The trees, but not the forest
Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghan finance minister (post-Taliban) and now chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness, has written an interesting article on what's required to move forward in Afghanistan. I was with him right up until these last two paragraphs:
While his observations ring true to me, his conclusions and recommendations seem misguided.
"Scattered efforts" aren't the problem. I believe that small, flexible, user-driven initiatives are generally more effective than big, cumbersome, top-down behemoths...if there is central guiding purpose that points the strategic direction.
In the military, it's called "commander's intent." Generals don't plan section tactics. They lay out their vision at the top level and tell their commanders what they're trying to do - they lay out what is to be done and within what parameters, and then let their subordinates work out the how of it. That process is repeated down the chain of command to the lowest level.
One of the benefits of such a process is that when the plan hits an unexpected obstacle - and the old saw that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" is a cliché for good reason - those affected can improvise another how quickly, because they know what their "commander's intent" is.
In this light, Ghani's recommendation for putting all aid through the central government seems to me a recipe for disaster - especially given the well known corruption issues he lays out earlier in the article.
Likewise, his invocation of the Marshall Plan is misplaced. The rebuilding of Europe had a substantially different starting point than the rebuilding of Afghanistan must have - because we're not "rebuilding" it, we're trying to help them build it from nearly scratch. Europe had institutions, bureaucracies, economic mechanisms, educational foundations and a lengthy list of other latent advantages that Afghanistan simply doesn't. Why do you think we were running the SAT-A? Because Afghanistan had no civil service to speak of, and no ability to create its own from the talent pool that existed after the fall of the Taliban.
I'm not saying that the international community is doing everything right in Afghanistan. More resources and a better plan are required. I suspect General Petraeus will discover that, unlike Iraq, his biggest challenge will not be developing and executing a counterinsurgency plan with U.S. troops, it will be herding the various cats that make up ISAF so that they're all moving in the same direction. It will be getting buy-in from the seeming cast of thousands who are currently pulling in different directions in Afghanistan.
No, I'm definitely not saying that the international forces are getting it right in Afghanistan. I'm saying that consolidating and centralizing power and delivery behind an inexperienced, largely corrupt Afghan government doesn't strike me as the most promising way forward.
The instruments currently used by the international community in Afghanistan, however, are part of the problem. The system can be made effective and efficient by eliminating the tens of thousands of scattered efforts, which create waste and parallel structures, and instead unifying foreign aid behind the single instrument of the Afghan national budget. The government and its international partners should delineate a set of objectives to deliver a dividend to the population and establish clear rules for accountability and transparency, including the creation of joint decision-making committees that bring international figures together with Afghan civil society and business oversight. This kind of partnership will require a new design for the use of aid, by a group similar to that which designed the Marshall Plan.
The present crisis was not inevitable, but rather the result of avoidable missteps. The Afghan population is still waiting, still hoping for an approach to answer their aspirations for a stable and just order. With that hope as its foundation, the right approach can bring Afghanistan to true stability.
While his observations ring true to me, his conclusions and recommendations seem misguided.
"Scattered efforts" aren't the problem. I believe that small, flexible, user-driven initiatives are generally more effective than big, cumbersome, top-down behemoths...if there is central guiding purpose that points the strategic direction.
In the military, it's called "commander's intent." Generals don't plan section tactics. They lay out their vision at the top level and tell their commanders what they're trying to do - they lay out what is to be done and within what parameters, and then let their subordinates work out the how of it. That process is repeated down the chain of command to the lowest level.
One of the benefits of such a process is that when the plan hits an unexpected obstacle - and the old saw that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" is a cliché for good reason - those affected can improvise another how quickly, because they know what their "commander's intent" is.
In this light, Ghani's recommendation for putting all aid through the central government seems to me a recipe for disaster - especially given the well known corruption issues he lays out earlier in the article.
Likewise, his invocation of the Marshall Plan is misplaced. The rebuilding of Europe had a substantially different starting point than the rebuilding of Afghanistan must have - because we're not "rebuilding" it, we're trying to help them build it from nearly scratch. Europe had institutions, bureaucracies, economic mechanisms, educational foundations and a lengthy list of other latent advantages that Afghanistan simply doesn't. Why do you think we were running the SAT-A? Because Afghanistan had no civil service to speak of, and no ability to create its own from the talent pool that existed after the fall of the Taliban.
I'm not saying that the international community is doing everything right in Afghanistan. More resources and a better plan are required. I suspect General Petraeus will discover that, unlike Iraq, his biggest challenge will not be developing and executing a counterinsurgency plan with U.S. troops, it will be herding the various cats that make up ISAF so that they're all moving in the same direction. It will be getting buy-in from the seeming cast of thousands who are currently pulling in different directions in Afghanistan.
No, I'm definitely not saying that the international forces are getting it right in Afghanistan. I'm saying that consolidating and centralizing power and delivery behind an inexperienced, largely corrupt Afghan government doesn't strike me as the most promising way forward.
posted by Babbling Brooks at 9:58 a.m.
2 Comments:
"auftragstaktik" . . . .it sounds so much better in German. After all, they invented it :)
I'm with you on the point that "small, flexible, user-driven initiatives" generally allow for more adaptive, imaginative and effective work, but I'm not convinced that there is an either/or proposition at work here. In my brief time in Afghanistan recently, this question was one of my main concerns, and I became quite sympathetic to two viewpoints that appear contradictory, but are not.
The first is that the most effective NGO "aid" work being undertaken in Afghanistan is the work that happens just underneath everybody's radar. It's small-scale, capital-investment, economic-development, work-with-what-you've got stuff, with little or no bureaucracy, and no elaborate and stifling accountability mechanisms. Lots of trial and error going on here, with surprisingly few errors.
The second is that the non-military work of the "international community" often tends to undermine the legitimacy of the Afghan state, draining talent from Afghan ministries (with higher wages, for starters), and the larger agencies tend to develop in Afghans a culture of dependency, rather than self-sufficiency.
I believe it is this second pathology that Ghani is on about.
Taylor Owen and David Eaves put the debate over these conflicting approaches in an interesting context recently in an essay in the Literary Review of Canada. Owen and Eaves side with "Third Way" progressivism: "a focus on a culture of outcomes, a shift from hierarchical to decentralized organizations and the use of markets as a progressive policy tool."
I don't think the Marshall Plan analogy is a bad one, and we shouldn't read too much into it (a bit of trivia - before he went all soggy on the issue, Stephane Dion used to argue for a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan (told me so himself once). Without question, Afghanistan requires a commitment on the scale of the Marshall Plan, but as you observe, run along wholly different lines, because the circumstances are so different, not least in the fact that the enemy is not yet defeated.
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