Center for a New American Security

Sports writing often compares great contests to epic battles.

But perhaps in our efforts in Afghanistan, the reverse is a better comparison.

Reporting on the Beijing Olympics puts China's expenditure on those games at about $44 billion.

Meanwhile, total US expenditure on aid to Afghanistan barely merits a place on the podium: a total of $26 billion in seven years.

Of course, we have come nowhere near the Marshall plan promised Afghanistan in 2002--an effort whose proportions are worthy of consideration as we try to correct course. One year of the Marshall Plan (1948-1949) cost approximately $7.4 billion. A similar effort in today's dollars would cost just over $64 billion (adjusted by the Consumer Price Index), or put differently, $14 billion more than the total requested by the Afghan government in the Afghanistan National Development Strategy over the course of five years instead of one.

This would not cost nearly as much as the Marshall Plan as a share of the GDP. A nation at war spending similarly in order to support its security in response to the largest attack on US soil in history would have to fork out in assistance about $382 Billion--1.5 to 2 times the annual cost of the first major US tax cuts in a time of war.

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has pieced together a stellar, short series discussing the challenges of development in Afghanistan. The first piece focuses on the frustrations of Afghans at the pace of development. Important is the discussion of moral hazard by the governor of Bamyan province.

A couple hundred miles to the north, Habiba Surabi envies the attention Khost gets.

She is the governor of Bamiyan, one of the most peaceful of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. It is also one of the most impoverished and underdeveloped.

Surabi says many of the children in Bamiyan still attend school outdoors — in tents, if they are lucky.

Of the roads that crisscross this mountainous province, only one mile is paved. Work on connecting Surabi's province to Kabul via neighboring Wardak province is going nowhere.

Surabi says Khost is supposed to get a $60 million road connecting it to neighboring Paktia province — and that it will take only 18 months to build.

It will take three years to build the road running from Bamiyan through Wardak, the Bamiyan governor says. She also says that despite promises from the Ministry of Public Works that construction would begin on the Bamiyan side, "we didn't see anything."

The slow pace of construction in the new Afghanistan and the slow flow of development dollars to the north and center of the country are leading to increasing restiveness in the previously quiescent Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara dominated areas.

The second piece discusses the role of PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams) in development and alludes to the ongoing debate about how development aid should be distributed in the country. It features an interview with one of the best former PRT commanders in Afghanistan, CDR Larry Legree.

"We've seen it everywhere else. Once we build roads through these valleys and we build bridges that connect population areas, economics just go through the roof," Legree says.

Once people are living above bare subsistence — where they are susceptible to Taliban influences — they begin to care about "starting a small business, selling excess commodities and getting to secondary and tertiary markets," he says.

It discusses USAID's reliance on foreign contractors to execute Afghan projects and ACBAR and OXFAM's criticism of the practice, not to mention the Afghan government's criticisms (CIDA and DFID, the development arms of Canada and the UK are excluded from this criticism, although they should not be).

The report goes on to say:

Christopher Dell, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, says people tend to forget how bad conditions were in the past.

He points to the fact that in 2001, Afghanistan had only 15 phone lines that could call the outside world. Now, the country has several million mobile phone subscribers who can call anywhere.

Of course, this is evidence of the poverty of our information operations campaign, if not the problems in our development efforts (although the US has still failed to fully fund even its already pledged aid to Afghanistan).

The last report deals with the now completed Afghanistan National Development Strategy. The Afghan government completed the Strategy last month and submits it to international donors in Paris next month. Nelson's report features an interview with senior advisor to the strategy Mahmud Saikal (brother of renowned Afghanistan expert Amin Saikal) as well as Kai Eide, the new UNAMA chief.

With a $50 billion price tag — more than three times as much as had been pledged here since 2002 — the strategy has the gotten the West's attention.

Most important, says Kai Eide, the United Nations' new special envoy to Afghanistan, is to convince donors that the plan can make a difference here and to determine whether the Afghan government has evolved enough to take over the reins of development.

"We do not expect to see a kind of Switzerland, or Norway, for that matter, over the next decades to come," Eide says, "but what we need to see is sufficient progress for the Afghans to sustain it and continue that by themselves."

Afghan leaders says they are are itching to do that. Jalani Popal heads the new Independent Directorate of Local Governance.

"We prefer that all the assistance to Afghanistan should go through very transparent systems, regarding the cost and process, and the government of Afghanistan should be in lead of this assistance, which is not the case yet," Popal says.

Still, questions remain about the government's ability to supervise where foreign development aid is going.

Many here point to the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development as a success story. Donors laud the ministry for getting hundreds of millions of dollars in wells, schools and other small projects out to far-flung provinces.

The lack of attention to the Afghanistan National Development Strategy by the international community and especially the military Alliances has been unfortunate, especially given the lack of any other comprehensive strategy for winning in Afghanistan (heck, we don't even know who is in charge of the various efforts there). Let me take away the surprises from the Paris conference to discuss the Strategy and request monetary support: the plan is imperfect and will be implemented imperfectly. On the other hand, the price tag for the five year plan is the equivalent of what we spend just on the military side for five months in Iraq. Given that it would finally provide a national level political strategy in Afghanistan that we could support and could actually result in victory, it seems well worth the price, despite imperfections.

Kip is constantly shocked to hear that we have no strategy in Afghanistan.

After all, the Afghanistan Compact of 2006 explicitly lays out the goals and conditions of ongoing international support to Afghanistan. Moreover, the Afghanistan National Development Strategy was intended to build Afghan government consensus for achieving the goals of the Compact.

Now, in order to have a functioning National Strategy in Afghanistan, we would have to support the almost nil capacity of the Afghan government to support it. In Today's Washington Times Ronald E. Neumann, former ambassador to Afghanistan gives an idea of incremental change in order to support the ability of the Afghan government to carry out reforms as well as to free up US funds for more rapid use in the country.

However, while ISAF has paid lip-service to four major lines of operation in Afghanistan: Security, Economic Development and Reconstruction, Governance, and Information Operations, is has never developed a national strategy that ties together these efforts. Essentially, everybody does security, the PRTs do a little Governance support and Economic Development and Reconstruction (although national and service caveats mean that many of the PRTniks rarely actually see any of their work), and no one does information operations worth discussing--publishing a newspaper in an illiterate country does not count as IO.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence of this (besides Bomber McNeill berating Dr. Nadiri , senior Afghanistan National Development Strategy adviser to President Karzai, in public forums) is recent reporting that the International Monetary Fund seems poised to declare the Afghanistan National Development Strategy a failure, which in turn would threaten in theory some of its access to funding.

ISAF has never taken seriously the Development Strategy. The CJ 9 (Civil Affairs) shop at ISAF was run for much of 2007 by a Marine Corps Colonel who did not even understand that CJSOTF and CSTC-A were a part of Operation Enduring Freedom much less the role of the Development Strategy in establishing a comprehensive approach to achieving stability in Afghanistan. Meetings dedicated to the "Comprehensive Approach" and run by the CJ5 (future plans) were by all accounts show-and-tell affairs in which major International Organizations told ISAF what it was that they saw as their role in the country.

Commanders in Afghanistan have by-and-large not heard of the Afghanistan Compact nor the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, even as the former lays out explicit measures of effectiveness for the campaign in Afghanistan.

Senior Commanders both at CSTC-A and at ISAF have not taken the Strategy seriously as the Compact did not deal very effectively with the Security line of operation. Yet, the majority of funding and support to Afghanistan comes in the form of direct or indirect contributions to the security sector. If that support is not rationally embedded into an overarching political framework, it is due to fail. Knowing this, the security players still aren't sitting at the table of their own accord--and then complaining subsequently that the security sector of the strategy is weak.

This is foolish, and the impending doom of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy is further proof that it is time after six years that Afghanistan too has its Petraeus.

(here for my previous post on narcotics and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy)

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) releases regular reporting on the opium trade in Afghanistan. They have done excellent work in analyzing the extent of the opium problem in Afghanistan.

Already in the 2007 annual survey on opium production in Afghanistan, UNODC challenged some of the claptrap from the SENLIS Council and other groups who have argued that poverty causes farmers to grow poppy and that eradication then results in those farmers joining the insurgency. (see also the very interesting, if you can take the bureaucratese, 2008 annual world report)

In a March report, UNODC methodically puts to rest the issue of poverty as the root cause for regional opium production. Instead:

...it is clear that both local corruption and the insurgency are key elements in the recent opium boom in Afghanistan. Today, the most significant factor affecting the scale of cultivation among opium poppy farmers appears to be the security situation. In areas with good security, the average opium poppy farm consisted of just 10 jeribs. In more dangerous
areas, the plots were nearly four times as high, averaging 37 jeribs. The February 2008 MCN/UNODC Rapid Assessment Survey9 showed that, in a sample of 469 villages, more than
two-thirds of the villages located in areas with poor security conditions reported growing opium poppy in 2008, as compared to less than one-third in areas that enjoyed better security. In the southern and western provinces, the link between security conditions and opium poppy cultivation was even stronger, with 100 per cent of the surveyed villages where poor security conditions prevailed having planted opium poppy this year. As stated in a recent report commissioned by the World Bank and DIFID: “Ominously, the links and
synergy between opium poppy and insecurity are becoming increasingly apparent."

Moreover, in Southern Afghanistan, where the majority of opium is grown, farmers could give up poppy and still make more than farmers anywhere else in the country (although less than they would growing poppy).

Even more importantly, in areas where agricultural assistance was provided within a secure environment, poppy production was greatly decreased. In areas without security, agriculture assistance had a far smaller impact, further suggesting that insurgency and poppy cultivation are far more intertwined than poverty and insurgency.

Now this become a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument because opium and insurgency have become mutually generative, that is they feed off of one another. You can't deal with one without dealing with the other.

The International Community and Afghan government have adopted an approach that looks to settle the opium issue after the insurgency has been dealt with. Yet, the opium issue contributes monetarily to the insurgency, creates an illicit economy which undermines any sense of government control, and de-legitimizes the government as many of its key leaders are involved in the trade.

(Such as Nangarhar governor Gul Agha Shirzai and, most Afghans believe, President Karzai's brother)

So what next? ISAF has adopted a head-in-the-sand approach to dealing with opium. (an approach it has also adopted with its economic development and reconstruction, governance, and information "lines of operation") As with the majority of our challenges in the country, the start is to develop a national strategy for defeating the insurgency.

A good place to begin would be supporting a nested security strategy within the Afghanistan National Development Strategy that includes a robust framework for dealing with opium. Kip has personally seen and heard ISAF leaders deride the Afghanistan National Development Strategy. The strategy, which the Afghan government is trying to produce, is the agreed upon framework for implementing the 2006 Afghanistan Compact between the International Community and the Afghan government. Neither ISAF nor CSTC-A (the US-led security assistance command) have robustly participated in the process of developing the strategy, nor as Australia's new government made clear last month, has it developed any form of coherent alternative strategy.

The Afghanistan National Development Strategy seeks to tie the various components of the Afghan government into a coherent whole capable of building an Afghan nation. An integral component of this will be defeating an insurgency which international forces cannot defeat on their own. And an integral piece of defeating the insurgency will be dealing with opium.

The up-and-down consultative process for developing the Strategy, while imperfect, has actually sought to engage communities that have been ostracized by either the regime or international forces. This has included beginning to tackle difficult issues such as narcotics. ISAF and CSTC-A should robustly participate in and support the process rather than strategizing in a vacuum.

At the very least, as a peon to unity of effort, the US Army could consider unblocking web access to the Afghanistan National Development Strategy and UNAMA from its computers.