Since 2002 I have been engaged in Afghanistan for a total of three and a half years. This engagement has included periods working at a field level with an INGO interacting with villagers and local government officials implementing anti-opium programs through to managing national signature projects while serving as Senior Ministerial Advisor with the UN. My most recent engagement was completed last September managing the technical and contractual aspects of the USA government counter-insurgency program in sixteen provinces along the Pakistan border region.

Over this period of time, I believe I have come to understand what is working in Afghanistan and what isn’t and why that is the case. I am unapologetically cynical of what success we have achieved so far, an argument that is well supported by the limited change we have effected in social, economic and political indicators over this eight year period. In the time I have served in Afghanistan I have sought to understand the motivation of communities and the behavior and conditions that leads to conflict.    

Traditionally we tend to measure the success of many of the internationally funded programs based on the deliverables; how many kilometres of road we construct; how many blankets we deliver or tons of food aid we provide; how many short term jobs we create. We largely do not measure the short term or long term impact of these interventions; neither specifically nor generally and often do not take significant account of “lessons learned” in developing new strategies. If we were to consider what has been the defining impact of many projects concluded over the past eight years we would find many are left wanting in the process of restoring meaningful social, economic and political structures within the country.  We report successes and tend to ignore failures.The failure however has greater import when considered over the full duration of our most recent period of intervention. The difficulty for most donors is that they are not interested in reporting failures to their constituents. By and large, some of the responsibility for the lack of real peace progress has to come back to how we determine our inputs and what critical self analysis that the major donors engage in.

The major issues affecting Afghanistan and the subsequent stabilization of the communities is that we have perpetuated a top down strategy that in itself tends to follow on from the former socialist, strongman model that held sway for several decades or longer over its history. We are continuing that process by building big government and infrastructure before the need for that arises and without consolidating the social and economic baselines for the people them self.  We have allowed economic reform to take a laissez faire approach dominated by a subsistence level economy with a government that is still in training in a global environment that is highly competitive. We have focused on achieving short term goals and not in developed a workable and cohesive long term strategy such as a sustainable development economic that is devoid of international political interest. In another aspect, we have often not sufficiently taken into account the political, social and cultural will of the people in setting development and recovery agendas.

We place great stock on the introduction of democracy yet for the most part, democracy as we know it does not exist in Afghanistan. Individuals and families follow tribal, clan, ethnic and religious divisions and always will. In this regard, Afghanistan and Afghan society is possibly better suited to a bottom up democracy where an official is answerable to the communities instead of to being appointed from above into a semi-autonomous position of power, a process that is has politically expedient lines but also is the cause for disaffection between the various community groups that gave rise to the previous civil war and the continuation of that conflict now.

I am firmly of the opinion that we can no longer afford to continue consolidating and applying balm to our own weak roles in the creation of an almost failed state if we are truly interested in achieving a meaningful resolution. If this report is to be effectual it needs to look at the positive and negative factors that pertain to the international stakeholders as well as the positive and negative factors that apply to the political and social structures in Afghanistan although that is not so obvious from the brief. To some extent conclusions appear to have already been drawn since it is looking at specifics relating to the community and not taking this more holistic view of the reintegration process such as I have mentioned.  I would hope to include this aspect.