruption, among other things.

In fact, there is virtually no chance that the Afghan government will tackle corruption – and everyone knows it…  [T]he unspoken reality is that the United States, which drives international policy on Afghanistan, appears to have resigned itself to this kleptocracy.”

In the rest of the article I explore the question of why international donors continue the charade of reaching new agreements  on anti-corruption measures with the Karzai government.  I argue that this charade mollifies public opinion in the donor countries, which might otherwise turn strongly against the funding of a corrupt government in Afghanistan.  (My argument echoes Michael Barnett and Christoph Zuercher’s concept of a “peacebuilders’ contract” between international interveners and local leaders to create the appearance of change “while leaving largely intact existing state-society relations.”)

I didn’t have space in the op-ed to examine specific terms of the “mutual accountability framework” that emerged from the Tokyo donors’ conference. A number of media reports from the conference stated that the international community was now demanding reform in exchange for additional development aid, and that a portion of these funds would henceforth be tied to the Afghan government’s performance in meeting specific reform objectives, including anti-corruption targets. Indeed, in a background briefing to reporters, a senior State Department official encouraged journalists to describe the mutual accountability framework as “something important,” in part because it was “pretty specific” about incentives for the Afghan government to effect reforms.

The problem with these accounts is that there are, in fact, very few anti-corruption measures in the framework, and most of the measures that are included are vague enough to be finessed. Worse, there is no effective enforcement mechanism. The agreement requires, for instance, that the Government of Afghanistan “enact and enforce the legal framework for fighting corruption including, for example, annual asset declarations of senior public officials including the executive, legislative and judiciary.” It is not difficult to imagine the Afghan government issuing incomplete versions of such declarations based on creative interpretations of what counts as “assets.”  In any event, there is no sign that the Afghan government will incur significant penalties – political or economic – if it fails to meet these undertakings. While the mutual accountability framework says that joint monitoring bodies and ministers will meet regularly to review progress, no sanctions are specified. Apparently, individual countries must decide on penalties if the goals are ignored.

True, the document suggests that donors will make more of their aid contingent on progress towards fighting corruption.  Many journalists reporting from the donors’ conference highlighted these provisions of the framework. “Up to 20 percent of the money would depend on the government meeting governance standards,” wrote Jane Perlez in the New York Times, for example.  However, the document actually says that donors will “aim” to increase the share of their aid in incentive programs “to 10 percent in 2014, with a goal of 20 percent of funding through incentive mechanisms by the end of the Transformation Decade.” When is the end of this “Transformation Decade”?  That would be 2024.  By that time, the only people who will remember this document and its commitments will be a handful of Ph.D. students working on the archives of the Afghan mission.  Furthermore, “aim” is weaker language than “commit,” and 10 percent of development assistance – the amount that donors will “aim” to tie by 2014 – is not much.  Most likely, when 2014 rolls around (which promises to be a tumultuous year, given the scheduled departure of U.S. combat forces and Afghanistan’s presidential election) even this modest undertaking will be overshadowed by events.

That is my point:  The fact that the anti-corruption provisions in the Tokyo mutual accountability framework are so few, so vague, and so lacking in means of enforcement lends support to my thesis that they are intended primarily for show, not for genuine implementation.

These paragraphs did, however, perform another important function: generating reports in Western newspapers suggesting progress on anti-corruption in Afghanistan, which in turn provided a measure of political cover for Western governments to continuing spending large sums of money to support an Afghan governance system in which corruption is endemic.

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