Afghanistan: it's not all bad news

Contemporary media reporting of post Taliban Afghanistan depicts a country ravaged by persistent conflict; of experienced and capable Taliban fighters drawing NATO forces into an increasingly bloody conflict; and of a resurgent Taliban gaining in strength and bringing a fledgling democracy to its knees.

Not a day goes by without new reports of suicide bombings, assassinations and mounting civilian and military casualties. It is this backcloth of unrelenting conflict that lends credence to the West’s traditional perception of Afghans as bloodthirsty warriors perpetually at war and rejecting a path to development.

While not denying the existence of serious security problems in southern Afghanistan, nor the resoluteness of the Taliban insurgence, this article presents a different image of Afghanistan — a people desperate for a chance to live a peaceful existence and to achieve the most basic living standards for its future generations. A people tired of war and factionalism, intent on choosing freedom and a path to development.

It focuses on the findings of a recent evaluation by the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit, based at the University of York, of the Afghan government’s National Solidarity Programme (NSP) — the largest reconstruction programme in the country. It is designed to reduce poverty by empowering communities through improved governance, and social, human, and economic capital. Directly elected Community Development Councils (CDCs) — 16,250 of which have already been etablished — are at the heart of this strategy, putting communities in charge of their own development and resourcing them to deliver projects that they want.

Since the programme’s inception in September 2003 it has reached 22,500 rural communities, accounting for 10.5 million people ­— half Afghanistan’s population — in 175 out of 364 rural districts across all 34 provinces in Afghanistan. In Phase 2 the programme will be rolled out to every rural community in Afghanistan by the end of 2008.

The evaluation, conducted for the World Bank, took a representative sample of 36 CDCs in 11 provinces, including those experiencing significant problems with Taliban insurgents in Nangarhar and Laghman in eastern Afghanistan, and took 12 communities not yet participating in the NSP to isolate any effect the NSP may have had.

Contrary to recent media reports, the evaluation identifies significant evidence of increased public faith in the system of government, improved community relations and the empowerment of CDCs. Eighty-six per cent thought it had brought greater unity and national solidarity and 77 per cent considered the government to be interested in their community, compared to 26 per cent of those not involved in the NSP.

As one respondent put it, ‘the NSP unites communities, bringing us together to solve our problems and plan for our future; for the first time the government has shown that it cares about us so we must now show our loyalty to our government.’

Remarkably, the CDCs have already secured the trust and acceptance of the majority of community members, with 58 per cent viewing the CDC as the core institution of community-level governance. Where the Shora, the traditional unelected village councils, still exist, a gradual transition and assimilation of the two forms of governance is taking place. Public participation in discussing community priorities ranges from 50-90 per cent in CDC communities, compared with 28 per cent in non-CDC communities.

A key strength of the NSP has been the capacity of CDCs to act as instruments of peace-building, playing an important role in conflict resolution and reducing the power of warlords and corrupt elites over rural communities.

The NSP has undertaken 26,000 projects, building roads and boreholes, which the evaluation found to be generally well designed and constructed. 65 per cent said that they had directly and indirectly benefited from their community’s projects. There is also evidence that the NSP has facilitated other community-led initiatives that could not otherwise have been undertaken. Additional infrastructure is often added to the project which enhances the value of the NSP, demonstrates community ownership and initiative, and provides evidence of sustainable development. Moreover, there is also evidence of neighbouring CDCs combining available resources in order to be able to facilitate a large project, such as a road.

Many needs, especially for sustainable livelihoods, remain and need to be addressed through the development of formal linkages with other national level development programmes. The relationship between NSP projects and poverty reduction at the community level varies from one community to another.

Certain of the NSP sites visited showed discernable poverty reduction benefits, including the ability to grow more produce, especially cash crops like sugar and cotton, and to adopt year round cultivation, generating more income for the community. Improved transport brings cheaper goods and reduces costs for communities’ own produce, greater levels of protection against natural disasters, better communications and higher levels of education.

Some limited benefit can also be perceived in relation to poppy eradication objectives at the local level through alternative livelihood promotion.

Inclusive cost-benefit analysis of the NSP reveals significant gains to the Afghan people in relation to institution-building and capacity building — mainly through skills development — and social solidarity at the national and community levels, and to a lesser degree at the provincial and district levels. Impressive economic benefits have also come from improved infrastructure and through community confidence-building. Certain gains in gender equality have been achieved in some regions.

Most significantly, in our survey CDC communities expressed more confidence in the future (28 per cent attributed their optimism directly to NSP) than those in the matched communities, although a general trend towards greater optimism was evident.

‘The NSP weakens the power of warlords because decision making is now at the grass roots, and because of employment and better livelihoods people do not want to fight. We are very optimistic about future unity in Afghanistan. There have been many years of war but the NSP gives us hope and we know that the world is supporting Afghanistan. We are Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Pashtun, Communist, Mujahedin and we were divided but this programme helps us come together.’

The NSP is now recognized both by the people of Afghanistan and the international community as the central policy instrument for Afghan state building and development.

This is not to say that the NSP is without its problems — we have proposed sixty-four recommendations for enhancing both the quality of community level governance and the delivery of projects in Phase 2, including: the need for a greater emphasis on building indigenous capacity both within the Afghan civil service and the CDCs, the introduction of a ‘whole government approach’ to the delivery of the NSP to gain greater political legitimacy and to coordinate national development planning and programming more effectively, incentivising CDCs and encouraging income-generating programmes to meet its economic growth strategy, and simplifying delivery systems at all levels to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and its associated direct and indirect costs.

Yet, despite the scope and intensity of this development effort, the Western media has continued to dwell on the activities of four to five thousand Taliban insurgents in five out of the 34 Afghan provinces. It is hardly surprising that public opinion polls in Britain, Canada, Japan and the United States should continue to report a growing disenchantment with humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.

This programme has been delivered at a cost of only $214m so far. With delivery on pledges of aid now running at around 70 per cent, those tasked with honouring these pledges need look no further than the NSP to see what well-planned and adminstered initiatives look like. Money spent in development is a surer means of establishing Afghanistan’s security than any level of military spend and deployment. Though the two must go hand-in-hand, development alone can win the battle for hearts and minds. This is what the Taliban fear most of all.

Professor Mark Evans is a member of the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit at the University of York.

The PRDU NSP evaluation included: Professor Sultan Barakat (Team Leader), Professor Mark Evans (Senior Investigator), Richard Brown (Engineering Analyst), Dr Arne Strand (Community Development specialist), and RAT team leaders Dr Magaret Chard, Dr David Connelly and Dr Richard Jones. The evaluation was conducted from July 2005 to May 2006.