Knowledge and power

Labels Matter: State Failure, History, Intervention

2012-01-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

We were walking the dust path curling through the Kabul University campus. My colleagues begin to tell me of the latest news that day: dozens of civilian bodies dead in Farah, western Afghanistan. Result of the latest American offensive against the Taliban. I ask how they feel about this, despite the blood seeping from my blanching face, from anger as much as embarrassment. I’m the only non-Afghan among them. But I would have to invent their frustration with America, the West or any other vented targets.

“Only the villagers know who is who,” one of my colleagues says. He points at my lightly bearded face, “They will know you are not Taliban, and that I,” pointing to his clean shaven look, “I might be a Talib.” They are upset more with the Taliban than NATO. How is America to tell the difference, they ask, when the Taliban hides among clusters of everyday Afghans. How are they to know what labels to apply, when and where?

This talk is part and parcel of the main Afghanistan discourses. The debate on the country centers, on the one hand, on the Taliban, military intervention, drones and civilian deaths. On the other, it focuses on nepotism, a flourishing narco-economy, and the first Hamid Karzai administration’s unfulfilled promises. These twin debates look at the global war on terror and the internal politics of a failing, failed or weak state. The label matters.

With the Barack Obama administration offering the emerging Afghanistan-Pakistan (‘Af-Pak’) strategy, a new wave of pundits busies itself repackaging analysis on the war on terror leg of the debate, filtering through the pluses and minuses of the budding two-state approach. Most welcome the sub-regional mindset appreciating the Al-Qaeda chase as involving both countries.

In proffering a double approach of more military action and civilian reconstruction, the strategy develops with renewed rigor external intervention as the solution to what are fundamentally internal political crises in these two countries. As such, the ‘new’ approach mirrors some of the central thrusts of George W. Bush administration war on terror policy.

Little distinction in the Af-Pak strategy is made between Al-Qaeda and Taliban, and the respective differences driving how each operate within and between the two countries. This ignores how the ideologies, aims and methods differ—and how responses may differ accordingly. It also risks lumping peoples and ideas under an umbrella notion of Evil, under which perpetrators must be killed outright, directly reflective of the Bush policy of bringing ‘Evil-doers to justice.’ That the Obama government supports the Pakistan military offensive in Swat Valley in early May 2009 testifies to this risk.

The notion of justice in the expired Bush government and the nascent Obama one seems to so far be made of the same stuff: an irreconcilably thin, Manichean essence. Thinking remains to be done that goes beyond implicit labels of Good and Evil towards grounding policies in history.

Less talk also occurs on what may be the more important second pillar of the Afghanistan debate: the capacity of the Afghan state. That Afghanistan and Pakistan border state failure as much as they border one another is widely recognized, but little is constructed on what to do about it. Ignoring this is to ignore a root cause of 30 years of war.

Reflecting on the history of the Afghan conflict or looking at conflict hot spots globally, a debatable few cases aside, they involve states today labeled as failing, failed or weak. The Afghan state in 1978 was a weak state: but we didn’t have the label then. Placing state failure in historical context is less-oft done than the ahistorical bandying about of the term, but it helps in identifying why conflicts begin. Understanding this in turn helps in knowing how they can end.

The writ of the state in Afghanistan has never been known for being especially strong. Whatever feats managed since the 1748 formation of centralized government in Kandahar (moved 30 years later to Kabul) were nearly all washed away or reversed by the 1978-2001 conflict. Most characterizations of this period see it as shifting, first, from the Saur (April or Communist) Revolution and Afghan revolt, to Soviet invasion and mujahedeen response, then to phases of further intervention and proxy war. After the February 15, 1989 Soviet withdrawal, the conflict moves into a stage of civil struggle for Kabul, with the Taliban wrestling control of the bulk of the country. American-led invasion to topple the Taliban serves as a further marker in 2001.

The conflict is thus flanked, on the one side, by the Communist Party’s failed social reforms sparking revolt and Soviet intervention; and, on the other, by September 11th and American intervention in the name of the global war on terror. We stand still in this latter phase. As the origins of revolt and the rise of radical Islam in the country took shape as a response, it is worth pursuing what it is that went wrong with the Saur Revolution reforms.

The People’s Democratic Party for Afghanistan (PDPA) unfurled eight reform decrees between April 1978 and the December 1979 Soviet invasion. The first three decrees – establishing the PDPA leader as head of state, abolishing the previous constitution and forming new civilian and military court systems – were met with little notice by most Afghans living outside of Kabul. The fourth decree to establish a red Afghan flag, on the other hand, did spark protest, pointing to some rising resistance to Communist rule. Nevertheless, decree five met with little consequence again, mattering mostly for the 23 people it stripped of citizenship, though the larger repression it signaled would touch many more. The first handful of reforms was either innocuous or useful for the PDPA alone. The three further reforms held much broader and deeper influence on Afghans.

Reform decree number six canceled debts and mortgages owed from small-hold farmers and landless peasants to large landowners. This in principle held potentially positive results for the majority of Afghans. Yet what the reform ill considered was that, in return to debt repayment, the wealthy gave the poor seed, fertilizer and equipment as agricultural inputs. Decree seven gave equal rights to women and abolished the bride-groom price. Similarly, on the surface, this was a positive move for society, but the cost of the reform was to rob brides of reserve cash in case of divorce. Decree number eight was on land reform, though it apparently meant more lands for the PDPA, appropriated without compensation.

These three latter reforms failed to be implemented with the intention to further the country’s development. They instead smacked of an elite garnering favors and blindly applying Marxist-Leninist ideologies. The revolt against them took speed when PDPA activists forced reform into the countryside. The imposition of Kabul’s authority onto Afghan values served as the breaking straw, unleashing a decade of warfare, bearing some resemblance to what ignited the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion leading to African independence movements: British intervention into the cultural affairs of Kenya’s Kikuyu to prohibit female genital cutting and promote land reform.

PDPA’s decrees six, seven and eight held the promise of good for Afghans. Applied properly, debt cancellation, women’s rights and land reform stand to benefit the many. They are, in effect, parts of larger political and social reforms shaping modernization and development in other countries—though clearly, anything done by ‘decree’ is rather a red herring. Social transformation in 1970s Afghanistan failed to produce a government in Kabul by democratic processes. If this had taken a different path, the unfolding of history, possibly as far as the fall of the Soviet State in the 1989-1991 episode, may have gone altogether differently. Little value, however, is held in untestable counterfactuals.

That failing, failed or weak states travel one-way paths to multifarious forms of destabilization is, on the other hand, less controversial. But the labels ‘failing states,’ ‘failed states’ and ‘weak states’ weren’t available in 1978, emerging only in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. It wasn’t though new academic understandings of the Afghan conflict that urged the emergence of this labeling trio. It was instead the fall of the Soviet State and entry into the ‘post-Cold War’ era.

The terms failing, failed and weak states were devolved to understand the rise of civil wars after the ‘end’ of the Cold War. This was a time that saw conflict trends between countries reverse, only to see battle fatalities within countries go on the rise. After years of application of realist thought in the study of international affairs, which generates and continues to generate many of the labels we use, we were better positioned in the late 1990s to study the internal workings of Third World states. State and society debates emerged again, with expanded study into the functionality of ‘states’ overlapping with ‘nations,’ and the drawn lines of borders on a map.

On this, two issues remain under-debated. First is how 1990s discourses failed to grasp the ways in which the Cold War shaped states, politics and conflict in the Third World, setting out effects that linger still in the aftermath of the Americo-Soviet entanglement—effects that seem to be still at play in external intervention today. The ‘post-Cold War’ phrase itself purchases little explanatory power in characterizing the 1992-2001 years anywhere, but especially in Afghanistan, not the least because many power relations limp onwards from the Cold War.

It wasn’t until after September 11th and the onset of war on terror debates that work by Mahmood Mamdani, Ahmed Rashid, Steve Coll and others began to lay the foundations for understanding the effects of Cold War intervention in Afghanistan and elsewhere—interventions performed in the sanguine name of roll-back, from each of their perspectives, of American free marketism and Soviet communism. Responding to inadequate theories devolved to trace why the events of that day occurred, the import of these histories for the study of global affairs, and for the running of foreign policies in areas affected by the hot wars of the Cold War, still demand crystallization.

The second issue eluding sufficient debate is the importance of the demise of the Soviet State for understanding South Asian states. The fall of a significant form of governance embodied in the Soviet State was met only with calls for the clash of civilizations or the triumph of democratic capitalism—a look oriented much more inward than towards understanding the dynamics presiding over Soviet state failure. Yet the key characteristics of the Soviet State as it unfolded over seven decades demand debate, for their meaning to the power structures and shapes of governance in Southwest Asia, as much for the frameworks studying state capacity. While we should not ignore the very real atrocities of repressive disappearances, economic strategies devouring entire seas, or the silencing of freedoms, posing the question remains important.

What results from overlooking these debates is the deployment of labels that mischaracterize the ‘ends’ of the Cold War and of the Soviet State, labels that do little justice to understand the period leading up to the war on terror. With that other global discourse of the first half of 2009 – the financial crisis – we may finally be in a position to massage out the mental cramps inhibiting this debate, allowing us to address issues other than globalization’s influence on GDP.

If we apply the thrust of the failing, failed and weak state labels to the history of the long Afghan war, state failure emerges as the inability to further human development, the choices and freedoms of a people. The post-September 11th administrations should be included into this framework as still symptomatic of state weakness, while ‘international community’ donor policies failed to support the advancement of a capable human development state, sharing in the perpetuation of the root causes of conflict in Afghanistan. Failure to establish conditions for social transformation thus pervade all phases of over 30 years of war: from 1978 to 2009.

Grasping state failure as the root of the Afghan conflict puts us in a position to evaluate how the Cold War limps onwards in South Asia today, in perpetuating cycles of external intervention failing to enhance state-building. The Af-Pak strategy, as defined thus far, seems to only fill the most recent looping of these cycles. Supporting military intervention in Afghanistan and now Pakistan does not signal a significant rupture from war on terror policy. One starting point is to move away from the idea that Resident Evil exists in any part of the world, or that any member of it, be it the Taliban or others, is Inherently Evil. These groups hold interests, unwieldy as some of them may be. But just as differing dynamics shape their rise and persistence, so shall they shape their decline.

If we understand the root causes of Talibanization and of September 11th as immediate consequences of state failure in Afghanistan’s history – and this failure as tightly fastened to pervasive Cold War intervention, now operating under the name of the ‘international community’ – the Swat peace talks ring hollow in the face of the Pakistani military unleashing massacre in NWFP with the argument that ‘no other choices’ are available when dealing with Evil. Moving beyond these discourses, we may be better placed to know what labels to apply, when and where, and what to do about them.

(drafted May 2009; published in South Asia magazine)

Afghanistan’s forgotten water crisis

2011-08-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Forgotten Front: Water Security and the Crisis in Sanitation, Afghanistan Human Development Report 2011.

In the face of troop withdrawals and peace talks, an invisible crisis lurks in Afghanistan: that of water and sanitation. The numbers prove startling. Six children die every hour for want of a glass of clean water or sanitation; 16.8 million Afghans lack access to basic drinking water; some 95% of all Afghans cannot access a safe toilet. As with the war, at root of these challenges is the problem of governance.

We are largely accustomed to thinking of Afghanistan as the site of terrorist evil, the source of countless NATO soldier deaths, and the graveyard of empires. Our foreign policy discourse pivots on the questions of Taliban peace talks, Al Qaeda’s safe havens and how to reverse opium production. These all amount to a view of Afghanistan as a failed state, with limited rule of law much less basic service provision.

But Afghanistan is also a place of endemic human poverty. The recent multidimensional poverty index shows that 84% of Afghan households are deprived in standards of living, health and education at the same time. Despite ranking among the world’s top 20 countries in the number of women parliamentarians, Afghanistan also features at the bottom of the gender-related development index for 154 countries in 2009. The nomadic kuchis are the most deprived of all Afghans across the board.

These trends often go hand in hand with insecurity and violence: Helmand is seat both of the lowest literacy rates and deadliest fighting. Yet, poverty and violence are not wholly consonant one with the other. Eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistan tribal areas - billed as the most volatile border in the world - also sees some of the better health rates in the country.

These relationships need careful investigation: not only for what lessons they impart for counterinsurgency and global terrorism, but - and perhaps more importantly - for what mean to the lives and livelihoods of Afghans. Redressing their poverty challenges, then, can also prove a major subsequent boost to the war on terror. Confusing the means and ends through continual military doctrines, though, does little to help either situation.

Moreover, Afghanistan’s human development has been on the rise despite violence. Declines in child and maternal mortality rates help elevate health achievements. The country’s human development index has increased over the last 20 years. Primary and secondary school intakes nearly tripled between 2002 and 2008. Inabilities, however, to access clean drinking water, a toilet or irrigation act as brakes to this progress.

Climate change can also slow and reverse advances. Declining water availability, increasing floods and droughts, and a range of economic and health impacts will continue to threaten human development in Afghanistan. Climate shocks leading to heightened water crisis interact with many Afghans’ already high vulnerabilities to leave them at significant risk of a collapse in their choices and opportunities to live full, dignified lives.

Is this because Afghanistan is a water scarce country, with few rivers and parched lands? This is hardly the case. Enough water exists in the country to meet the human right of 20 liters per person per day hundreds of times over. Geography, however, is one part of the challenge: while most Afghans tend to reside near major water sources, the tremendous water availability is not distributed to all regions equally.

Yet the deeper answer lies in governance. Most of Afghanistan's water escapes underutilized over its borders to neighboring countries. A great deal is also wasted, perhaps as much as 40% of water resources simply evaporating into the air as crops, grass and weeds drown in over-watering. Irrigation schemes systemically lack efficiency, with underground canals that transport water onto farms still severely damaged from decades of war and neglect. And branches of government vie for control of the blue gold: a fragmented structure places responsibility for water in the hands of several ministries, from mines to agriculture to water itself, leaving a complex reality for water governance.

The mismanagement crisis is acute. Kabul City, growing at phenomenal urbanization rates, may see a complete drying out of its drinking water in just a few years. Food security across whole pockets of Afghanistan rises and falls based on shifting glacier melt and seasonal water availability. And dialogue towards transboundary water sharing agreements is virtually mute for fear of geopolitical reprisals.

International aid is pivotal for governance as well. Over $24 billion in bilateral and multilateral aid funneled into Afghanistan between 2001 and 2009. Less than 5% went to the water sector, or about $3.31 per Afghan. This represents minor fractions of the $26.50 given to Iraq or $25.00 to Pakistan.

Improving water governance, aid and adapting to climate risks are key ways forward. Expanding on the local National Solidarity Program to rehabilitate and build irrigation canals, village wells and educating children on hygiene can deliver considerable results. Creating ‘water jobs’, moreover, can play the double role of serving Afghan human development and counterinsurgency, keeping the youth at over half the country’s population busy - with some estimates putting agricultural incomes of $4 per day enough to persuade many from joining the insurgency.

A country's human development should not be left to severe mismanagement or weather forecasts. Stepping up the war on terror effort towards a dedicated war on water insecurity and deprivation can help produce a firm exit strategy. It would also help sustain the human development of a people who have experienced decades of war.

Children of the Drug War

2011-07-31T10:22:00.001-07:00

Among the most moving issues is that of the unseen impacts on children of: poverty, drought, terrorism and counterterrorism, economic sanctions - and the global war on drugs.

The calculus that keeps much of the 'first world' engaged in 'third world' events tends to ignore the human costs, focusing instead on fiscal budgets. In effort to go beyond the status quo thinking, Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate the true cost of the Iraq war as $3 trillion, including such things as the healthcare bills of injured war veterans. But these studies are few and far between.

This is where Children of the Drug War steps in. The book is now fully published, but we're still waiting for it to go up on websites.

My coauthor and I contributed a look into 'opium brides' in Afghanistan. These are children, largely girls, who get bartered to service farmers' debt to drug lords. Looking at the huge potential income gains from growing poppy over the nearest competitor wheat (more than 6-fold as lucrative), many farmers borrow the finances needed to get started. But as drought or field eradication policies take hold, their poppies are destroyed. This usually leaves poppy farmers in debt still owed to drug lords for the start-up capital. As means to repayment, a practice that occurs is offering the debtor a child-bride.

A popular essay in Newsweek some years back highlighted the issue and developed the term 'opium bride'. The scale and entrenchment of the problem is largely unknown as the war on terror takes place on the same grounds as the war on drugs: Helmand and Kandahar are the dubious sites of the both interventions into Afghanistan. This means that research and reporting from these areas is significantly limited.

What my coauthor Atal discovered in conducting interviews in and around Kandahar is that it's likely more pronounced than we think. Many of the people he was able to meet had specific details to share; all had heard of the practice.

The challenge is a difficult one, rooted in the nature of the economy -- we could call it a 'drug' economy as much of the literature does, but this ignores the fact that is just plain 'economy' to the people engaged in it; the scale of opium income has been as high as 3 times the "legal GDP" in Afghanistan. But it is also rooted in shifts of cultural practices, perceptions and power in Afghanistan in the last generation - and in the last 10 years of the renewed war.

The Afghan-Soviet war displaced traditional elites such as mullahs and tribal heads, leaving the local political space to be filled-in by mujahedeen veterans and those who could wield violence to sort out territory. Alongside the impacts on children and youth, these largely ignored shifts in power need to be further understood in Afghanistan as a result of the foreign interventions. This is one of the insights we try to offer in the book in the latest 10 year war period.

Children of the Drug War takes a broad look at many countries, an innovative book that digs deep under common debates on drugs and wars.

It's a small plane that takes off for Bhutan.

2011-07-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

The travel catalogues forecast a place of endless enchantment and mystery. The home of thunder dragons and national happiness. The privilege of what I do envelopes me absolutely.

I think next of my work, and life - one as if the other, the sequence masking more than it may illuminate. The work: Climate change. I'm to help write among the first assessments of its impacts and the scale of the needed response for the challenge in a small, landlocked country in the Himalayas.

How do you weigh the pebbles of modernity against those of tradition on the balance of human progress? City life versus rural? Better standards of living versus culture and life itself? That seems the riddle to unravel.

It's a place lucky even for the tourist; I arrive as an invited analyst. Traveling mid-2011, I carry Fukuyama's 'The origins of political order.' It makes me wonder: what secrets are to be uncovered from the Bhutanese mind and landscape.

Time, and peace. They seem the only things on offer - the only things that matter. Deep in the heart of the promise is that these are the very stuff of life, humanity missing the message every, elsewhere. Is it only so much spin, though, for excuse and tourism dollar?

The excuse: to keep at bay the wanton tragedies of the new, the future and modern. The dollars, for the complacency and hypocrisy of it all. An economy owing much to its tourist vision of tradition, temples, green forests and such.

Twenty-four days in the sands of gross happiness, forgotten sites of modernity/tradition, and loneliness to look forward to. In context the average tourist visit peters out at day five, rare the marker of day 10. What more, with over $200 a head per night to be here as a site-seer. I've walked before the expanse of the capital in naught more than a quarter hour - as if exhausting the currency of the city in minutes.

Days of jet-lag and not knowing the time overcome me. Should I remain wide awake or succumb to a desired eternity of sleep and dream?

The origins of political order indeed. Aspirations of man and beast alike; the authority of invented rules against the passions of love, prejudice and the realities of the possible. Where else but to play out the infinite surge of life and death, but at the hallmark of a country left at the thresholds of past and present.

Where else to find the wanting answers for the stage of oneself; one's life; to locate the regality of meaning for a future left open to choice. Escape utter nothingness and too much robustness at once.

And then, simply, breakfast arrives - to temper the treasures of the possible with the gifts of always. My loose thoughts reign themselves in with a decent meal.

To be here by the chances of so much fate. Bend my will to the grace of god. I'm not a religious man, but these are the prayer filled tones that color me over.

And, the plane lands.

Politics and human development: what's the link?

2010-05-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

James Traub has a good article on some of the 'real' issues in Afghanistan: "The Obama administration needs to make up its mind: Is Ahmed Wali Karzai a menace or an asset?". Via a discussion of the Karzai rule and its familial ties, Traub draws out a crucial distinction:

"The [Obama] administration's Afghanistan strategy eschews George W. Bush's thunderous language of democracy promotion in favor of the more modest vocabulary of 'capacity-building.' But a legitimate government is not simply one that can deliver basic goods (though that matters a lot). Legitimacy means that power is at least minimally accountable, and that people believe they have some kind of voice in their own affairs. Kandaharis complain more bitterly about the rule of powerbrokers than they do about the lack of schools or even security."

Three points, one political, the other developmental - and the final one, about where the twain meet. The political: the nuts and bolts of contemporary warfare are located in the COIN doctrine (counter-insurgency as a whole of society approach). Migrated in bits and pieces from Iraq, in Afghanistan this has meant the full-range of interventions, from military (knocking Taliban out from Marjeh) to constructing roads, wells and mini-dams in an effort to win-over Afghan hearts and minds. As Traub argues, these NATO-led actions are fashioned to bolster the central government -- but if branches of the US administration (aka CIA) support warlords because of intelligence gains, then the politics of such a large-scale military apparatus are inherently self-defeating, like so many heads of a masochistic hydra.

The developmental point is a bit more complex, and has a pair of faces to it. Face one: human security. This conceptual framework was given birth in the 1994 Global Human Development Report, and is inherently tied to its fundamental precept: that 'human dignity' should be at the center -- in human security's case -- of international relations, displacing the bedrock notion itself of the "inter-national."

In terms of the operations of human security as a development discourse, there has been a failure on one striking count: an amnesiac disability to realize that great foe realism, is not a major social science perspective for nothing. That self-interest guides a great deal of behavior, from agents minimizing credit risk in econ 202, to the stalwart actors of the global scene, nation-states -- realism (in economics) can cover a lot of ground in explaining why the poor stay in poverty traps, and in IR theory, why Iran wants nukes - and equally why the US wants to stop them. To be sure, my Sen-ianism compels me to note that self-interest or utilitarian calculus do not cover all reasons for, say, donating parts of one's kidney to a complete stranger; and behavioral experiments prove the point that we're so driven by a sense of justice/equity that we will in fact cut off our noses to spite the face. Human security's main problem has been that it does not explain anything better than does realism.

The second developmental question with reference to Traub's essay is about a compelling refrain in human development-talk: providing basic services is key to reducing poverty and reasons for disaffection, and thus critical for dampening radicalization of disaffected youths. While not a human developmentalista per se, Paul Collier shares enough of the view to be spoken of in the same paragraph as the capabilities perspective. He's recently remarked on how instituting something like an Independent Service Authority -- which, opposed to current uncoordinated approaches, would band together government, civil society, private sector and donors to dish out aid for basic services -- can go a long ways towards giving jobs to young men. And it's this demographic that spins into violent insurgencies, not grandmothers.

The human development lens argues, on one hand, for the delivery of basic services for the intrinsic worth of bringing a human's potential into fruition. Lant Pritchett (via Blattman's blog) reminds us of this Aristotlean point, and one we shouldn't forget for Nussbaum's (a Greek classicist by training) involvement in developing the capability approach. On the other hand, making the other Kantian ethical argument, delivering basic services, per Collier, is also instrumental for taking insurgencies apart.

And this brings me to my third and main point: this Collier perspective is nearly as far as human development goes in getting political, that is, enmeshed in power plays as opposed to idle policy banter. The notions of democracy, human rights and the activation of citizenship are important for human development, but Oxfam has done more recently of really bringing the 'active citizen' dialogue out.

This leaves open an intricate problem: human development follows in much the same vein of conventional development-speak -- it inculcates an anti-political machinery to discuss grand designs like "freedom" a la Bush, capacity building viz. Obama, and much else. Analytical insights via a human security lens differ little from a realist explanation of a political problem. And human development solutions are virtually indistinguishable from your standard menu of economics-informed policy redactions.

Traub's conclusion -- "Afghanistan's problems are, at bottom, political. The solutions must be political. That's what it means to fight a counterinsurgency war" -- are spot on, and something like a human development perspective as currently formulated offers little in grasping or expanding these political processes.

But, just the same, it may be looking for inspiration where the need-not be found. Ultimately, however, this calls into question the significant conjectures that human development represents an entirely new paradigm for development.

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and nobody hears him, Is he still wrong?

2010-04-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

This is apparently a few years old now, but the good old people at TED have done it again: Ken Robinson, who I don't know anything about, has a brilliant presentation on creativity and education.

Some key points:

* More people in the next 30 years will be graduated through education systems than in the whole history of the world

* Academic ability has come to dominate our view of intelligence at the cost of understanding and appreciating creativity

Nothing could be more true than this other nugget: our education systems, globally, are geared to produce university professors. But we ignore demographics at our risk: Robinson notes how a generation ago a college degree guaranteed you a job, lest you disdained one -- but today's MAs are yesterday's BAs. I'm lucky to not be home playing video games.

Degree-inflation has struck the development business something mean. Every person I've known working in development in their 20s has a pair of hopes: first is getting a PhD; second is teaching university at some point after acquiring their years of experience out in the real-world.

This is a problem, and I don't just mean because I want these things too. Demand for university educations is exploding the world over.

The number of applicants seeking entry into Kabul University, the premier institution of higher learning in Afghanistan, went from 4,000 in 2002 to 40,000 in 2005. There simply isn't enough space to accommodate such demand. Every day I drive by dozens of billboards and posters advertising English language and computer science degrees in a cacophony of degree abbreviations I've never heard of.

The infrastructure question of how to fill bodies into more seats is something we need to pay some mind.

That, and Robinson's take-home message on creativity: producing a new idea requires the preparation of being wrong. Something that education systems educate us out of.

He concludes we need to adopt a new conception of human ecology and intelligence, taking into account the full range of what intelligence means, not just academic ability.

Couldn't agree with him more.

And the man is hilarious while still driving home his message. Well worth the 20 minutes.

**
Oh, and my answer is: more than half humanity will say: Duh.

NSP's the real thing, but a silver bullet it's not

2010-04-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

Over at Aid Watch, they're getting a bit frantic about maintaining a balanced image on their often-times pesky critiques of everything aid. In their search they've seized on the momentum of Dr. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart's Institute for State Effectiveness. Much excellent work is going on by the tremendous intellectual force of Ghani's mind alone, much less the two paired up.

But to prick a pin in the Aid Watch bubble, one of the key pillars they recently highlighted out of a Lockhart talk on Afghanistan is that of the National Solidarity Program (NSP). It's a great initiative, but not the all-answer to development in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The brain-child of Ghani, Hanif Atmar and others, NSP in effect supports local communities to pick and choose where they want aid monies to be funneled. This stands in stark contrast, of course, to the oft-equally pesky Money Resolves All Evil logic Jeffrey Sachs espouses. A brilliantly random visit to one of Sachs's Millennium Villages in Ethiopia turned up that decisions on aid were made by some big shot "very famous professor in New York."

NSP also reminds me of the fabled Mexico 'tres por uno' remittance program. Here the government would thrice multiply cash sent-in from abroad and allow communities to decide where they wanted to spend the sudden influx. Did that extra health facility, school, road spring up? Nope: they chose to invest in churches and cemeteries.

Beware the false consciousness of the poor. At least as much as our nearing-sacred notion that the poor know all there is to know about being poor. Slippery slopes these issues. But back to NSP.

So what's really going on?

NSP funnels government block grants between $20,000 and $60,000 to every village able to: elect by secret ballot a village leadership council; hold inclusive meetings to design its own plans; and publicly post its accounts. According to Fixing Failed States, p. 206 -- the 2008 Ghani and Lockhart tome, more on which later: NSP aims to show how democratization can be done from the ground up. Villager quotes on the next page support this, NSP, they say, is "the national tablecloth" and "the national learning school." Good stuff.

The website of the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD in local-speak) also updates us on the following:

"As of 19th February, 2010 NSP has covered 361 districts across all 34 provinces.

22,488 Communities which have been mobilized by the FPs
22,216 Community Development Councils (CDCs) elected
22,091 Community Development Plans (CDPs) completed
50,978 Community sub-project proposals submitted to the NSP
50,901 Community sub-project proposals approved by the NSP
38,126 Community sub-projects completed"

The scale of what has been done is immense, as is the scale of what's in the pipeline.

Most people’s experiences with NSP have been very positive. This, we're told by an external review, is largely because communities feel that they are benefiting equally through a genuine consultation process.

So lots to commend on NSP. But there is a catch or two.

For one, despite apparent success there is no clear evidence to suggest that this programme has direct security benefits. In fact, to correlate (not causate) the broad trends: the more NSP projects implemented, the worse the security situation in the country gets. This poses a bit of a challenge to arguments that sustainable development is the real answer. One of the constant complaints, gaining attention now in the media, is about how much of aid in Afghanistan goes to Southern provinces, the really insecure Talibani ones. This then leaves calmer regions, in which there are still no livelihoods, a bit pissed off. That they're still saying they're not all-in with the government despite NSP projects is troubling. Hearts and minds ain't such an easy thang to get won.

Another catch is, to harp on my theme: water. The bottom-up approach NSP takes to community's deciding to install x number of water projects is great -- for those communities. But not so great for those further down a water system. Tapping water supply off from a river in one village transmits the opportunity costs of another village -- not only not being able to do the same, but perhaps suffering extreme forms of water scarcity as a result. Here is a where a more top-down approach -- focusing on river basins as the main unit of concern for water projects -- needs to be met with the bottom-up that NSP represents.

A really good development success story in such a difficult context NSP is. But let's not get too gung-ho on it as a silver bullet.

I saw Ghani speak a few weeks ago at the LSE. A brilliant talk that made many an interesting point. One was about how statecraft as an art isn't for everybody. In his years back to Afghanistan, where he first returned as finance minister in 2003, he says he's not once been out to a restaurant, highlighting his sacrifice (and there are some nice ones about, so what a pity).

Passionate as ever about his country, one point especially moved me. During the Q&A session he was asked by the moderator, one global governance expert, to break it down for us the mystery of stolen votes and just what in any god's name happened in the August oh-nine elections.

Ghani responded by saying he didn't really want to get into it. And why? Because it's time to move forward, a la Al Gore, with political reconciliation in Afghanistan.

He then parenthetically proceeded to mention that he was likely robbed of at least 1,000,000 votes. But let's massage that away and focus on his message: He was willing to forget a crassly fraudulent election and put his support to Hamid Karzai for the better good of his country.

Silver bullet or not, this is reason enough to take this man's ideas seriously.

Were the Taliban good for Afghanistan?

2010-04-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

It's a question that seems to be coming up more and more these days in Kabul. It's told often-times as a joke. Or creeps up in conversation as a counterbalance to the current Karzai regime. But there's more to it than meets the eye.

Were the Taliban good for Afghanistan?

I heard this implicitly pop up three times today alone.

What the Afghans need (an Afghan man broke it down for me) is a strong leader. Come in, take control of things. Wham, bam. No more corruption. One tale spun today illustrating the point was about how a (Afghan) friend was living in Pakistan during the Taliban time. One day he receives a notice from some unknown somebody in Kabul, claiming that because his family's house was going empty they were going to stake claim to it. So my friend returns to Kabul to meet with this claimant. An offer of 800k Pakistani rupees, the true currency of the hour, converting to thereabouts 1k USD (NB: I've not done any verification on this, just conveying the perspective). After agreeing to the amount, it takes the so-called claimant a full 3 days to come and collect the bakhshish. What's the hold up? Fear of being caught out and losing a hand to the ruling Talibs.

One of the very first stories I heard when I started researching in Kabul was of how disputes over village territories were settled under the Taliban years. Somebody: go stand at the mosque and yell REAL LOUD. Somebody else go stand out at the edges of the disputed space. If you can hear the call, village. If you can't, village no more.

Another story I heard today was about a water dispute in a far eastern province -- I want to say it was around Jalalabad, but memory fails me. But it was out in the area near Pakistan. Two farmers get in a fight over who has right to an irrigation source. They take it to the village talib, who does what? Proceeds to beat the living daylights out of the two. One of the unfortunates dies by night. Dispute settled. And naught was heard another water fight for quite some time.

The last story I was privy to today was about my current neighborhood, the fabled Shar e now, a lot populated today by surly foreigners like me. It's considered the most secure part of town. But let's go on and delete that the two recent guesthouse attacks were within blocks of one another. And where? Shar e now. Photos of the still holed out windows of the Kabul City Centre explosion soon may make an appearance.

But so, late 1990s. Shar e now. Governed, I'm told, by the one-man force of a single talib. On Fridays, the first day of the Afghan weekend, everyone walked about in file "like ants." Nothing like fear keeping ya'll straight.

There's a lot of weight in this was Taliban good question. Though surely no one seems to dispute in the least the deep costs of the Taliban. Schools were destroyed. Women's faces sprayed with acid and freedoms indefensibly curtailed. And an odd case of smithereened Buddhist statues.

What, in essence, this question boils down to is a more conventional economic v. political development trade-off. One we're more used to being couched in Lee Kuan Yew or Pinochet terms. Do budding states confined to sudden national borders need to have a benevolent dictator telling who is who and what is what?

In this you have the stuff of self-Afghanized orientalism, per my friend's corruption story: invader-fending Afghans need a state walking with a very big stick. But then you also have Western political correctness. Via yours truly.

I did up this graph earlier today.

Nothing big. Just what international agencies say improved water access trends look like in Afghanistan. As I've mentioned before, my posse and I have got some issues with these data. Shockingly (or not), I've surmised this near-half the population has access to safe drinking water estimate is based on sloppy work. It includes Kandas, Arhads and Karizes -- which are all open to the environment to large degrees and thus to contamination, making them directly violate the international water law of It Shall be Covered. In their detailed write-up of the data, the good ol' people at WHO-UNICEF had a question, Uh, What's a kanda, arhad, kariz?, but seem not to have gotten a response proper. Do they off and engage in some half-hearted googling? Nah, let's publish our report why don't we. And claim the Afghans aren't really doing so badly on water and sanitation, poor folk already have their hands full with violence violence everywhere.

Did you spot Waldo? Yup: between 1995 and 2000, UN agencies claim that improved water access went from 3% to 21%. Seven-manifold increase. And who controlled 80% of Afghanistan roughly during that time? 'Islamic students.'

The argument, to be sure, is stability. Stability gives NGOs and others calm enough to go in and drill some boreholes and maintain some canals. From such a low starting point, the opportunity to get any real work off the ground is welcomed. Stability. That is why the Taliban rolled over cities with scarcely a bullet seeing the other side of a barrel. This is why they're not all out and done for today. Compared to the current regime, where everyone knows exactly what Karzai's half-brother is up to, neck-deep in opium (who, by the way, it seems is gonna get it big time, and soon), compared to this, stability smells real nice.

Aside from having statistical qualms about the viability of surveys deriving such late-1990s figures, I sat and thought I'd best not make too much a storm about these numbers. And why? Because what would Mrs. Clinton say about our showing up a ton of figures saying how life may have been better before the US-NATO tonned in $31 billion in 'aid'?

To round things out, this is what seems the best estimate, tell-all trend: something that shows a notably less up-tick than the few Taliban years. And who is in power during these years....?

You say what, I say who, we say World Water Day

2010-03-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

Around the 22nd of March every year World Water Day comes around. This year saw a laudable effort to advance the agenda on women, children and other oft-ignored faces of the global water crisis. Plus, National Geographic is offering nifty free access to their special April issue on water.

Last time, the 3rd world water report was launched in Istanbul. It had the rather apposite theme of analyzing the non-water sector factors that nevertheless influence water: in fact, those things which likely determine why water and sanitation continue to feature so low on developing country and donor agenda.

So who the culprits? Those who hold the purse strings to government budgets, prioritizing: Economic growth (dam here, dam there, dam everywhere; same goes for privatize this that and that). Macroeconomic stability (what, health education basic services need money?). The rare devastating but sexy issue, HIV in certain spots of the globe. And military expenditures tagging along for good fun.

Whatever it is, water and sanitation remain largely underfunded, underanalyzed and undercovers. No different in Afghanistan.

And what results? You end up with dismal situations where 1 in 4 Afghans have access to ‘improved’ water (about 27%). That's a source of water that has some sort of cover. 1 in 4, folks. That's more than 17 million people without access to drinking water (well, with some assumptions on the population numbers. But let’s not get started on those stats today.)

Sanitation stands a bit more complicated. If you ask my posse and me, it's at about 5%. But if you ask the WHO-UNICEF folk, the guardians of international data on such things, it may be as high as 30%. So what gives?

It's all in the definition. Mere semantics can be harmless sometimes. But here's a case in point where language-games prove deadly.

By the WHO-UNICEF design, an 'improved sanitation source' is one that separates the excreta from the human contact. In Afghanistan there's what's called the dearan or sahrah, a traditional toilet that captures said excreta, doing something like separating it from touch. But that's it. No further steps from there. So excreta sits in your home or compound until it dries up, and goes where? Into the air. Kabul holds the dubious distinction of figuring among the world's cities with highest fecal content. And that. Is. The. Capital. Of. The. Country. No wonder I find myself picking my nose all the time.

While the dearan/sahrah effectively meets the WHO-UNICEF criterion of hand-excreta separation, it doesn't really meet the bar for the intimated health gains.

Behind these aggregate country stats are more stats at provincial levels and behind those stats: well, not much. Just households. And maybe some people. And kids. Who, if they're lucky, make it to age 5. There are about 50 thousand each year that don’t. Because of diarrhea.

The double of Mr. Obama’s military intervention is the civilian surge for development, including platoons of engineers. This may be welcomed at this point. But decouple it from the military: don't militarize your aid.

Make sure, instead, to help Afghans make the needed changes themselves. Why hell, you might even find helping to build a sector of Afghan engineers, maintenance workers, and the admin people who support them will provide jobs. And what do jobs do in a poor country with a youth bulge that sets most of the world to shame?

It might give them a reason to not pick up a Kalashnikov.

Invisible country

2010-03-27T09:06:00.001-07:00

Afghanistan. A place of emptiness and void, crime and corruption. Or a land of beauty and hospitality. The graveyard of empires. Foreign Policy Issue Número Uno. A failed state.

It's wielded for many purposes, bent for many an agenda, understood insofar as necessary to conquer. It's thought of only en route to somewhere else. Somehow it's often the same destination: security. Buffer for Pax Brittanica. Site shoving the stake into the heart of Evil Socialism. The key to international security in a globalized world.

The vogue, today, is to win the hearts and minds of an unnamed Afghan populace, offering the toys of money and prestige to coax a warring people away from insurgency.

We ignore Afghans as they are, imagining them instead as we want them to be. Forgotten are the policy contradictions. Not only those borne out a generation ago, at the endgame of the Cold War -- the blowback of those inconsistencies already writ large on our collective consciousness. Nor just the support proffered to the Taliban months before an invasion to remove them from power. But also those internal inconsistencies in the halls of knowledge and power that fail to advance even their own designs. The twins of war and development cannot be left welded together for security, in distant terrorized countries or in local counterterrorized villages.

What would it take to see an invisible country? A different way of knowing and acting.