What would it take to end violence in Afghanistan and kick-start efforts to get the country on the road to peace and prosperity?
It depends whom you ask, but a number of experts who spoke to CBC Online agree strongly that the approach being taken to pacification and development by NATO forces in southern Afghanistan simply isn't working.
In a report released on Feb. 12, the Senate defence committee draws a similar conclusion and urges the Harper government to rethink Canada's role in the NATO mission if other alliance members don't send more combat troops and resources within 12 months.
It's hard to overstate just how badly things are going at the moment, according to Barnett R. Rubin of New York University, a leading scholar on Afghanistan.
"Washington and its international partners must rethink their strategy and significantly increase both the resources they devote to Afghanistan and the effectiveness of their use," Rubin writes in the February 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Otherwise, he warns, the resurgent Taliban, record opium production and a moribund reconstruction effort will push the country into chaos.
Those are the broad challenges that NATO and Afghanistan's aid donors face. What to do about them is a hot topic in Ottawa, Washington, London and at United Nations headquarters in New York. It's impossible to find anyone who believes in quick fixes, but consensus is building among Afghan experts and well-wishers that several steps have to be taken as soon possible, to avoid the collapse that Rubin fears.
These include:
• Making more effective use of NATO forces, with more Alliance members contributing troops.
• Stepping up training for police and the Afghan National Army.
• Attacking official corruption.
• Regaining popular support by altering counter-insurgency techniques and involving Afghans in their own development.
• Getting the legal (non-drug) economy moving to create jobs and tax revenue.
• Ending Pakistani support for insurgents.
"More troops and more money, that’s where you start" says Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.
Rashid has been covering Afghanistan for two decades and his assessment of what's going wrong in Afghanistan begins with a scathing criticism of the international community's failure to pacify and rebuild the country after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.
"Basically the U.S. and other coalition countries came in after 9/11, bombed the Taliban out of power and promised to rebuild to give people a new Afghanistan. Instead, they just gave them the old one: drugs, warlords, crime and all the factors that gave rise to the Taliban in the 1990s," Rashid said from his home in Lahore, Pakistan.
"People expected nation-building but instead they got NATO, corruption and a Taliban insurgency."
Winning Afghans' trust
For Kathy Gannon, a Canadian journalist and author of the Afghanistan memoir I Is for Infidel, the problem begins and ends with the government put in place in Kabul after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban.
"Ask any Afghan," she says, "they'll tell you they can't trust the police, they can't trust officials, they can't trust provincial governors. Therefore, they can't trust the international community that supports all of this."
An opium poppy crop that accounts for more than half of the country's economy is partly to blame for corruption, Gannon says, but so is the international community — the United States, Britain, Canada and other donors who have clout in Kabul but don't take advantage of it.
"Until we win back the trust of Afghans," she said, "all the money and all the military action in the world isn't going to make a difference."
Steve Masty agrees. He was head of the international charity CARE Kabul in the 1990s and has worked for nearly 14 years as a writer and consultant on international development. Afghans, he says, have to be put in real charge of their country's reconstruction efforts.
Billions in aid stolen, Afghans believe
"It's not just about a military strategy," Masty says, "it's about who owns the process, and that should be the people of Afghanistan. Not just warlords and politicians in Kabul but real people in real villages."
Masty advocates giving aid funds to local councils known in Afghanistan as shuras.
"It needs to be supervised, and there needs to be security, but it will work better than centralizing everything with corrupt officials in Kabul," he says. "Afghans seriously believe that the $16 billion [US] in aid that the country has received since 2001 has been stolen or wasted."
There are those who question Canada's overall strategy of simultaneously delivering aid and fighting a counter-insurgency. The rationale is that development work can't succeed without security, so soldiers either protect aid workers or provide essential services themselves — digging wells, building roads and schools.
Cheshmak Farhoumand-Sims argues against that approach. A lecturer in conflict studies at Saint Paul's University in Ottawa, Farhoumand-Sims says even the most well-intentioned military interventions can't co-exist with development aid.
"It makes the aid delivery process more dangerous," she says, "and the proof is in the reality in southern Afghanistan. It's simply not safe there for aid workers to dig wells or build schools. People assume they're soldiers and they're targeted."
Crime and the police
There is a consensus among Afghanistan experts and aid donors that recruiting and training local police needs to be a priority in future counter-insurgency strategies. But at the moment, Gannon says, the Afghan police are widely seen by the public as corrupt and untrustworthy. Police officers are often involved in violent crime, she says, often for understandable reasons.
"The police have to wait months for what's already a pittance of salary," Gannon says. "Unless salaries and training improve, you're going to have a populace that doesn't trust the police or the foreign donors that support them. It's a vicious circle."
This spring is expected to usher in a fierce season of fighting between Taliban and NATO forces, whatever steps the alliance takes to alter its approach or beef up troop strength. Barnett Rubin of New York University says the role of Pakistan in the Taliban uprising needs to be taken into account.
The insurgents are largely based in Pakistani frontier areas with Afghanistan, he says, and greater pressure needs to be put on the military and government in Islamabad to end cross-border forays and support.
"The Taliban get sanctuary in Pakistan," he says. "It has to stop."
Rubin also believes, along with every other Afghanistan expert contacted for this article, that the United States has yet to take its Afghan campaign seriously enough to invest the time, troops and resources that the situation requires. That might be changing, he says, but the war in Iraq, tensions with Iran and other pressing international demands could just as easily divert U.S. attention yet again from a country that's known nothing but war for the past 30 years.
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