Afghanistan: State-Building Under the Influence by Angad Singh

As the world’s attention focuses on Iraq, it is easy to forget about Afghanistan. As a struggling state whose nation building efforts are mired in a myriad of problems, some thought Afghanistan was a done deal after the fall of the Taliban. After all, the US “doesn’t do” state-building, according to George W. Bush before the Afghanistan invasion.

But that is exactly what the US, NATO and the Afghani government are trying to do, with limited results. Afghanistan has made remarkable headway in developing democratic institutions since the fall of the Taliban, yet many significant obstacles persist in its development. The most significant problem is a resurgent Taliban that has increased attacks on US-NATO forces in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan. The porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border not only led to the escape of Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, but continues to allow the Taliban to crossover into friendly areas of Pakistan to use as a haven.

Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, is frustrated with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan for signing a deal with tribal/Taliban leaders of North Wazirisitan, an area of Pakistan that shares a border with Afghanistan. The deal states that Pakistani security will ease border checkpoints, release some militants, and generally observe a cease-fire. In return, the Taliban would stop cross border attacks into Afghanistan.

Since the fall of the Taliban government, the US has put pressure on Pakistan to fight these rebels yet Pakistani security forces have been unsuccessful due to the tenacity of the Taliban and their ability to find sanctuary in the mountainous border region. Furthermore, there seems to be a general reluctance amongst Pakistan security forces to fight the Taliban and their supporters as the ISI, Pakistan’s infamous intelligence agency, had backed the Taliban regime when it was in power. A recently publicized paper written by an officer of Britain’s Defence Academy condemns the ISI for continuing support of the militant group. The new North Waziristan deal will lead to what Karzai fears most: a region where the Taliban can build up forces for cross border attacks along an even more fluid border through which not only militants can pass, but also the illegal drugs that finance them. In sum, the deal evidences the failure to win militarily against a guerilla group using the means of conventional warfare, a reality the US is realizing in Iraq. Consequently, new and creative means must be implemented to disrupt the Taliban’s activities and provide incentives to dissuade people from aiding the militant group. Part of the solution may lie in co-opting the Taliban’s main source of funding: opium.

Afghanistan produces 92% of the world’s opium, which continues to fund the Taliban. Insofar as the Taliban and armed drug lords benefit most from the illicit narcotic trade, opium production and poppy cultivation become intimately tied to the problem of insurgency and crime. The US is still using the blunt instrument of crop eradication to fight drug production; such tactics have failed and continue to fail, most noticeably in Latin America. The US has contracted DynCorp International, also reportedly involved in the drug war in Latin America and in training the Iraqi and Afghani security forces, to eradicate poppy fields in Afghanistan. However eradication programs hit the poor and not the criminal gangs and the Taliban who profit most from the drug trade. In fact, such programs may perpetuate the very evils the US government wishes to eliminate.

According to the Senlis Council, a Brussels-based think tank, Afghanis are increasingly joining or indirectly aiding the Taliban due to US-led poppy eradication efforts. The US needs to abandon this ham handed approach. Johann Hari, a columnist for The Independent, advocates the termination of eradication programs and in their place set up a system in which western governments purchase Afghani poppy seeds and sell them to pharmaceutical companies to make legal opiate based painkillers. Hari cites the success of a historical precedent in which Turkey effectively became a supplier for legal opiate-based medicines in the 1970s. Such a solution may be plausible but would also have to be accompanied by fostering job growth for the numerous other people involved in the drug trade. If the poppy purchase plan were to be implemented, the various conduits in the drug trafficking chain would be left jobless, angry, and armed. Without further employment opportunities, the government would risk a stronger coalition of drug gangs and a Taliban prepared to topple the Afghani government to regain their previous power.

Job growth would not only ameliorate the conditions that militants capitalize on for recruitment, but is essential for a stable society. Some progress has been made on the economic front. For instance, Coca Cola has opened a bottling plant in Kabul that provides 350 jobs, the largest telecommunications company in Afghanistan, Roshan, partly owned by the American firm MCT, is making profits. Future prospects include the 3M Corporation contracting distributors in Afghanistan and the dairy company, Land O’Lakes, was commissioned by USAID to revitalize Afghanistan’s dairy industry. While signs of progress exist, they are more of an exception than the rule.

Economic progress cannot be made until the government administers essential services such as electricity, efficient irrigation systems, and the general infrastructure that provides the base for economic improvement. Currently, the government can only provide a paltry 6% of its populous with electricity. International donors have given billions of dollars worth of aid money, and perhaps more is needed, but the main obstacle to development seems not to be lack of aid, but lack of honest government. Corrupt regional leaders who have been co-opted into the federal government need to be replaced with those who have an interest in Afghanistan as a whole and not merely their own self interest, a far cry from the entrenched tribalism of the nation, making house cleaning an extremely difficult task.

Some say security is a prerequisite for economic growth, but if creative solutions aren’t implemented for both security and economic problems, expect to see Afghanistan slip back into the internecine conflict that has plagued it for much of its history.