Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Liberal peace activists in the West regarded education and reconstruction as the answers to all the ills of Afghanistan, the moral alternative to military force. Perhaps this idea held water in 2002, for, at that moment, the prospects for an Afghan renaissance looked rosy. The country was bursting with entrepreneurial energy, everyone had a project in mind, and microlending on a grand scale might have made all the difference.

  By microlending, I mean foreign funders doling out loans and grants for small projects proposed by enterprising Afghan individuals and groups and letting those Afghans design and run the projects as they deemed fit—deep wells, lipstick-making workshops, whatever. For example, a group called Afghans-4-Tomorrow developed a hand-operated device it is distributing in rural areas, a device that compresses agricultural waste—sticks, stems, wheat stubble, and the like—into bricks of long-burning fuel. In a country virtually denuded of firewood, such a project is manna, especially since individual families that own these devices can use them to produce home heating fuel commercially.

  Microlending to projects like this would have meant that instead of spending $1 billion on three projects, the international community would have given $5,000 apiece to half a million projects. In 2002, when a single dollar equaled 45,000 afghanis, $5,000 would have gone a long way. Much of the money disbursed in this manner would no doubt have been “wasted.” Some would have been stolen, and many of the projects would probably have failed, but manageably small sums would have percolated into the local economy even through the failed projects—and at least some of the money would have done some direct good, because Afghans’ ideas of what to fix and how to fix it would have come out of their own actual lives and would have drawn upon technologies with which they were familiar.

  There was never any realistic chance of this happening. For one thing, no infrastructure existed for disbursing the money this way, no army of grant officers that could be fielded quickly. Besides, this approach would have required that donors pay out vast sums with no control over how the money was spent and with no direct benefit to themselves, and no funder was going to do that. Finally, most potential donors, including the deepest and purest of idealists, didn’t want to see mere restoration in Afghanistan; they wanted to see transformation. So when reconstruction money came pouring in, as it did eventually from countries around the globe, it came in huge chunks for grand projects planned abroad and designed to produce a national metamorphosis.

  The US contribution got off to a slow start because the party in power had a conflicted attitude about helping any ruined nation recover its social and economic infrastructure. As a candidate campaigning for the presidency, George Bush had railed against “nation building” and had vowed that he would never do any of it if he were elected. It was natural, then, for his administration to treat the intervention in Afghanistan as a purely military mission. The aim had been to topple the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, nothing more. Afghanistan might be hurting, but fixing it wasn’t America’s job—so went one strain of thinking in the Bush administration.

  For the rest of that year and into the next, the bulk of American spending in Afghanistan went to the 5,200 troops still stationed in the far southeast and south, near the Pakistan border. Their mission was quite specific. They were to “mop up” the last of the “Taliban remnants” and come home as soon as that job was done. Securing the rest of the country was turned over to the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, staffed by nations such as Turkey and Germany (and soon run by NATO).

  But the run-up to the intervention in Afghanistan made a quick in-and-out impractical. For one thing, every war needs public support. Public support requires righteous passion. Anger about 9/11 provided plenty of passion but didn’t fully satisfy the requirement that the passion be noble. The women’s issue was co-opted to meet this need. Officially the war may have been fought to punish terrorists, but sentimentally it was fought to rescue Afghan women from Afghan men. Never mind that the situation of Afghan women was embedded in the culture, which only Afghans could transform. Now that the war was over, it was necessary that the lot of Afghan women at least look improved before American troops left the country. Otherwise—Osama bin Laden having escaped—the whole thing would have been for naught.

  Also, just months after the United States intervened in Afghanistan and before the fighting ended there, the Bush administration started beating the drum for another war, a war to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. This new war was sold on the core neoconservative doctrine that America could spread democracy and promote happiness by taking aggressive military action against tyrannies. So the United States sent a hundred thousand troops into Iraq, supported by forty-seven thousand from Great Britain and twenty-seven thousand from the “Coalition of the Willing,” a ragtag lineup of thirty-six other countries (including Iceland, which contributed two). Hussein proved easy to topple, but the democracy, prosperity, and happiness that were supposed to follow proved elusive.

  By mid-2003, Iraq looked like a failed initiative, and that failure made a happy outcome in Afghanistan all the more crucial. Originally the Bush administration seemed to think Afghanistan would straighten out on its own, but by the end of 2003 it was coming to terms with the probability that the United States might have to do some nation building to ensure that women be liberated and empowered, that democracy take root, and that Afghanistan end up stable and prosperous.

  In 2002–2003, America spent some $35 billion on military operations and war-related costs in Afghanistan.3 It budgeted nearly $800 million for humanitarian and emergency aid, and less than a tenth of that, about $64 million, on long-term reconstruction projects. The following year, funding for reconstruction and development projects began to climb.4 By then, money was also beginning to pour in from many other countries. Some was spent directly by government agencies of the donor nations. Most went through private firms hired by governments or through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which are private organizations funded by public grants and private donations—analogous to what, within America, are called nonprofit corporations. The NGOs ranged from private charities such as Roots for Peace (an organization dedicated to removing land mines) to long-established giants such as the Asia Foundation, which has been doing development work in Asia since the early days of the Cold War, largely to support US foreign policy goals. Many NGOs, especially those staffed by Afghans and run locally, did truly vital work against great odds. Still, by 2003, more than three hundred outside NGOs had some ten thousand employees living and working in Kabul, and, as of 2006, that number had climbed above sixteen hundred.5

  In fact, 77 percent of the reconstruction money spent in Afghanistan bypassed the Afghan government entirely, according to a study done in 2009: it went through NGOs, private corporations, or foreign government agencies without ever passing through Afghan government ministries. 6 Whatever benefits these billions of dollars may have conferred (and some conferred a lot), they did nothing to build the government’s authority within the country. To many Afghans these projects made their government look like a hapless bystander.

  Some projects planned on the other side of the world might have been sound in theory, but on the ground they looked like they were carried out for somebody else’s benefit, and, because some were executed hastily (to provide markers of success ahead of the re-election campaigns that both Bush and Karzai would be facing in 2004), they were carried out incompetently.

  A road linking Sar-e-Pul to Shiberghan, two provinces in northern Afghanistan, offers a striking example. The road was a good idea; it cut travel time between busy provincial cities, a wonderful impetus for trade. The trouble was, people living along the road did not have occasion to visit the cities frequently, and many did not own cars or trucks. When they did go to a city, they usually traveled on foot, with donkeys carrying their goods, so the better road didn’t cut their travel time by all that much. The new road was certainly better than the dirt tracks the villagers had built and m
aintained themselves over the decades. Those tracks were ruts filled with dust in the summer and mud after the rains started.

  The American road was built on a raised stone substructure to keep it dry, but the surveys done so hastily failed to take the slope of the landscape into account along the entire length of the road. In some places, the high, impermeable berm acted as a dam. The road didn’t have culverts in the necessary places, so the water collected into pools on the uphill side. Villagers worried that the water would soften the soil enough to make their cob huts collapse. Some villagers went out with picks, therefore, and cut channels in the road to serve as drains, which defeated the whole purpose of the road, because automobile traffic could not cross even one such improvised ditch. The police caught and arrested the villagers who had done this destructive deed.7 The road did thus create an interaction between the rural folk and the government, but not one that made the government feel like their government.

  The biggest, most heroic reconstruction project attempted by the Americans in the early days was to rebuild the road between Kabul and Kandahar, the country’s two main cities. No one could impeach the argument for this project, which cut travel time between these cities by two-thirds. It proved extremely expensive, however, and, as with many construction projects carried out in Afghanistan by American technical experts and with American funding, much of the money was spent in America. That’s because infrastructure projects of this sort had to gain approval in Congress, and the legislators voting for it had a responsibility to their constituents. If their votes didn’t bring jobs and money to their districts, they were not likely to get re-elected. So development projects earmarked for Afghanistan were structured to ensure that the necessary supplies and equipment were purchased in America or paid in salary to US technical experts whenever possible.8

  Afghanistan didn’t have the technical experts needed to plan projects like the Kabul-Kandahar road. This part of the job was farmed out to consulting firms in America, who farmed out portions of their tasks to subcontractors, who farmed out parts of it to sub-subcontractors, and so on down. Typically, then, as much as sixty-six cents out of every dollar allocated for development work in Afghanistan was banked in the United States. This was not corruption. It was democracy. To Afghans at the other end of the pipeline, however, it looked a lot like the practices that in Afghanistan were universally labeled corruption.

  Still, let’s be honest: by Afghan standards, a huge sum of money did make it to Afghanistan. Some of this, however, was paid to foreign technical experts working on-site. These professionals demanded at least as much money to work in Afghanistan as they would have made working in the private sector at home, which is reasonable. Why else would they go to this distant and dangerous place? In fact, because the work entailed real risks, professionals of the highest caliber could only be recruited with offers of better money than they could have made at home. So engineers and technical consultants working on a project like the Kabul-Kandahar road could expect to earn at least $100,000 a year and as much as $200,000. Plus, they certainly could not be asked to do this work unprotected, and Afghan police were ill equipped to provide such security, both their competence and their loyalty being uncertain. So, private construction companies such as the Louis Berger Group procured crack bodyguards from private security firms such as Blackwater and Global Security. These aces commonly made $1,000 a day, ranging up toward $250,000 a year per person.

  Most of the American experts working in Afghanistan didn’t even speak Dari, the lingua franca of Afghanistan, much less Pushto, the major language of most areas in which America was doing civil reconstruction work, so they needed their own translators, ideally ones who could act as cultural interpreters. Translators had to speak English just as fluently as the local languages, so expatriate Afghans were hired by private contracting firms, the neoconservatives’ preferred avenue of aid delivery, to supply translators/interpreters to the big construction companies as well as to NGOs, government agencies, and the US military.

  I was amazed when a recruiter for one such firm called me out of the blue one day to offer me, sight unseen, a job over the phone. I said I didn’t speak Pushto, which I knew to be the language really needed, but the recruiter told me not to worry. “Your Pushto is good enough.” Since the only sentence I know how to say in Pushto is “I don’t speak Pushto,” I doubted her assurance.

  She urged me not to decide, however, until I had heard the offer: the job would pay a little over $200,000 a year, 80 percent of it tax free, all benefits and travel included, and no expenses to speak of, because I would be fed and lodged by (in this case) the US army. Quite a number of my friends and relatives have said yes to this type of offer, so I know it wasn’t exceptional.

  Finally, when a technical expert with his bodyguard and interpreter went into the countryside, he generally traveled in an armored vehicle priced around $100,000. In short, one unit of technical expertise roaming the Afghan landscape represented nearly $1 million on the hoof.9 Meanwhile, locals hired to do the physical labor were paid on the local scale of forty to seventy dollars a week. So million-dollar units were managing the work of people breaking rocks for five to ten dollars a day. That’s a prescription for trouble.

  Then again, ten dollars a day was more than many of these workers would have made if the road project had not come through their district. Once the road was extended into the next district, they would be laid off, and people in the next district would get jobs. So local people working on the road had an incentive to go out each night and sabotage the work they’d done each day, with some confidence that the sabotage would be blamed on “the Taliban.” No wonder the highway was expensive to build.

  Even though so many of the dollars allocated for Afghan development were siphoned off before the funds even left the donor countries, torrents of money did end up flooding local markets. Because it was overwhelmingly out of proportion to the domestic economy, it had unintended consequences. Even the NGOs contributed to this syndrome. Many had branch offices in Kabul operating from headquarters in foreign countries. Their staff members may have been true idealists with the best interests of the country at heart, and many made less money than they could have earned in the profit sector at home, but, still, they did get salaries commensurate with the low end of the pay scale in their home countries. And some were, in fact, compensated more handsomely, which was only natural, since they were risking their lives to vaccinate children in a place where doctors were getting killed for vaccinating children. And of course many foreigners came to Afghanistan to work not for NGOs but for private companies intent on profit.

  The bottom line was that Kabul filled up with foreigners who had cash in their pockets and little to spend it on. These folks could pay whatever was asked for any local product or service. They didn’t have to haggle, and haggling would indeed have seemed tasteless, given their wealth relative to the general populace of this ruined country. So any Afghan with a house or an office to rent to foreigners could name his own price. Consequently, rent on top properties soared. Philanthropist James Ritchie (who takes an interest in helping Afghanistan because he lived in Kabul as a child when his parents were doing development aid work there) opened an office in Kabul just after the fall of the Taliban. He rented it for $200 a month. By the time I spoke to him, five years later, the rent on that space had climbed to $3,000 a month.10

  When rents went up for foreigners, rents went up for everybody. And when rents went up, so did the price of real estate. Kabul properties began to sell at near-California prices. With inflation in the housing sector came inflation in other sectors. Extravagant demand meant some consumers were willing to pay reckless premiums to get what they wanted—pay whatever to get it now! get it fresh! hot! the best!—which drove up the price of shoes, bread, and other common items not just for foreigners and the nouveau riche Afghans living on their runoff but for everyone.

  All this new cash floating around didn’t come from any basic change in the
domestic economy. It wasn’t generated by new businesses, rising trade, or increased productivity in the domestic economy, so it didn’t correlate to a general rise in incomes. Only Afghans working for NGOs, international companies, and foreign governments could get a cut of this cash dropping out of the sky. This is why men with medical degrees shut down their clinics and went to work driving cars for foreigners: they could make more money as chauffeurs than as doctors.

  Many of the city’s inhabitants, however, were living in the old economy at the old salary scales. Teachers, cops, and civil servants were making somewhere between thirty and fifty dollars a month. Even high-level government officials were getting salaries in the mere hundreds of dollars a month, not thousands. Afghans operating private businesses catering strictly to locals might earn even less than cops and teachers, unless their business involved smuggling.

  The disparity between the old and new economies, fueled by the influx of outside money (and of drug money) began to strain the Afghan social fabric. Small-scale “lunch-pail” corruption turned endemic. Postal clerks routinely sold ten-afghani stamps for twenty afghanis and pocketed the difference.11 After all, they had to make a living too. Cops who came upon the scene of an accident fined everybody they could catch including witnesses, bystanders, gawkers, and random people passing by, regardless of involvement. Bureaucrats in charge of processing any kind of paperwork had one power above all, the power to slow things down, and they were certainly going to exercise that power unless they got a tip, more commonly known as a bribe. What else could they do? They had to get to work every morning just like everyone else, and gas cost four dollars a gallon in Afghanistan just as it did in other countries.

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