Remember when peaceful, democratic,
reconstructed Afghanistan was advertised as the
exemplar for the extreme makeover of Iraq? In
August 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld was already proclaiming the new
Afghanistan "a breathtaking accomplishment" and "a
successful model of what could happen to Iraq". As
everybody now knows, the model isn't working in
Iraq. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that
it's not working in Afghanistan either.
The story of success in Afghanistan was
always more fairy tale
than
fact - one scam used to sell another. Now, as the
administration of US President George W Bush hands
off "peacekeeping" to NATO forces, Afghanistan is
the scene of the largest military operation in the
history of that organization. Personal e-mail
brings word from an American surgeon in Kabul that
her emergency medical team can't handle half the
wounded civilians brought in from embattled
provinces to the south and east. American, British
and Canadian troops find themselves at war with
Taliban fighters - which is to say "Afghans" -
while stunned North Atlantic Treaty Organization
commanders, who hadn't bargained for significant
combat, are already asking what went wrong.
The answer is a threefold failure: no
peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.
Doing things backward Critics
of US Afghan policy agree that the Bush
administration, in its haste to take out Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, did things backward. After bombing
the Taliban into the boondocks in 2001, it set up
a government without first making peace - a
scenario later to be repeated in Iraq.
Instead of pressing for peace negotiations
among rival Afghan parties, the victorious
Americans handed power to Islamists and militia
commanders who had served as America's stand-in
soldiers in its Afghan proxy war against the
Soviet Union in the 1980s. Then the Bush
administration staged elections for these
candidates and touted the result as democracy. It
also confined an International Security Assistance
Force, made up largely of European troops, to the
capital, creating an island of safety for the
government, while dispatching warlords of its
choice to hunt for Osama bin Laden in the
countryside.
In the east and south - that
is, about half the country - the Taliban never
stopped fighting. Now, augmented by imported
al-Qaeda fighters ("Arab-Afghans") and new tactics
learned from the insurgency in Iraq (roadside
bombs, suicide bombing), Taliban forces are
stronger than at any time since the United States
"conquered" them in 2001. According to the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission, most Afghans
have long favored a process of amnesty and
reconciliation; and President Hamid Karzai
recently called on the Bush administration to
change course and stop killing Afghans. But US
administration policy, recently reaffirmed in
Kabul by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
calls for a fight to the last Talib.
Predictably, Afghan public opinion has
been turning steadily against the largely
powerless central government, guarded in the
capital by foreign forces. The insecurity endured
by most Afghans - the absence of peace - is enough
to make them give up hope in President Karzai,
often jeeringly referred to as the "mayor of
Kabul" or "assistant to the American ambassador".
Historically Afghans have selected and
followed strong leaders; they expect a leader to
deliver security, jobs, special favors -
something, anyway. The Karzai government, confined
to a self-serving US agenda that is often at odds
with Afghan interests, has delivered nothing at
all to the average Afghan, still living in abysmal
poverty. In 2004, Afghans dutifully voted for
Karzai as the instrument of US promises. By 2005,
when parliamentary elections were held, voters
indicated that they were fed up with the same old
candidates - all those militia commanders and
Islamist extremists - and the same old hollow
promises.
The sad part of the story is
this. Despite the Bush administration's sham
"peace" and fake "democracy", it might have made -
might still make - a success of Afghanistan if
only it delivered on that third big promise: to
rebuild the bombed-out country. Most Afghans,
after the dispersal of the Taliban, were full of
hope and ready to work. The tangible benefits of
reconstruction - jobs, housing, schools,
health-care facilities - could have rallied them
to support the government and turn that illusory
"democracy" into something like the real thing.
But reconstruction didn't happen. When NATO-led
forces moved into the southern provinces this
summer to keep the peace and continue
"development", Lieutenant-General David Richards,
British commander of the operation, seemed
astonished to find that little or no development
had so far taken place.
For that failure
the US is to blame. Until this year, the US-led
coalition assumed sole charge of "security"
operations outside Kabul, but it never put enough
troops on the ground to do the job. (Sound
familiar?) As a result, aid workers (both
international and Afghan) lost their lives, and
non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs) withdrew
to Kabul or, like Medecins Sans Frontieres, left
the country altogether. Private contractors who
remained in the field found themselves regularly
diverting project funds to "security", so that, as
in Iraq, aid money poured into operations that
belonged in the military budget.
A recent
audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction found the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) using "an
accounting shell game" to hide mammoth cost
overruns on projects - as high as 418% - resulting
partly from such security problems. There's every
reason to believe that an audit of Afghanistan
reconstruction by many of the same firms under
contract to USAID would reveal similar accounting
practices used for the same reason. Without peace
there can be no security, and without security no
development.
The reconstruction shell
game But there's more to the story than
that. To understand the failure - and fraud - of
such reconstruction, you have to take a look at
the peculiar system of US aid for international
development. During the past five years, the US
and many other donor nations pledged billions of
dollars to Afghanistan, yet Afghans keep asking:
"Where did the money go?" American taxpayers
should be asking the same question. The official
answer is that donor funds are lost to Afghan
corruption. But shady Afghans, accustomed to
two-bit bribes, are learning how big-bucks
corruption really works from the masters of the
world.
A fact-packed report issued in June
2005 by Action Aid, a widely respected NGO
headquartered in Johannesburg, makes sense of the
workings of that world. The report studied
development aid given by all countries globally
and discovered that only a small part of it -
maybe 40% - is real. The rest is "phantom" aid;
that is, the money never actually shows up in
recipient countries at all.
Some of it
doesn't even exist except as an accounting item,
as when countries count debt relief or the
construction costs for a fancy new embassy in the
aid column. A lot of it never leaves home.
Paychecks for American "experts" under contract to
USAID, for example, go directly from the agency to
their US banks without ever passing through the
to-be-reconstructed country. Much aid money, the
report concludes, is thrown away on "overpriced
and ineffective technical assistance", such as
those very hot-shot American experts. And a big
chunk of it is carefully "tied" to the donor
nation, which means that the recipient is obliged
to use the donated money to buy products from the
donor country, even when - especially when - the
same goods are available cheaper at home.
The US easily outstrips other nations at
most of these scams, making it second only to
France as the world's biggest purveyor of phantom
aid. Fully 47% of US development aid is lavished
on overpriced technical assistance. By comparison,
only 4% of Sweden's aid budget and only 2% of
Luxembourg's and Ireland's goes to such
assistance. As for tying aid to the purchase of
donor-made products, Sweden and Norway don't do it
all; neither do Ireland and the United Kingdom.
But 70% of US aid is contingent upon the recipient
spending it on American stuff, especially US-made
armaments. Considering all these practices, Action
Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of US
aid is phantom aid.
According to targets
set years ago by the United Nations and agreed to
by almost every country in the world, a rich
country should give 0.7% of its national income in
annual aid to poor ones. So far, only the
Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and
Luxembourg (with real aid at 0.65% of national
income) even come close. At the other end of the
scale, the US spends a paltry 0.02% of national
income on real aid, which works out to an annual
contribution of US$8 from every citizen of "the
wealthiest nation in the world". (By comparison,
Swedes kick in $193 per person, Norwegians $304,
and the citizens of Luxembourg $357.) President
Bush boasts of sending billions in aid to
Afghanistan, but in fact we could do better by
passing a hat.
The Bush administration
often deliberately misrepresents its aid program
for domestic consumption. Last year, for example,
when the president sent his wife to Kabul for a
few hours of photo-ops, the New York Times
reported that her mission was "to promise
long-term commitment from the United States to
education for women and children". Speaking in
Kabul, Laura Bush pledged that the United States
would give an additional $17.7 million to support
education in Afghanistan. As it happened, that
grant had previously been announced - and it was
not for Afghan public education (or women and
children) at all, but to establish a brand-new,
private, for-profit American University of
Afghanistan catering to the Afghan and
international elite. (How a private university
comes to be supported by public taxpayer dollars
and the US Army Corps of Engineers is another
peculiarity of Bush aid.)
Ashraf Ghani,
the former finance minister of Afghanistan and
president of Kabul University, complained, "You
cannot support private education and ignore public
education." But typically, having set up a
government in Afghanistan, the US stiffs it,
preferring to channel aid money to private
American contractors. Increasingly privatized, US
aid becomes just one more mechanism for
transferring taxpayer dollars to the coffers of
select US companies and the pockets of the already
rich.
In 2001, Andrew Natsios, then head
of USAID, cited foreign aid as "a key
foreign-policy instrument" designed to help other
countries "become better markets for US exports".
To guarantee that mission, the State Department
recently took over the formerly semi-autonomous
aid agency. And since the aim of American aid is
to make the world safe for American business,
USAID now cuts in business from the start. It
sends out requests for proposals to a short list
of the usual suspects and awards contracts to
those bidders currently in favor. (Election-time
kickbacks influence the list of favorites.)
Sometimes it invites only one contractor
to apply, the same efficient procedure that made
Halliburton so notorious and profitable in Iraq.
In many fields it "pre-selects vendors" by
accepting bids every five years or so on an IQC -
that's an "Indefinite Quantities Contract".
Contractors submit indefinite information about
what they might be prepared to do in unspecified
areas, should some more definite contract
materialize; the winners become designated
contractors who are invited to apply when the real
thing comes along. USAID generates the real thing
in the form of an RFP, a Request for Proposals,
issued to the "pre-selected vendors" who then
compete (or collaborate) to do - in yet another
country - work dreamed up in Washington by
theoreticians unencumbered by first-hand knowledge
of the hapless "target".
The road to
Taliban Land The criteria by which
contractors are selected have little or nothing to
do with conditions in the recipient country, and
they are not exactly what you would call
transparent. Take the case of the Kabul-Kandahar
Highway, featured on the USAID website as a proud
accomplishment. In five years, it's also the only
accomplishment in highway building - which makes
it one better than the Bush administration record
in building power stations, water systems, sewer
systems or dams.
The highway was featured
in the Kabul Weekly newspaper in March 2005 under
the headline "Millions wasted on second-rate
roads". Afghan journalist Mirwais Harooni reported
that even though other international companies had
been ready to rebuild the highway for $250,000 per
kilometer, the US-based Louis Berger Group got the
job at $700,000 per kilometer - of which there are
389. Why? The standard American answer is that
Americans do better work - though not Berger,
which at the time was already years behind on
another $665 million contract to build Afghan
schools. Berger subcontracted to Turkish and
Indian companies to build the narrow, two-lane,
shoulderless highway at a final cost of about
$620,000 per kilometer; and anyone who travels it
today can see that it is already falling apart.
Former Minister of Planning Ramazan
Bashardost complained that when it came to
building roads, the Taliban had done a better job;
and he too asked, "Where did the money go?" Now,
in a move certain to tank President Karzai's
approval ratings and further endanger US and NATO
troops in the area, the Bush administration has
pressured his government to turn this "gift of the
people of the United States" into a toll road,
charging each driver $20 for a road-use permit
valid for one month. In this way, according to
American experts providing highly paid technical
assistance, Afghanistan can collect $30 million
annually from its impoverished citizens and
thereby decrease the foreign-aid "burden" on the
United States.
Is it any wonder that
foreign aid seems to ordinary Afghans to be
something only foreigners enjoy? At one end of the
infamous highway, in Kabul, Afghans complain about
the fancy restaurants where those experts,
technicians and other foreigners gather, men and
women together, to drink alcohol, carry on, and
plunge half-naked into swimming pools. They object
to the brothels - 80 of them by 2005 - that house
women trafficked in to serve the "needs" of
foreign men. They complain that half the capital
city still lies in ruins, that many people still
live in tents, that thousands can't find jobs,
that children go hungry, that schools and
hospitals are overcrowded, that women in tattered
burqas still beg in the streets and turn to
prostitution, that children are kidnapped and sold
into slavery or murdered for their kidneys or
eyes. They wonder where the promised aid money
went and what the puppet government can possibly
do to make things better.
At the other end
of the highway, in Kandahar city - President
Karzai's home town - and in the southern provinces
of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan, Taliban
commander Mullah Dadullah is reported to have more
than 12,000 men under arms and squads of suicide
bombers at the ready. They ambush newly arrived
NATO troops. The embattled British commander,
Lieutenant-General Richards, recently issued a
warning: "We need to realize that we could
actually fail here."
The US attacks the
Taliban, as it did in 2001, with air power. (The
Times of London reports that in May alone, US
planes flew an "astonishing" 750 bombing raids.)
Every day brings new reports of NATO and Taliban
combat casualties, and of "suspected" Taliban as
well as civilians killed, long-range, by US bombs.
In the meantime, the Taliban take control
of villages; they murder teachers and blow up
schools. US-led drug-eradication teams take
control of villages and destroy the poppy crops of
poor farmers. Caught as usual in the middle of
warring factions, Afghans of the south and east
long ago ceased to wonder where the money went.
Instead they wonder who the government is. And
what ever happened to "peace".
Journalist and photographer Ann
Jones spent much of the past four years in
Afghanistan working as a human-rights researcher
and women's advocate with international
humanitarian agencies and teaching English to
Kabul high-school English teachers. Her new book
is Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in
Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
