| | The fears of a former Afghan minister National Post
05/18/2007
By Peter Goodspeed
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Economic Aid; Worries Afghanistan a 'failed state'
Afghanistan is a tortured country in an unforgiving corner of the world, but it will always be home to Ashraf Ghani, a 58-year-old academic and former World Bank executive who was the interim government's finance minister for two years after the Taliban were expelled.
Now, he worries his homeland may once again be becoming a failed state, riddled with corruption, preyed on by terrorists and incapable of providing good government for its citizens.
And he thinks the international community, well-intentioned as it may be, is unprepared to do much to help.
"We have rushed to address each problem without understanding the whole, using atavistic, haphazard, fragmented and short-term responses that sometimes exacerbate the collection of problems we set out to fix," he says in a newly published book, Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.
"While we all agree that global poverty is intolerable, we attempt to deal with it by using mechanisms developed 50 years ago. From Sudan and Somalia to Nepal, East Timor and Kosovo, the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars over half a century has resulted only in disenchantment and mutual recrimination without many significant breakthroughs in wealth creation.
"Rather than allowing those we are trying to help to drive he process forward themselves, we insist on imposing our own outdated solutions," he adds.
The key to state building, Mr. Ghani argues, is to recognize that legitimacy flows from citizens, then agree on the goals and functions of a state, from a citizen's point of view, and search for pragmatic ways to support those goals.
When states fail to meet their citizens' basic needs, they enter a vicious downward cycle, where power struggles distort priorities, people lose trust in government, institutions lose legitimacy, the economy becomes criminalized and the populace is disenfranchised.
Neglected failing states quickly become breeding grounds for terror and "vicious networks of criminality, violence and drugs feed on disenfranchised populations and uncontrolled territory."
Seven years after the Taliban were overthrown, Afghanistan is still struggling to re-establish itself as a successful state, says Mr. Ghani.
It has racked up some victories, rallying international help and receiving promises of billions of dollars in foreign aid, but few Afghans have seen significant improvement in their lives. Rampant corruption, the absence of the rule of law and a failure to provide equitable social services are all undermining government support.
"Corruption has become a major problem in Afghanistan. It is a cancer that has eaten through," he says. "No high-ranking official of the government has been prosecuted for corruption and sentenced and unless that happens, there will be disgust.
"The Afghanistan political class has failed to offer a national vision to the people. They have pursued their personal interests at the expense of the national interest and corruption has resulted in disappointment."
"It is the weakness of the government, not the strength of the Taliban that is the issue," he adds.
But outdated international aid efforts must share some of the blame. UN agencies frequently fail to practise the transparency they preach and refuse to be held accountable for their work, Mr. Ghani says.
"Six of the UN agencies in Afghanistan are not even willing to disclose their audits to their own board of governors," he says.
"These agencies are not coherent; they are no co-ordinated under one UN program. In Afghanistan, every agency has a separate set of priorities and we do not know how capable they are because they are unaccountable."
"International technical assistance is considered to be largely wasted," he adds. "Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into technical assistance only to increase corruption and misgovernance."
He cites U. S. contractors whose staff are paid $1,500 a day to do basic accounting procedures, when locals could be trained to do the same job in less than six months for a fraction of the cost.
In addition, the UN and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have virtually stripped Afghanistan of the capable civil servants it needs to be successful.
"We had 240,000 civil servants in 2001, who were quite willing to work for $50 a month," he says.
"By 2004, all the talented ones had left to become drivers for the UN or World Bank or the NGOs. A driver for the UN was being paid $400, a university professor was being paid $50. So, 60,000 Afghans went."
While international aid workers have rushed to push up enrollments in primary schools, they have done little to provide higher education for young Afghans.
"In a country that has had decades of war, how are you going to run a government without investment in higher education?" he asks.
"Youth can't have ownership of the country unless they are at the forefront of assuming responsibility.
"Putting millions of people in primary school, without giving them a functioning economy is not the way to stability."
More than anything, Mr. Ghani wants to see Afghanistan approached not as a charity case, but as an investment. If it could only be given access to globalized markets, it could unleash new opportunities.
"If 40 of the top corporations in the world give us market access for our major products, it will change economic opportunities radically," he says.
"We need to convene people from the corporate world, who know how to manage risk and handle value chains and how to create jobs. The aid community does not know these things and the military is being asked to assume tasks for which they have never been prepared."
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