by David Loyn
The idea of “Money as a Weapons System” was enthusiastically promoted by commanders at all levels, who wanted development and jobs to follow offensive operations—clear, hold, and build. And the administration were committed to funding it. Michèle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, called it an “absolutely critical and flexible counterinsurgency tool.” But this turned out to be based on a flawed belief.
What people wanted most was fair treatment, justice, security, and an end to predatory policing, not schools and hospitals. “Paktia has lots of problems, but lack of clinics, schools and roads are not the problem,” an elder in the mountains of the east told researcher Andrew Wilder. If the police and courts were corrupt, Taliban justice looked attractive. Aid fueled that corruption, and Wilder was told that in the villages that more aid would make that worse, not better. “If you increase the amount of money it will also be useless because the government will simply steal more.”19 Warlords became astute players of the system. They knew the drawdown would begin in 2011. The bonanza would come to an end; they made money while they could.
MORE IS LESS20
The corrupting potential of international aid cut deep in Afghan villages. In a country with a profound sense of right and wrong and duty to society, getting something for nothing struck people as foolish. So while understandably demanding what they could get, they thought donors to be fools. Democracy brought corruption, so it quickly became a tainted idea, associated with immoral behavior, such as wearing jeans and drinking wine. One elder told Wilder, “Now we have democracy. People do whatever they want—loot, steal, and only think about themselves.” Ultimately, education, mobility, and development might open up different opportunities, but for now, conservative, traditional values were a rational defense against insecurity. The money came in grants, not loans, and associated social reform programs encountered a clash of culture between Western donors who value individual liberty, and people in Afghan villages governed by collective duty, where concepts like liberty and women’s rights literally have no meaning.
In functioning Pashtun society, duty and responsibility feed both ways through widening concentric circles of family, clan, tribe—with the nation as a remote wider circle. Individuals have no place outside this web of mutual responsibility, but are given respect inside, as duty flows up and down through patronage and service. The network was under attack from a Taliban campaign of murdering prominent elders in the south and west. A British diplomat in Helmand in 2009 said, “We are trying to work with the tribal grain, but it’s very coarsened.”21 That meant that there was little resilience, as the amount of aid money in the system lubricated new patronage networks, run by warlords who in their turn sidelined traditional elders, while co-opting patronage networks. To secure a senior police or regional government appointment cost upward of $100,000 in big provinces, with the money flowing upward to elites with roots in the 1980s mujahideen parties, whose corruption and banditry in the 1990s had provoked the rise of the Taliban in the first place.22
This represented a profound dilemma for the counterinsurgency doctrine. The plan was to connect citizens to the state, but if the state were corrupt, then the doctrine had a fatal flaw. It was Vietnam redux—massive military effort squandered by a failed administration, with the difference being that in Vietnam, America was propping up a post-colonialist state; in Afghanistan, the state was an American creation. ISAF commanders were exposed by their proximity to warlords, appearing in public with people the public knew were thieves.
McChrystal heard this problem in his first week in command in 2009, visiting a remote village in the east where he was told, “The number one complaint from Afghans is that the Afghan government doesn’t deliver on promises.”23
The international community had too few people with the political capacity to navigate these treacherous waters. Just as American officials failed a test of realpolitik in 2001, not recognizing the weakness of the warlords, so they later failed to recognize how the aid was worsening insecurity by empowering warlords. However adept the international project in Afghanistan may have been at democratic process, such as elections and jirgas, it failed the test of Afghan politics in the raw, lacking strategy and will both to limit the power of the warlords and successfully encourage civil society institutions who could grow non-warlord political parties.
The Taliban’s first military operation in 1994, when they had fewer than a hundred men and a handful of weapons, was against corruption and banditry. They opened the road between Kandahar and the border, taking down illegal roadblocks.24 When roadblocks returned, under the eye of international soldiers, it was an easy propaganda win for the Taliban, as was the corruption of the police and justice system. An Afghan political activist explained the process. “In any country there are 4 percent thugs and 1 percent extremists. Foreigners did not understand this and gave money to the thugs [warlords].” Supporting the Taliban was a logical defense mechanism in a system where international troops looked as if they were on the side of the warlords as they condoned corruption. “The 95 percent were patient for a while, but eventually, we had to align with the extremists [the Taliban] to throw out the thugs [the warlords].”25
THE SECOND JUGGERNAUT
At the same time as the military were flooding Afghanistan with cash, USAID also hugely increased its spending.26 William Byrd, the former World Bank economist, now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, saw this second wave of cash as more damaging than the first off-budget “aid juggernaut” he identified in the early years. With the bonfire of corruption consuming Afghan hopes, more cash was just fuel on the fire. It further delayed the day when Afghan elites were accountable to their people for the money they spent. “What’s the political strategy of relying on warlords, how does that move forward if you really want democracy?” asked Byrd. “It’s all short-term fixes.”27
Most funding was still off budget, spent outside the state, against what was now internationally agreed best practice—that aid was better spent building state capacity than replacing it. Donor nations, including the U.S., signed up to the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness back in 2005, agreeing that putting aid on budget was the best way to go forward because it connected people to the state. At an Afghan conference in London in January 2010, Hillary Clinton committed to put most cash on budget. But it was hard for the U.S. administration to get out of the habit. Looked at from Washington, the Afghan government was hardly a safe receptacle for hard-earned tax dollars, so grants and contracts delivered off budget continued.
Holbrooke insisted on running all USAID decisions on Afghanistan through what he called his “shitty office,” where he ran the AfPak program in a cramped, stuffy, first-floor corner of the State Department, overlooking an inner courtyard, next to the cafeteria.28 He was a restless vortex of energy, and would arrive in Kabul sending a bow wave crashing ahead of him that left nervous staffers bobbing in his wake. It did not deliver better scrutiny of projects—in fact, the opposite.
As spending grew, the need to shovel cash out the door became more urgent. U.S. civilian contracting, still with too few officials managing large sums of money, little inspection, and short timelines, brought its own perverse incentives. Quantity mattered more than quality, and since it took as much effort and time to deliver a large contract as a small one, there was a tendency to contract out functions to other companies, who would subcontract and subcontract down the line, with each layer taking a slice of the cash, until there was little left for the contract itself. Across Afghanistan, there were signs outside schools saying, “Gift of the American people,” but behind the signs, children were being taught in substandard buildings or even just tents. An aid official described the pressure on Afghan contractors.
He can get second-rate materials because no one will check the work (or he can likely pay off inspectors). He will hire family to do the work. He, and every other contractor, is graded not on quality but on how many schools he builds … So, even for honest contractors,
the incentives are for expensive, shoddy, uncoordinated, quickly built schools. And that is often what we got.29
Those who became adept at spending international money for their own purposes did not only come in dark-windowed pickups surrounded by gunmen but wore Western suits and spoke good English. They had undue influence among the thousands of international staff now in Kabul to manage aid projects. These were the peak years for expatriate life in Kabul, with a dozen places to eat and drink highly priced alcohol, sourced from the back doors of compliant embassies who shipped it in by the pallet-load, in the “diplomatic bag.” It was highly priced because of the bribes needed to serve it in a Muslim country. There were Chinese-owned late-night drinking clubs, a couple of French restaurants, and a Croatian restaurant, staffed by fierce Croatian women who took no nonsense from overmuscled boozed-up security guards on a night off.
The longest-running foreign-owned bar and guesthouse was opened by an English romantic, Peter Jouvenal, soon after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, in a house once occupied by Osama bin Laden. Moving to a more central location a couple of years later, he shipped out the interior of an old English pub, with table mats showing hunting scenes, and had china made with a crest showing the face of the fictitious rogue Flashman, antihero of a series of novels set in Britain’s nineteenth-century wars. Jouvenal called it Gandamack Lodge, after the location in eastern Afghanistan of the final defeat of an entire British division in the winter of 1841/42. The restaurant and garden of the Gandamack were the location where much business was done by spies, soldiers, journalists, and aid workers among the birdcages, rugs, antique Afghan muskets, swords, and tribal-made jezails that lined the walls.
Occasionally, if they could give a good reason, and get security, which meant two armored SUVs with discreetly armed guards, USAID and other embassy officials would be allowed out for the evening to a residence or the Gandamack, but it was hard to escape the demands of security officials with low appetite for risk. They were generally restricted to life hunched over computers behind the high walls of the embassy compound. They might as well have been in Foggy Bottom.
Peaking at close to one thousand people in 2010, the civilian surge never delivered the numbers or quality of people anticipated by Obama the year before. Only around three hundred people made it outside Kabul, and many did not last in the austere surroundings of rural Afghanistan, although it was what they had signed up for. Between 2009 and 2010, of the civilians assigned to Helmand, 40 percent did not last six months.30 Marc Chretien, the senior civilian representative with the U.S. Marines in Helmand, watched one woman arrive out of the cloud of dust of a helicopter landing, wearing a business suit, with good suitcases. He asked her if she had development experience, and she said, “Yes, I do, with the UN, in Manhattan.” He said, “You need to go to Kabul.” She said, “This is my assignment.” A week later, the marine commander told him, “She’s complaining about the size of her hooch, how big her little refrigerator is. She lives better than I do or any of my Marines.”31 Chretien had her transferred to Kabul.
Holbrooke harbored a career-long appreciation of the value of agricultural projects from his first overseas posting in 1972 working in villages in Vietnam, and when he took on the AfPak portfolio, he doubled spending on agriculture. There is no doubt that some of the agricultural experts made a difference, especially those with genuine farm experience. A California apple farmer spent three years in Ghazni improving orchards; cotton experts revived antique ginning plants and made another attempt to encourage Helmandis to grow cotton. Also in Helmand, there was a model agricultural research institute, Bolan Farms, which pioneered new ways of growing crops and showed them off to farmers, handing out seeds as they did so—hundreds of millions of dollars of seeds. In 2010, the enormous sum of $250 million was sent to a few districts in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post calculated that every resident of Nawa, one remote, poor Helmand district, received $400, higher than the annual per capita income.32 But it took more than the best of intentions. Holbrooke reminded staffers that when in Vietnam, he stuck on his office wall a Charlie Brown strip then just out that would become a classic. After losing yet another baseball game, Charlie declares, “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”33
The economy was stacked against success, however good the advisers were. An Afghan poultry expert, Dr. Ihsanullah, studied the best practice in the Netherlands and set up an innovative chicken project in Helmand. He would sell day-old chicks to farmers, buy local corn, fortify it, and return it as chicken feed. Even with a USAID grant for his incubation plant and price subsidies, the farmers could not compete with low-price chickens crossing the border from Iran and Pakistan. International financial institutions demanded open borders and free trade, missing the experience of so many countries that had made real strides from poverty to wealth, like Korea and Taiwan, who had managed trade, supported agriculture, and subsidized exports—essential stepping-stones on the way to prosperity.34
Similarly, the cotton could not find a market. In 2012, watching cotton arriving at a gin in Helmand, I asked farmers what they would plant the next year. Without hesitation, they chorused, “Koknar, koknar” (“Poppies”). And it was easy to see why. A wide concrete apron next to the gin was stacked as far as the eye could see with piles of unsold cotton bales. It was too hard to compete with imports of cotton from Pakistan.
Southern Afghanistan had plentiful water, and winter sunshine meant they could double-crop some fruits and vegetables, growing all year round. But without refrigeration, and better support for international trade, the agricultural sector would find it hard to recover the global trade it had before the decades of war began without more systemic support, and a decade of thoughtful interventions to provide alternative livelihoods to growing opium poppies was wasted.
In Garmser, southern Helmand, the dirt-poor gateway to the Pakistan desert, the huge sum of $21.5 million was spent from 2009 to 2011 across military and nonmilitary aid projects. The political officer Carter Malkasian wrote that there were not enough conditions attached to the spending. “Too often locals were happy to take the projects and do nothing in return.” That much money was overkill. “As of early 2011, most of the projects had provided a short-term boost rather than long-term economic growth.”35
The pity was that beyond the tsunami of cash for military contracting and troubled southern provinces, much had changed for the better. There was a real improvement in revenue raised in Afghanistan. Technical support for key ministries, in particular the Finance Ministry, meant the government could effectively handle more cash, as after years of mentoring they had developed the technical capacity to account for spending, “absorb” it in the jargon. This progress was more marked than in comparably sized economies in Africa. The World Bank found that Afghanistan had developed a “sound tax collection and administration system.”36 But it warned, “The overriding lesson of the last 10 years is that too many actors and projects chasing too many short-term stabilization—rather than development—goals leads to poor service delivery and an institutional environment that supports quick fixes over longer-term capacity development.”37
BAGS OF CASH
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the president, a mournful-faced man, heavier set but with the same trimmed beard as his more famous relative, sat in a crisply ironed white shalwar kameez and reminisced about how Kandahar was a long way from Chicago, where he had run a restaurant near Wrigley Field. The American diplomat was not taken in. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities,” he wrote in a cable, and “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs.”38 AWK, as he was known, was suspected of involvement in drug-dealing and other criminal activities. The president always demanded to see proof when diplomats complained. No court will ever test the evidence. AWK was shot by his own bodyguard in 2011.
There was another problem in confronting him. He was a CIA asset who rec
ruited fighters for the Kandahar Strike Force, an irregular military unit, operating out of the former home of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, alongside the CIA, who had occupied the compound since 2001.39 They had carried out a number of attacks that caused concern, including the death of a Kandahar police chief.40 The counterinsurgency dilemma was defined with precision by Eikenberry after one encounter in October 2009. “The meeting with AWK highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt.”41
Under constant international pressure to clean up the government, Karzai set up an oversight body as early as 2004. His first appointee as head of the body, Azizullah Lodin, used it to pursue personal vendettas. The second, a childhood friend of the president, Ezatullah Wasifi, had spent more than three years in jail in Nevada for selling heroin. After donor pressure, Karzai simply abolished the organization rather than cleaning it up.42 The same cycle was repeated several times, as internationally funded bodies delivered little effective oversight, and by 2010, Karzai was willing to be even more defiant. He openly admitted receiving carrier bags full of cash from Iran after it was revealed in The New York Times. “They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done.”43 It was a pointed reminder that the president had other international friends at a time when he was in a bitter argument with General Petraeus over control of Afghan private security companies who provided guards for Western organizations in Kabul. Karzai said the contractors killed civilians. He blamed the U.S. government, who he said “send the money for killing here.”44
Karzai had already tested the limits of international authority in 2010 by ordering the release of an official in the National Security Council, Muhammad Zia Salehi, arrested on corruption charges a month after Petraeus arrived in Kabul. Salehi was caught in a phone tap demanding a bribe of $20,000 to buy a Toyota for his son, in return for blocking an investigation into the New Ansari currency exchange company.
