LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Autumn 2007

by Mike Gapes

Sir,

Ashraf Ghani, as a former finance minister of Afghanistan and now as Chancellor of Kabul University, provides a unique insight into how the country’s current difficulties arose and how they might be resolved. He proposes a number of sensible policies that would do much to reinforce the structures of the Afghan state and issues the international community with a timely warning about the most immediate problem we face, i.e. that foreign forces operating in the country are close to losing the good-will of ordinary Afghans. If we are to avoid a crisis in Afghan public opinion, a new short-term international security strategy is now clearly required to go hand-in-hand with long-term planning.

This review of international security activities should consider all aspects of the problem. Many countries which have deployed troops in Afghanistan currently impose tight restrictions on what they are allowed to do, thereby hampering their effectiveness. On the other hand, as Human Rights Watch has argued, civilian casualties caused by US military operations do little to win public support for international forces. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has criticised both extremes.

I believe that by building the capacity of the Afghan government, the international community will help to strengthen the trust of the Afghan people in their own leaders and institutions. Only then will we buy ourselves sufficient time to implement more long-term solutions, such as those suggested by Ghani. Indeed, his call for a 10-year horizon to implement innovative solutions to his countries difficulties resonates with recent comments by the new British Ambassador to Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. The ambassador argued that international support for Afghanistan must be committed “for decades” and that we are in “a marathon, not a sprint”.

Ghani’s article also noted the particular difficulties caused by the disjointed organisation of Afghanistan’s international partners. This fragmentation can be traced back to the Bonn Agreement when a number of G-8 countries agreed to take lead responsibility for different aspects of Afghanistan’s development. For instance, the UK accepted responsibility for counter-narcotics and the Italians took the lead on judicial reform. When it became clear that this system was less successful than expected, the London Compact established an Afghan National Development Strategy to harmonize and co-ordinate assistance in three sectors. These were a) security, b) governance, the rule of law and human rights and c) social and economic development. Such a collective international approach needs to be strengthened if we are eventually to empower the Afghan government to meet the country’s demands in these sectors.

At the moment, however, endemic corruption is perhaps the single most corrosive influence on public support for the Afghan government. It provides extremists with an opportunity to exploit discontent. In this context, Ghani suggests that all future assistance be channelled through a multi-donor trust fund to reduce coordination costs and establish clear accountability. It is an interesting proposal. However, it may prove difficult to find consensus on this issue, given disagreements between, for example, the US and UK on how much aid should flow through the Afghan government itself.