By Sayed Mohammad Shah
State building is a broad topic which encompasses almost all political, social and economic interventions: here I will focus on strategies for social and economic development that came out of different rounds of policymaking processes in Afghanistan after 2001 and the subsequent failure to implement these same strategies in a successful way due to: political influences on policy in an aid-dependent environment, lack of capacity and lack of political commitment to achieving the policy goals.
The current state building discourse in Afghanistan is dominated by a general belief that the priority agenda of the United States and its allies was the War on Terror and fighting the Taliban insurgency. State building was only a biproduct of the War on Terror and success in that necessitated the formation of a functioning state able to provide its citizens with certain benefits on an inclusive basis. The foundation for formation of such a state was laid through the UN-sponsored Bonn Agreement in December 2001, in which the representatives of Afghanistan’s political and social arena decided to end the conflict in the country and promote national reconciliation, lasting peace, stability and respect for human rights. They reaffirmed the independence, national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan, acknowledging the right of the people of Afghanistan to freely determine their own political future in accordance with the principles of Islam, democracy, pluralism and social justice
. This agreement contained all the key elements of modernity including social justice and women’s rights. Thus a dream was seen to modernize a country, which had never been truly modern and which even functioned in anti-modern ways.
This was the difficult journey on which the international community along with its Afghan partners decided to embark. Afghanistan was unlike other post conflict countries such as Iraq and Bosnia, where the states had functioned before the war or conflict, the governments of these countries had been able to extend services to their populations through state institutions and systems in place. Afghanistan was not a functioning state for at least the last three decades before 2001 due to political turmoil, foreign invasion, Jihad, civil war and the interference of neighbouring countries who wanted to define the state and its legitimacy. Thus a necessary precondition for state building in a post conflict environment was missing in Afghanistan and that made the task more difficult for its newly established interim government and its international partners.
However, to operationalize the dream of a modern state in post-Taliban Afghanistan, there was need for strategic documents that would explain how to reach this goal and hence the first national development strategy was developed in 2002 for the Interim Government of Afghanistan and some national priority programmes were identified for the emergency period. This first ever post-Taliban development strategy was called the National Development Framework.
The NDF was followed by a series of strategic planning exercises and after two years, another document was produced by some 100 international experts from the United Nations (UN) and multilateral development institutions in collaboration with their Afghan colleagues. This was called “Securing Afghanistan’s Future” (SAF) and was aimed at putting forward a program of investments designed to lay the foundations for the sustained economic growth needed for a financially sustainable state capable of undertaking social development and poverty reduction. The Afghanistan Compact (AC) and the Interim Afghanistan National Development Strategy (I-ANDS) process began in early 2005 with a discussion of Afghanistan’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which the Government of Afghanistan envisioned would improve the well-being of its people. An Oversight Committee headed by the Presidential Advisor on economic and social development and seven key ministers of the Afghan cabinet worked throughout 2005 and 2006 to develop and refine the contents of the I-ANDS and to oversee the process. Based on the MDGs, the I-ANDS was elaborated.
It was followed by the London Conference, held from 31 January to 1 February 2006, which brought together 60 delegates from the Government of Afghanistan, the UN and the international community. The delegates met to agree on the AC and I-ANDS with the Government of Afghanistan and subsequently pledged US$10.5 billion in funds to support Afghanistan’s reconstruction. The event was a precursor to the development of a full ANDS which would lay out the strategic priorities and mechanisms for achieving the government’s overall development vision and would serve as the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).
Following the London Conference, the Afghan Government and the international community agreed to establish the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board for overall strategic coordination of the implementation of the AC. UNDP subsequently devised a two-year, USD$8.2 million project with funding from different donors. The practical development of the ANDS began in March 2007 and was completed in April 2008 and then presented to donors at the International Conference in Support of Afghanistan in Paris on 12 June 2008. Under the ANDS process, 24 sector strategies including 6 cross-cutting issues, were developed for which, different government ministries and agencies had ownership.
In January 2010, again in a conference on Afghanistan in London, there was a re-emphasis on Afghan Government accountability and the transfer of security matters to the Afghan Government as well as the announcement of the planned reconciliation and reintegration initiative to end conflict. It was followed by another conference in July 2010 in Kabul with the attempt to recommit to the priorities of the ANDS and embark on a process of refining and improving the ANDS document through the clustering of its sectors and developing National Priority Programmes (NPPs) under each cluster. This process of developing the National Priority Programmes is on-going and it has been named the Kabul process. From the National Development Framework in 2002 up to the Kabul Process in 2010, many strategic documents were produced that defined state building plans and activities but ironically, none of them have been implemented in a way that could be counted on to achieve results. The failure to implement one strategy led to the starting of another process to develop yet another strategy and this cycle is currently moving on. This failure has reinforced a common pessimism about the time and resources spent on policies and programmes which do not get implemented.
The implementation failures have been due fundamentally to politically-driven strategies, their ambitiousness and their unrealistic nature in terms of understanding the contextual facts in Afghanistan and the lack of political will on the sides’ of the government and donors’. This is further exacerbated by an enormous capacity gap both within the government and donor institutions and the hasty processes aimed at meeting the deadlines that leads to ignoring any focus on teh quality of work.
Political influences on strategies:
Policies are both political and technical in their nature. The political aspects of policies are mainly linked with the commitment of a country to achieve international targets such as the MDGs, the donors’ agenda for the aid-dependent country and their conditional funding commitment for the specific development programmes in their specific regions of interest. For example, if the British forces are being stationed in Hilmand province of Afghanistan then the maximum focus for British development aid will be on this province. The technical aspects refer to the understanding of contextual facts and realities and the alignment of policies with them to make them more realistic, practical, and implementable.
Like many other aid dependent countries, Afghanistan needs donor financial assistance for development programmes. The majority of the donors have priority programmes for the sectors and areas of their interest and these condition their funding for the national strategies to ensure the accommodation of their agenda items with the national strategies. The aid-dependent status of the government weakens its position to challenge the donors’ options with contextual facts and realities and eventually it compromises with them. The donors also have conflicting agendas and programmes amongst themselves while some of them have the mandate to achieve international targets through their policies and programmes.
Here I will review only two cases as examples: first the development of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) which was fundamentally aimed at developing a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) for Afghanistan that would enable Afghanistan to become part of (HIPC) Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. It is worth mentioning that the IMF and World Bank require a PRSP from those countries which are seeking debt relief within the HIPC initiative. The IMF and World Bank provide debt relief and low interest loans to reduce external debt repayments to sustainable levels. To qualify for assistance, the national governments of HIPC countries must meet a range of economic, management and performance targets.
In April 2007, Afghanistan became the 41st HIPC through unique circumstances. The Government of Afghanistan had come under pressure from Russia and the IMF to accept a debt of USD$10.6 billion from Russia based on the amount of funds transferred to Afghanistan during the communist regime from 1978 to 1989. However, Afghanistan’s status as a HIPC country meant that it would be able to write off the debt. Although the Afghan Parliament reacted strongly against the move, the decision was made to go ahead, on the basis that the country would be more likely to receive support and future funding from donors. The second example of political influence is at a sectoral level about policymaking in the primary and secondary education subsectors. In mid-2008 the Ministry of Education decided to revise its National Education Strategic Plan (NESP), this started in early 2009 with the aim to enable the country to become part of a Fast-Track Initiative (FTI) for increased funding to the education sector to achieve the Education For All (EFA) targets linked to the MDGs. The EFA FTI is a global partnership to assist poor countries in meeting the primary and secondary education MDGs. The World Bank launched the partnership in 2002 in collaboration with other donors and hosts the FTI Secretariat. The World Bank has set up collaborations with developing countries and country level donor partners as well as global level donors as a high priority for realising the promise of FTI. To receive FTI endorsement a country must have a PRSP and an education sector plan that is endorsed by in-country donors. These donors lead the endorsement process through a coordination forum, with one donor acting as the lead coordinating agency with responsibility for organising the assessment of the country’s programmes, using FTI appraisal guidelines and an indicative framework. In Afghanistan, the coordination forum of in-country donors is called the Human Resource Development Board (HRDB).
The Ministry of Education in Afghanistan shared at least five drafts of a revised National Education Strategic Plan with the HRD Board but the donors did not approve it, even though they were part of the process of the development of Education Strategic Plan but they waited for an FTI assessment of the education sector and the NESP to take place. The assessment happened during the months of March, April and May in 2010 and the FTI assessment team gave their recommendations, which again did not lead to the finalization of the NESP. The team instead recommended developing an interim one year plan before the approval NESP that would elaborate how to achieve EFA targets in Afghanistan
.
These examples not only explain the great political influences of in-country donors on the process of national decision making but also bring the marginalization of national ownership on the processes under limelight.
Lack of capacity:
Another issue that has a deep correlation with the political influence on policies is the lack of capacity at different levels. Capacity needs to be seen broadly, it does not imply only the capabilities of human resources to perform their specific tasks, but it also refers to efficiency of systems, administrative structures, realistic policies and programmes as well as rules and procedures.
On the part of the Afghan Government, it had inherited poor capacity both in terms of dysfunctional institutions and an inefficient workforce as the legacies of the civil war and protracted period of turmoil. At the same time, there was an unprecedented demand from Afghan society for service delivery as millions of Afghans started return migration to their homeland from different parts of the world, particularly the neighbouring countries, with the dream of living on their own land with a better future. Thus state institutions needed tremendous technical support from the international community to meet the demands of Afghan society and come up to their expectations, at least to some extent. The state institutions were injected with numbers of technical advisors, which according to a recent study
by the Ministry of Finance was as follows:
| Estimated numbers of TA in key ministries |
| Ministry | National TA | International TA |
| Education | 1,248 | 11 |
| Finance | 300 | 71 |
| Commerce | 25 | 16 |
| President’s Office | 90 | 10 |
| MRRD | 1,134 | 49 |
These technical advisors took the key functions in the government ministries, from programme implementation to design and development of policies and programmes. The already weak position of government in determining the content of policies and programmes due to its aid dependent status was made worse by a lack of professional capacity with its own staff to draft strategies. The control of processes thus drifted into the hands of mainly those TAs who are on donor contract and the majority of them ensured the agenda of their contracting organizations were represented in the strategic documents.
Other than the lack of professional staff, another disability of the government ministries was inability to spend their development funds. According to Ministry of Finance sources, the government ministries spent only 39 percent of their development budget during the last fiscal year (1388), although over 60 percent of the development funds are spent outside the government budget directly by donors through their implementation partners. This disability is due to the highly complicated and bureaucratic system of financing and budgeting in the government institutions, which despite many attempts at reform is still inefficient.
When it comes to the donors’ capacity, although they have efficient systems in place in their institutions the majority of their technical staff are largely ignorant to the context of Afghanistan but they led processes and wrote the strategies. Many of these people replicated their experiences from other parts of the world in Afghanistan, without tailoring them according to the specific needs and realities of the country. Their capability to write the documents in English language put them on the driving seat, which by itself is enough to put into question the local ownership on the processes. Undoubtedly, English has been a big factor to define capacity in the context of Afghanistan. Some even blame the professional bureaucracy in the UN and other international organizations for smelling money in the post conflict environments and then rushing in with their tailored development models to become engaged in policy development processes and find reasons for spending money.
Unrealistic timeframe:
Policymaking requires adequate time and proper time management. In Afghanistan, national level policymaking has mainly been hasty, driven by unrealistic deadlines. Pushing processes within an unrealistic timeframe, the quality of work is often sacrificed over the process. This undermines confidence in and satisfaction with, the soundness of policies and planning, which then leads to their hasty revision, ashappened in the agriculture subsector. Within a year of the development of ANDS sector strategies, the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) developed another policy document called the National Agriculture Development Framework (NDAF).
Dearth of political commitment:
The processes of development of national development strategies have been extremely zealous: government, donors, parliamentarians, NGOs, think-tanks and academics got engaged in tremendous activities to ensure their contributions. There were uncountable coordination meetings, consultations, working group activities, workshops, conferences, travelling into and out of the country, along with conflicts of interest among the actors and compromises. Millions of dollars have been spent on organizing these events. Then finally the strategies get approved at formalized and impressive events such as the Paris and London Conferences where dignitaries from key contributors of Afghan rebuilding announce their funding commitments. Once the funding commitments are obtained, suddenly everybody gives up their enthusiasm for the strategies as if they have achieved all of their objectives.
At least this was the case with the ANDS, all the actors rather disgracefully forgot about it after the Paris Conference in June 2008. The Secretariat, which was established to manage the development of the document, suddenly lost their office, top leadership quit and the website died for sometime due to lack of funding. The Secretariat was then divided into two sections, one responsible for budgeting of sector strategies was merged into the Ministry of Finance while the other section, which was responsible for monitoring and evaluation of the ANDS sector strategies, was handed over to the Ministry of Economy. Both of these sections ran into severe management problems with their managing institutions since these institutions had their own priority programmes and ANDS implementation was allocated only secondary importance compared to their institutional mandates.
During the development phase, President Karzai spoke several times about the importance of the formulation of ANDS, but after its formulation, he never spoke about the importance of implementing it, which shows a decrease in political commitment in implementation phase.
Conclusion:
The failure to implement strategies that formed the state building agenda does not mean that there has not been progress at all. Development has taken place in major sectors such as agriculture, the private sector, education, health and others but the last nine years of reconstruction could have meant a lot more than they did, if the development actors had developed more consensus and common vision, if military activities had not been associated with development practices, political choices had not dominated technical choices in policies and strategies and there was more practice than words and papers.
Many believe that the attention of the United States shifted towards Iraq after 2003 and Afghanistan did not get the required financial assistance compared to Bosnia and Iraq, and this slowed down progress on state building. However, there is another view, to which I subscribe, that there was a lot of money for and in Afghanistan, which was spent in an irresponsible and unaccountable way that not only darkened the chances of the development planned but also brought further destabilization by increasing corruption and strengthening existing and nascent mafias. A recent study by Andrew Wilder for Tufts University which was partially funded through AREU and conducted in Khost, Uruzgan and Paktiya provinces of Afghanistan, argued that unaccountable aid money corrupted the system and brought further destabilization in these areas. Andrew found that some people on key government and social positions deliberately created insecurity for their personal benefit to make reasons for the inflow of further aid to the area since the development landscape is dominated by a false belief that more aid brings stability.
Today a fear prevails about the future of Afghanistan as a state and people keep questioning each other that what happens if United States and its allies leave Afghanistan? Would the country be able to sustain itself and provide essential services to the people through its institutions? Unfortunately, after over nine years of international interventions to build the state of Afghanistan and many rounds of policymaking and strategy development, the answers to these questions are not positive.
Note: This article was read out in an international conference on Afghanistan in Delhi, India in January 2011.
Sayed Mohammad Shah, Is Capacity Being Built? A Study of Policymaking Process in the Primary and Secondary Education Subsector, July 2010