by David Loyn
He was soon removed from his post, and saw other colleagues who knew about Afghanistan sidelined and replaced by a new leadership of people from across the UN system with no Afghan experience. When he asked why there was such a widespread replacement of people, risking the loss of institutional memory, he was told that staff who knew Afghanistan were “resisting new ideas”; the UN now “needed new blood.”20 There was competition among UN agencies for postwar reconstruction, as they relied on the overhead payments to run their offices in Geneva or New York. Barmak went to work in the Afghan Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development, where there was no furniture or phones and staff sat in cold rooms on thin mattresses on the floor. The available budget to spend on rural development in the ministry’s first year after the fall of the Taliban was fifty dollars.21
Across town, in the Afghan seat of power, the Arg, President Karzai’s chief of staff, a former San Francisco lawyer, Said Tayeb Jawad, was struggling to do basic tasks. He had brought his own laptop with him and would have the president check documents on it before going to an office supply shop to use their printer.22 At the beginning, there was no money to pay the civil service, nor for basic reconstruction in the Arg, which had been badly damaged by the Taliban. The international community did not step in with practical assistance to work with Afghanistan as it was but instead came in with a variety of competing grand plans, with overlapping conditions, budgets, priorities, and target dates. The president did not need a plan, he needed a printer.
It was a fundamental misunderstanding of many aid organizations and the U.S. military that Afghanistan was a clean slate, where they needed to do everything from scratch. Aid workers took to referring to it as Ground Zero.23 They would have done better from the beginning to build on what was there, frail as it was. The institutional structure of the Afghan state survived both the chaos of the mujahideen years and the Taliban. With a little attention, it could have been stood up. When the Taliban regime collapsed under sustained U.S. bombing, civil servants forced by the Taliban to grow beards and wear shalwar kameez, the baggy cotton pajamas that are universal across the region, went to the barbers for a shave, took their Western-style suits and ties out from under the mattress, and reported for work. But they were told to go home to wait for the new administration—a mistake as serious as the de-Baathification program that damaged the prospects for post-Saddam Iraq.24
There are curious elements to this institutional continuity. In the entrance halls of some ministries, including the Ministry of Finance, is a line of pictures of ministers. After the Communists in suits and mujahideen in robes comes a bearded and turbaned Taliban minister. When I worked as an adviser in President Ghani’s government in 2017, one of his legal team quoted a precedent from 1998 in a meeting to construct a new policy. I asked, “Are you sure about the date? That was when the Taliban were in power.” He said, “It’s a decree—as legitimate as any.”
Material that could have informed a better policy was available. In the remarkable archive of modern Afghanistan collected by Louis and Nancy Dupree, and now housed in its own center at Kabul University, I came on a report written in 1988 that looked back over U.S. assistance to Afghanistan from 1950 to 1979, the year of the Soviet invasion. U.S. support was only a quarter that of Soviet assistance to Afghanistan in that period, but was still substantial, including major investment in Helmand Province in the southwest to build hydroelectric dams and irrigation canals. The report contains much that would be familiar to those in the international community who dealt with Afghanistan post-2001. It found that “over-confidence in American expertise often meant that too little attention was paid to local circumstances.” It would have been better to work with the grain, rather than against “Afghan cultural and institutional factors.”25
One of the biggest failures in the post-Taliban years was in delivering a better life and opportunities for women. Agreements since Bonn have been full of language about a “broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic” settlement for Afghanistan. This led to quotas so the Afghan parliament has a higher proportion of women MPs than many Western countries, but the reform needed was far deeper. Fundamental issues would not be resolved by slogans. Most women in jail were arrested for “running away,” leaving abusive husbands; not officially a crime but customarily regarded as one. Despite all the rhetoric, this appalling abuse has not changed. It required robust international action to stop it, not well-meaning and well-funded workshops that made donors feel good. Child marriages, low access to education, and limited employment opportunities continue to make Afghanistan an unequal place. And this remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to have a baby, despite some improvements in health. The best protection for women would be an end to the fighting and equal access to jobs—far more important than platitudes about gender equality. But rights were always prioritized to the exclusion of everything else. When the Afghan government put a request for economic empowerment of women among the advance papers for an international conference as late as 2014, they faced significant pushback from the UN. In the Alice in Wonderland world of international agreements, emphasizing economic opportunities for women was seen as undermining the fight for women’s rights.
MONEY TO BURN
In December 2002, in the fading gray light of a Kabul winter afternoon, stocky Mongol-featured Uzbek workers wrapped in padded jackets were burning money. One after another, they pushed wheelbarrow loads of old blue Afghani banknotes and hurled them into large braziers, each six feet across and ten feet tall. The notes had been swapped one for one for a new currency, and the old money needed to be quickly destroyed, under tight security, so it was not recirculated. There were two currencies previously in circulation, and barring tiny irregularities, the one issued since the 1990s by the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north looked identical to the central currency, but was deemed only half its value for exchange purposes.
Bales of notes were tossed up through the air and fell into the braziers—each shooting a stream of sparks as it tumbled down into the fire. The cash swap was a radical tool that could be wielded only once, to reclaim control of money supply by replacing a failing currency where the largest denomination notes—ten thousand Afghanis—were worth just twenty-five cents.26 There was far more money in circulation than expected, as for many years there had been chaotic distribution of new notes with no reference to the stability of the economy. The cash swap felt like a clean break with the past, although much of the money burned was brand new, coming directly from container loads of cash seized by warlords when they entered Kabul.27 The cash had been ordered by the Taliban, and the warlords who swept into the city refused to hand it over to President Karzai’s government. This was money laundering Afghan-style, where once again the warlords stood to benefit the most.
The currency reform was introduced under the finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, later president, one of a new generation of politicians who had spent most of their lives abroad—in his case, the U.S. He was impatient for change from the start, criticizing the West for failing to support Afghanistan with what it needed when it needed it. It would be another three years before USAID put forward a coherent plan for reconstruction. “We had a strategy in three months,” said Ghani. “Why is it one has to go to parallel strategies?”28
From his work at the World Bank, Ghani knew that capital was essential in the recovery of fragile states—both financial and human capital. But in 2002, humanitarian aid was the main focus of donors rather than funding for infrastructure, and Ghani could not change that. He did not win support to fund a scheme to zone Kabul with services laid out before the city expanded. The result was that the capital city grew to five times its size over the two decades after 2001, with chaotic layouts of houses, climbing hillsides across town, with no access to utilities. Nor could he and reformist colleagues like Muhammad Hanif Atmar persuade donors to build an advanced Afghan business school to turn out MBAs. “They could have trained armies of civi
l servants with masters’ degrees to serve their country,” said Atmar, who later became the foreign minister. “For twenty years they planned every time for a year … They were always planning on short-term time lines, saying we just have a year to do this.”
In response to President Bush’s call for more aid when he referred to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after the Second World War in his Virginia Military Institute speech in 2002, the U.S. budgeted $1 billion for the following year under the title Accelerating Success. Even if the change in tone was only to ensure troops could depart without leaving chaos behind them, the U.S. now turned on an aid spigot that would not be turned off for a long time. Two decades on, international donors, with the U.S. by far the largest, have spent the equivalent of the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation.29 And to put it simply—we have not got Germany out of it. So what went wrong?
After decades of trial and error, development economists are now broadly in agreement that the best way to fund stability in poor countries is to put money through government budgets.30 If governments are weak, that is hard to do. America wanted to see quick improvements after dislodging a tyrannical government. Since there was no understanding of potential Afghan institutional capacity—this was aid for Ground Zero—the money went to fund programs outside the state—a substitute, not support, for government. The opportunities for corruption were substantial.
By 2004/5, the off-budget cash for Accelerating Success was three times the size of the Afghan state budget. In the unregulated freewheeling world of post-Taliban Afghanistan, with the international community unwilling to provide security or develop institutions to manage the country, off-budget cash was like throwing gasoline on a fire, where the warlords were in the strongest position to take advantage. William Byrd, the World Bank representative in Kabul, said the off-budget aid was like an “aid juggernaut” that descended on the country, rolling over everything, and leaving nothing in its wake.31
In those early high-rolling days, it was easy for almost any Afghan who spoke a little English to get rich quick. A former driver for Wais Barmak at the UN became a millionaire virtually overnight by picking up American contracts, where international clients were paying far more than they should have done. The differences in figures were eye-watering. For example, a house would be renovated for $500, but the Americans would pay the contractor $20,000. It was a problem that was never solved. As late as 2014, Barmak rented a large building in the Sherpur district of Kabul for the Afghan government department he then headed. The rent he negotiated was $6,000 a month; the building had previously been rented by an international organization for $45,000 a month.
Like Dante’s hell, there were several circles of corruption in Afghanistan after 2001. The first was the grinding petty indignity of the police demanding bribes at checkpoints, or the passport or identity card office, where every official took a cut, but there was also the corruption involved in contracting, where so much was sliced off along the way in substandard subcontracting that the quality of the final work was no good. In between was the vacuuming power of the big international presence in Kabul, that sucked in the best people, so the new money did not grow a new state. This too was corruption. The average salary of 280,000 Afghan civil servants was $50 a month, while 50,000 Afghans working as support staff in the parallel state of the UN and international NGOs could earn $1,000 a month—a disparity that crippled the capacity of the state to recruit talent.32 “Failure was built in from day one,” according to one of Ghani’s closest advisers, Scott Guggenheim, because of “a flood of people coming in here, with contractors and NGOs making fifteen times what a civil servant does.”33
As I entered the World Food Programme compound in Kabul one day in 2006, the security guard told me his story. Like so many Afghans, his family were refugees. Living in a camp in the Northwest Frontier in Pakistan, he secured a university degree, and on his return to post-Taliban Afghanistan, wanting to contribute to building a new country, he worked in the Ministry of Higher Education. But he quit, as the salary for a security guard in an international agency was far higher than a graduate-level job in government. With two children, he made a rational choice.
The report card for the $1 billion spent on Accelerating Success was not good. Just one in ten of the new schools budgeted for were completed.34 Many spending promises were never fulfilled and were not followed up as attention turned to Iraq. Money was spent on building capacity in a number of ministries, including health and education, but the programs did not deliver much. Staff quality was variable, and it was hard to get people willing to stay in Kabul. USAID had three directors in 2004, its agricultural program had five technical officers. Relatively junior staff were handling huge sums of money. Typically, the spending handled by each staff member in an overseas mission is $1.2 million. In Kabul in 2004, it was $27.5 million.35
Much of the spending was as if a mirage—on a balance sheet as aid to Afghanistan, but not getting near any Afghan. In some programs, less than 10 percent of the budget was actually spent on the ground, as the bulk of the funding went to computers, vehicles, salaries, travel, accommodation, and in particular security for Western staff. In an old Afghan proverb, it was like a “cow drinking its own milk.”36 When USAID did provide international consultants to the president’s office, the chief of staff, Jawad, fired one who could not write a basic letter.37
The road from Kabul to Kandahar, a prestige early construction project, would become notorious for high cost, bad management, and poor quality of the final road—built using foreign contractors and thus not putting money into Afghanistan. The temptations of “cost-plus” contracts, where bills were paid with little scrutiny, proved too great for the company Louis Berger, which would settle with U.S. authorities for $69 million in 2010, with a further $17 million in 2015, as several senior staff were convicted of fraud.
ON BUDGET
There were ways of putting money on budget, through the state, without it fueling corruption. The World Bank created the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which turned out to be a simple and effective way of tracking donor money to limit corruption, funding salaries, and delivering better roads, schools, and health facilities. Some technical assistance programs were successful, delivering outcomes that helped Afghanistan to stand up for itself. The Ministry of Finance was transformed by externally funded advisers, who worked with the civil servants who were there, rather than replacing them with highly paid foreign-educated substitutes. This made it easier to bring modern computing into an existing system, and it delivered results. By 2012, the analyst William Byrd, who once railed against an aid juggernaut, could write that Afghanistan’s capacity to manage public finances “far exceeds other fragile or conflict-affected low income countries.”38 An initiative to increase the number of people and businesses who paid tax exceeded its targets. Lines formed at new public taxation offices for people to register.
So not all aid was wasted. The National Solidarity Program was a popular and successful way of building local projects, which turned out to be a corruption-resistant way of delivering development and building up confidence in the state. Village committees decided how to spend grants of around $20,000—small sums compared to other development spending. They would typically request a bridge, well, generator, or school. Spending was transparent, and accounts were published on the wall of the village mosque. At a meeting to decide how to spend the money, in a village in Logar Province, I asked the backgrounds of those in the meeting. One had been a Communist, another a fighter for the mujahideen, the next in the Taliban. But they all came together to build the new Afghanistan and decide on how to manage the small funds now coming to them. The scheme was wholly funded by international donors and wholly administered by the Afghan state, but when I asked where they thought the money came from, they said, “The government.” So this was the best kind of international development support, building links between citizens and the state. With conventional USAID-funded schools coming in at
around $350,000, and many not built well because of the problems of supervising subcontractors, these local projects were value for money. Fifteen National Solidarity Program schools could be built for the price of one USAID school.
FIVE PILLARS AND A MAGIC CARPET
At the same time as the president announced Accelerating Success to fund development, Rumsfeld announced an end to combat operations, saying the eight thousand U.S. troops then in Afghanistan would move on to Phase IV—stabilization and reconstruction—and one of the most innovative commanders to head the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Barno, was appointed to make the change. The new commander of CENTCOM, General John Abizaid, who succeeded the war-fighting Tommy Franks in 2003, took a more nuanced approach to political/military relations. He told Barno to do “big POL and little MIL.”39 Barno expanded from a headquarters staff of six to four hundred in his nineteen months in command. Recognizing that the military were “bankrupt”40 in doctrine to deal with the challenge of Afghanistan, he dusted off his cadet textbooks on counterinsurgency from West Point in 1974 and put them on the shelf in his office in Kabul when he arrived in October 2003.
Inspired by T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia)’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”41—Barno introduced “Five Pillars” for the campaign. Beyond defeating terrorism, they extended the reach of the military mission to good governance and regional relations, and most importantly, giving “area ownership” to military units. Until then, the war had been fought by units going out widely from fixed bases. Now troops would live in one area for the whole of their tour and get to know the local leaders informed by a slide that became known as Barno’s “magic carpet,”42 spreading about a dozen activities under the Five Pillars, mostly not involving the use of force. “Afghans’ biggest concern,” he said, “is not Americans and Westerners overstaying their welcome; it’s the fear of abandonment.” The memory of America leaving Afghanistan to the warlords and civil war after the defeat of the Soviet invasion was still fresh.
