A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Lockhart, Clare Working Paper The aid relationship in Afghanistan: Struggling for government leadership GEG Working Paper, No. 2007/27 Provided in Cooperation with: University of Oxford, Global Economic Governance Programme (GEG) Suggested Citation: Lockhart, Clare (2007) : The aid relationship in Afghanistan: Struggling for government leadership, GEG Working Paper, No. 2007/27, University of Oxford, Global Economic Governance Programme (GEG), Oxford This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/196290 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Between 2001 and 2005, she worked for the Afghan Government and the UN on the institution-building and reconstruction processes in Afghanistan, where she led budget design, aid management, institutional reform, and national program design processes. Previously she managed a team in the Social Policy and Strategy Unit of the World Bank to design governance and legal reform approaches, adapting techniques from the private sector and military domains to public sector management, designing toolkits, training seminars and operational guidelines. She has also worked on program design in Russia and Indonesia, and practiced as a public lawyer. 1 The Aid Relationship in Afghanistan: struggling for government leadership Clare Lockhart This case study explores the role of the Afghan authorities between 2001 and 2006—the Interim Administration, the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—in shaping the ‘aid relationship’ between those authorities, and various components of the international community. It describes the strategies, frameworks, policies and systems that the Afghan authorities and the donors adapted or invented to manage aid. The case study analyzes the impact of those initiatives on the effectiveness of domestic and donor policy, and the drivers and constraints on the effectiveness of domestic policy. Given how recently the events described unfolded it is no surprise that there are as yet, at least to the author’s knowledge, no accounts that convey the decision-making processes accurately. The account presented here is written from the perspective of a participant in many of the events in question who attended the core meetings and policy discussions of the period in the UN, the Government of Afghanistan, and most recently in NATO/ISAF. Recognising that the author is therefore a participant as well as analyst, the case study nonetheless attempts to provide a factual description of the process, together with an objective analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of approaches taken against the goals they were intended to serve. Background Afghanistan, aid and the geo-political context The character of aid in Afghanistan has varied dramatically over the last few decades, in terms of the channels and purposes of aid, and the identity of its interlocutors. At various points prior to the years of conflict, a number of nation states and multi-lateral organizations had invested in Afghanistan’s physical and institutional infrastructure, and were motivated by a range of factors. It is possible to consider the evolution of the character of the ‘aid relationship’ in Afghanistan with reference to four distinctive ‘phases’. The first two of these describe the broad patterns of aid between the Soviet invasion and the fall of the Taliban, as a background to the second two, which describe two distinctive periods in the aid relationship between the fall of the Taliban, the Presidential elections, and 2006. Afghanistan has been at war more or less continuously since 1979, following the invasion of Afghanistan by the former USSR, and the resulting resistance movement. From this period until 1989, when the Soviet forces withdrew, foreign financial assistance was channelled to the country through two main mechanisms. First, the USSR invested up to $10 billion in Afghanistan (in today’s value in assistance). Approximately $2 billion was invested in major physical infrastructure projects, including highways, power stations and tramlines, with the remainder taking the form of ‘military assistance’. At the same time 2 Western powers, mainly the US, channelled considerable resources to the mujahadeen, much of this through humanitarian assistance to refugee communities based in Pakistan. Even after the withdrawal of Russian forces in 1989, support continued to be channelled to various actors in the country. As the seven parties, which had attempted to share power between them in the period 1992-6, turned their energies and resources against one other, governance became increasingly fragmented. A number of NGOs which had been channelling support to the Northern Alliance throughout the resistance years continued to be active, and together with UN agencies they attempted to sustain basic services for the population. A small number of NGOs gained specialized skills in particular areas and consolidated a network of service delivery organizations including, for example, the Swedish Committee which sustained large numbers of schools across the country, Dacaar which managed water supplies, and UN Habitat which established a network of Community Fora across six major urban areas. In 1997, after the establishment of the Taliban, a group of donors under the leadership of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) established the ‘Strategic Framework’, which sought to establish and enforce protocols to ensure the coherence of humanitarian assistance, under a UN umbrella. The political arm of the UN – UNSMA - took a different view, urging some coordination with government structures. No distinction at this time was made between the political arm of the government - the Taliban leadership - and the administration - the professional civil servants in technical domains. During this time the World Bank kept a ‘Watching Brief’ on Afghanistan, which involved monitoring some aspects of the situation from a distance, but it maintained no on-the-ground presence or programs. After the overthrow of the Taliban in November 2001 by US forces, leaders of developed nations pledged to ‘rebuild Afghanistan’. This pledge took the form of various different kinds of aid. First, military assistance was deployed in four major forms; (i) the Coalition, which continued to focus on the elimination of terrorism in the territory and particularly the capture of Osama bin Laden; (ii) the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which was deployed initially in Kabul and then progressively across the country with the establishment of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs); and (iii) assistance from a variety of agencies from various countries geared to establishing the Afghan National Army and reforming the police force, border control and secret services. At the time of the 2004 Berlin Conference, the Government of Afghanistan estimated that the cost of the military presence between the Bonn Agreement and the Berlin Conference was at least $30 billion, whereas it estimated that $3 billion had been disbursed through the aid system in the same period. Military assistance vastly outweighed developmental assistance in financial terms, by a ratio of at least 10:1. Second, political assistance was undertaken, most importantly through the UN’s facilitation of the Bonn Agreement and its sustained diplomatic attention to the implementation of that agreement from 2001 to 2004. Third, developmental assistance was pledged to the country, in the form of support to recurrent and capital expenditures in order to restore services. Lastly, humanitarian assistance was pledged to the country in the form of fund-raising for UN agencies and NGOs to implement projects in a variety of domains, including food distribution and refugee assistance. 3 The extent of government dependency on each of these forms of assistance is linked to the speed and effectiveness with which the government can assume the functions. In terms of military and security