Can all the king's horses and all the king's men put Afghanistan back together again? Nyier Abdou takes the pulse of Afghanistan's recovery efforts The attention focused on Afghanistan during the US-led military campaign that ousted the Taliban regime one year ago laid bare the destruction wreaked by decades of conflict -- from the 1979 Soviet invasion, to the US-backed resistance of the 1980s, to the bloody civil war that helped bring the Taliban to power in 1996. As reporters poured into the country to chronicle the last death throes of the Taliban regime, tales of oppression and despair galvanised popular support for a full-scale international effort to help set the country on the road to recovery. Last month delegates marked the anniversary of the hastily convened United Nations-sponsored conference on Afghanistan in the German city of Bonn with a one-day meeting at the same mountainside resort. While last year's conference was heated, tense and uncertain, this year's was more subdued, more self-congratulatory; but Iraq was the unspoken agenda. Iraqi opposition groups met in London this week to try and form a united front in the event that a US- led removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could present the need for an interim leadership. Such early efforts seem both presumptuous and logical, if anything is to be learned from Afghanistan. And comparisons to Afghanistan are ubiquitous -- although they shouldn't be. Afghanistan is hardly a success story. One year on, Hamid Karzai, appointed the interim leader at Bonn until a traditional loya jirga (grand council) could be called, remains the chosen leader of Afghanistan; but a failed assassination attempt mitigates this apparent success. And while some $4.5 billion of aid was pledged by international donors at a meeting in Tokyo in January, a great deal of this money has been slow in coming. Aid groups poured back into Afghanistan, but have battled increasing lawlessness outside the capital, where Karzai's influence is minimal and the UN International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is not deployed. And yet, humanitarian organisations have a long history in Afghanistan and have grown accustomed to a certain level of insecurity. "It is very difficult to generalise about reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan," says Paul Barker, country director for Afghanistan at CARE International, which has been active in Afghanistan for the last four decades. "But in general, I would give a positive report card on the efforts of the interim Afghan government, the UN and NGOs. Given the enormity of the country's problems, full recovery is going to take years, if not decades." Based in Kabul, Barker told Al-Ahram Weekly that security is "the single greatest constraint" to reconstruction efforts, warning that it was the failure of the Afghan leadership and the international community to establish "adequate and appropriate security structures" in the early 1990s that sunk Afghanistan into a "post-Soviet cycle of anarchy" that spawned the rise of Taliban. "It would be a hollow victory indeed if the coalition forces and ISAF were to move on from Afghanistan before multi-ethnic, national-level security systems are in place in Afghanistan." Aid workers working in crisis areas tend to shimmy between offering an encouraging outlook and a glimpse of desperation. In Kabul, Alejandro Lopez-Chicheri, spokesman for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Afghanistan, dances this dilemma. Pointing to the numerous accomplishments made possible through direct food aid, Lopez-Chicheri told the Weekly that relief efforts have made it possible to stave off starvation and malnutrition among Afghanistan's most vulnerable. Maintaining this basic need has a clear chain reaction, discouraging migration and further displacement and strengthening the resettlement of returning refugees. Food for Work projects help rebuild sustainable resources, while programmes that exchange food for children's attendance at school keep families from reverting to "extreme coping mechanisms" like early marriage of daughters and the selling of basic assets. But Lopez-Chicheri tempers this success with a warning: "We must not forget that after 23 years of conflict and four years of consecutive drought, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth. This step in the right direction has to be followed by more steps." "Clearly, continuing insecurity, as highlighted at [last month's] Bonn conference, remains the major challenge to be overcome," concedes Kevin Henry, advocacy director at CARE USA. Speaking of Karzai's announcement to form a 70,000-strong national army and disband warlord militias, Henry is adamant that this cannot be done without strong international support. "While creating a national army should be the top priority, the fact is that this process is going very slowly," says Henry. "It will take at least two years for this army to reach critical mass, and during this time, the international community will have to come up with a viable formula for improving security throughout the country." It seems that for every success in Afghanistan's reconstruction, there is a caveat in the shadows. "Development is not progressing as quickly or efficiently as it could," says Martha Heil, spokeswoman for the California-based Afghan Women's Mission (AWF), an affiliate of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). "The lack of real security outside of Kabul, the amount of aid that has been promised but not given, and the fact that the Karzai government is supporting fundamentalists instead of building a real democracy -- all these factors hinder Afghanistan's development." Heil notes that efforts to placate warlords by placing them in key positions in the military negates the possibility of greater security. And yet, grassroots projects run by RAWA that aim at sustainable development, like irrigation and farming, have still been able to flourish. "RAWA was an underground association during the Taliban regime," explains Heil. "They are used to being in situations without much security." Dominic Nutt, an emergencies journalist working with the UK-based humanitarian group Christian Aid, told the Weekly that so far, lack of security has not "overtly" hampered the group's work, although they are well aware of the dangers. "If we are threatened -- which has happened -- we speak to local leaders and tell them we will pull out. The decision is theirs: look after our staff or explain to your community why we have left. We did it once under the Taliban and we have never had to do it again." Asked if he thought that development efforts were going forward effectively, Nutt says that the "short answer" is no. Though money pledges to the interim Afghan government are getting through, money that was intended for rebuilding infrastructure like roads, schools and hospitals has instead been channelled into short-term relief efforts. "No one estimated the vast numbers of Afghan exiles, in Pakistan and Iran, for example, who would return to their homeland after the defeat of the Taliban," says Nutt. "By the end of this year, around two million refugees will have returned to an already impoverished and drought-stricken country." Nutt explains that aid money is being spent on transport of refugees and basic food rations. "Of course, this is necessary -- refugees need help. But this means less investment is being made in Afghanistan's future. This will have implications for stability and peace." Lack of jobs, infrastructure and continued food shortages are a recipe for further conflict and instability, he adds. "An uneducated man with a gun -- and there are many guns in Afghanistan -- is more likely to turn to banditry, or sell his services to local warlords, who in turn can be 'bought' by outside powers... This is natural. If you want to feed your wife and children and have no job, your land is dry and you have a gun, what are you going to do?" With Afghanistan still in the grip of draught, direct food distribution is essential. But with the number of returning refugees almost double what was expected, aid agencies are having a hard time coping. "Of course, this unexpected number of returnees has put more stress on already limited resources," says the WFP's Lopez-Chicheri. "We had to reduce the initial family repatriation package from 150kg to 100kg in August, and from 100kg to 50kg per family in October. If we want this repatriation to be sustainable we have to continue assisting these families at least during the winter months." Although Afghanistan has been painted as a massive reconstruction effort by the international community, the country receives surprisingly less post-conflict international aid than countries like Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor: about $75 per head per year, and $42 for the next four years, compared to some $250 in the other countries. Likewise, the US has 7,000 troops in Afghanistan. In combination with 5,000 international peace-keepers, that makes 12,000 troops, while an initial 60,000 NATO troops were sent to Bosnia. The US is currently considering expanding its military presence beyond the capital. Small teams of soldiers and civil affairs officers would be deployed to between six and eight larger towns throughout the country and would help secure aid projects -- a significant policy shift for the Pentagon. But CARE Afghanistan's Barker says that NGOs are alarmed by the prospect of coalition forces taking on larger roles in reconstruction efforts, first because forces still have far to go to ensure security, and second because aid agencies are better equipped, appropriately trained and "bound by codes of conduct which mandate neutrality and impartiality". "Soldiers and aid workers can never and should never mix," agrees Christian Aid's Nutt. "In any country where there are armed factions, it is always dangerous and unhelpful to be identified with soldiers because opposition groups will feel you are partisan. It would be fantastic if that were not the case and we could all work under a secure military umbrella. The fact is, this isn't the case. Imagine if aid workers went into the Occupied Territories protected by Israeli soldiers. Palestinians would naturally identify them with the state of Israel. It can never work."
