Steve Hutcheson

I have spent 3 and half years in Afghanistan since 2002 and have been the program manager in charge of about 200 million in various infrastructure projects, the last year with the Counter Insurgency program. It is all largely a waste. We are not bringing about peace, we are not changing anything. Why build a road to market if there is no market? Why give Afghan government workers computers when they cannot write and do not even have a manual system functioning first?

I think of America as a country developing on the basis of small government, small welfare and high on entrepreneurship. In Afghanistan we have introduced aid on a system that is focused on big government, big welfare, no entrepreneurship and all managed by public servants.

If they were to measure the impact of a project they funded three years ago, there would be nothing to comment on. We are doing work now that was being done six years ago, we are simply providing maintenance, not development.

It is extremely frustrating that those making the decisions on how funds are dispersed do so on a whim that they bring from the west, without understanding the people or the internal systems of the people of Afghanistan and all with a new way of doing things that they think will work knowing none of the above.

There are currently two groups of criminals in Afghanistan, one being the insurgents, the other being in government. We provide support to one side of what is a essentially a turf war between the two.

My guess is that ultimately, the west will stop giving aid and it will revert to the civil war with the Talibs driving the criminals out as they did in 1996 at which point the government will fold as it did then.

I wish that were not the case. Where we have failed is that we have not changed anything. We have not created sustainable industry but sought to enhance the existing economic structure of subsistence farming. There is no industry other than what is required to service the international assistance and budget. Take that away and you will be left with a big zero in economic activity.

Let me see if I have this straight. Masood Qaim who recently wrote in the Guardian (I’ve Changed my Mind about the West published 30 Dec 2009) about the failure of the west to take its reconstruction activities in Afghanistan seriously, who grew up the son of a General with power, position and was part of the privileged elite in socialist Afghanistan, losing it all on departure of the Russians. He is unhappy and grumbles that the Americans or the west have not reinstated his life to that which it once was and have not bought back the development in a manner that would suit him.  As a journalist Masood and judging from his complaint, sees himself as part of the intellectual mass of Afghanistan that believes and challenges the west should be doing more to reinstate his county to its former self.

Frankly, Masood represents about one percent of Afghanistan as it stands. Afghans voted and it was Karzai whom for better or worse the apparent majority Afghans felt represents their plight best of all.  

There are substantial issues for Afghanistan to face up to, least of all the rampant corruption amongst the government, the abuse of power by the warlords and the ongoing philosophical battle that represents the fundamental policy of the Taliban versus the liberation espoused by a more humane western sense of human rights. Biting the hands that primarily feeds them is the last thing Afghans need to be doing if they are to move anywhere in the direction of change and development.

In a Facebook thread on this article posted by Nushin Arbabzadah, another Guradian journalist, I have challenge Masood to address the question of how change would come about to Afghanistan if the west was to abruptly withhold all aid and intervention in the processes that are taking place. How will Afghans solve some if not all of the seemingly intractable problems his country faces?

In another more inspiring article that I have read lately drawn by Nicholas D Kristof in the New York Times (His Gift Changes Lives published New York Times 16^th December 2009) Kristof writes about a Sudanese youth, Valentino Deng who at first escaped the rigors of the war in Sudan but on eventually achieving some sense of stability and security in the US, has returned to his country work on the development process himself, building a school where countless NGOs have failed. He is not carping about how that the west is not doing enough, he has moved on and is doing it himself, he sees himself as the lucky one and that it is up to him to actually bring about the change needed to his country.    

Masood, and he is not alone in this, need to take control of their own set of circumstances. If it cannot be achieved at the ballot box then it needs to be done irrespective of the government and the corruption that exists in the world as they know it. It is after all, only what he is presently expecting the west to do for him.  

I take umbrage at his dismissal of the work of foreign NGO’s where he labels them as the greatest source of corruption in Afghanistan. Far be it from me to defend the actions of all of them, I often disagree with the methods and programs they become engaged in, however having worked there and experienced firsthand where the problems lie, it is not the internationals per se, it is more often in the local staff who find an avenue to corrupt the processes, who take backhanders from contractors, who manipulate the flow of funds an any number of other ways of stripping the funds out of NGO programs. For the most part as a program manager, I saw my role and that of other international functionaries in part was to introduce systems and processes that perhaps would not eliminate the corruption but would at least bring it into a respectable level of say eighty percent delivered. Where international inexperience on the part of the program manager was evident is where the most rorting of the aid funding existed. Many believed much like Masood seems to believe that Afghans would not be the major protagonists in this failure to see full delivery of program funding to bring about major impact by its delivery. It is not an intentional process but one brought about by default and consequence of young idealists taking a lead in many programs.

There is a problem with much aid funding that is for sure. Programs are introduced that have no commercial basis, they are feel good projects that do little to alter the economic plight that is at the root of the complaint Masood has.  We build schools in remote locations and then cannot get any qualified teachers to attend them because of security or remoteness or simply a lack of teachers. More than three hundred schools in the eastern provinces are vacant because of this. We build and equip clinics when there is no qualified staff to man them for the same reasons.  We build roads to market and then do nothing about ensuring that there is in fact a market at the end of it. We do nothing to ensure that the 70% of rural poor who are landless have an opportunity to have greater aspiration than to simply be an itinerant farm laborer or part time Taliban as an alternative. We look at our individual programs as self important and fail to register them holistically with the overall development process needed for the county.

Simply put, Masood is wrong in his assessment. He would do well to take a leaf out of Valentino Deng’s book and consider his good fortune to be one of the lucky ones and take action to make the changes he wants for Afghanistan himself.

Capitalism as we know it is perhaps at a crossroad. It may have reached a position in the way we live our lives that only social disorder will resolve some of the difficulties we are now facing unless new options are created to alter the way our communities co-exist. Presently hundreds of millions of people around the world have been affected by the fallout of the financial collapse that has occurred over the past year. Millions upon millions are presently unemployed; countless millions of others have lost their homes and lifestyles and again hundreds of millions if not billions have suffered financial loss through the collapse of investments.

Part of the problem is the development of unfettered capitalism, the belief that the acquisition of more and more wealth is immutable and inscribed in stone. Thirty to forty years ago the salary difference between the lowest and highest in any organization may have been in the order of three to four times. Now differences in compensation in the hundreds of times are not unusual. It raises the question of how much additional contribution the highest paid is making to the overall success of the operation.

I was once complimented in that as the former manager of a program in Afghanistan and after considerable absence I gave credit and greeted as a friend a humble man whose single role was to open and close the gate as we entered the compound. As I explained to my engineer, I saw that the gatekeeper’s role was as important to the overall operation as anyone. If he was not vigilant in his task to secure the compound as he did, we were all at risk and in that respect he was critical to the safe operation of us all. The same can be said in any organization today.

People and governments however in another respect are intrinsically generous.  For the past decade I have had the good fortune to have been engaged in dispensing some of the universal largess in some of the world’s more difficult crisis zones, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Aceh and to a lesser extent Thailand and now Malaysia. People with the most have been the most generous. Bill Gates has contributed billions in the fight against malaria; countless trusts have been established by philanthropists worldwide to engage in social restoration, building schools and clinics or simply provide financial aid and hundreds of millions of people have contributed to millions of charities and social programs worldwide. From my own small involvement I have been given the managerial task to dispense more than two hundred million dollars over the period I have been working in these operations.

 But in all the time I have been involved in this line of work I have questioned the overall impact that all this generosity has made in solving the problems of half of the world’s population. If we provide aid today, we often need to provide more aid tomorrow. I liken it to placing a dollar in the cup of a beggar. We don’t solve his problem since he will most likely be there again tomorrow. We take on a role of Benefactor and Beneficiary where one party is always kept at a disadvantage and is unlikely to become our equal.

Since 2002 more than thirty billion dollars has been provided in direct aid to Afghanistan yet they still have the worst social indicators across all measures of all the countries in the world. The aid program has not been successful. We have however perpetuated the roles of benefactor and beneficiary without developing any sort of successful partnership between the two parties.

I firmly believe it is now time to address this particular issue directly. If I give you something, I want you to something in return to develop the partnership. I was heartened to see an article recently about an admirable young Sudanese man, Valentino Deng who has been moderately successful in the US and is now actively working towards building schools in his own country. He view is that “he is the lucky one so it is incumbent upon him to help his people solve some of their problems.”

In some ways, (I am an engineer so am taking an engineering approach to developing a solution) I believe that for the most part, people are prepared to work. Over the years I have employed more than 60,000 people on cash for work programs and I know and they know that the money we would hand out each week was theirs, they had earned it. But the question that always niggled me was the lack of sustainability these programs had. We would employ a thousand people for three months to construct a road to market for some isolated community. At the end of the project however, there was no continuing work for the thousand engaged in the process.     

Presently UNESCO has listed part of Penang to be a cultural and social World Heritage site. That in itself has created something of a commercial flurry in the development of the region however the most likely scenario is that it will become a gentrified enclave, eliminating in its progress the lifestyle and social framework of those that presently live within its boundaries.

The solution as I see it is to put the property development aspect required for Penang to work in conjunction with the social development work that is necessary to retain the social and cultural structures as they are. Through this there is also an opportunity to modify our approach to dealing with the social issues of the disadvantaged such that we arrive at sustainable outcomes and that problems are not simply solved only for as long as the aid continues, we enable the poor and disadvantaged to reach a position where they no longer require aid. That then brings into account a new means of addressing social philanthropy, philanthropy that enables the poor to have sustainable incomes and permanent jobs where they are in partnership with those that provide them the means to achieve that status, the benefactor and the beneficiary are as equals.

To do this requires the philanthropist to become not simple the benefactor giving alms to a beneficiary but working as the financier providing soft loans that need to be repaid and as that is returned providing further soft loans to start more projects and so on and so on all the while retaining a direct connection and equity with the process.  It is not simple one gives and the other takes, they both have a common objective and outcome in mind. Perhaps that is a solution to address the existing faults of capitalism. It is one that I am certainly working on.

There is considerable angst amongst international circles regarding the corruption of the recent Presidential elections and the lack of capacity that is available within the Afghan government.  But what is it that they are wanting?

Presumably they want to see good government however what they have is an administration that is wracked with corruption, staffed by untried criminals, lacking all manner of administrative capacity and a litany of other failings. It simply begs the question as to what is it that they are suppose to provide in the big equation that is Afghanistan?

From the perspective of the average Afghan, their lives would in many cases be better off simply by eliminating all local government intervention. Governance as it exists is a matter of favors and rampant nepotism all managed by incompetent and corrupt officials. It is of parties playing off other parties, be they of a different tribe, ethnic group or gender. 

There function is marred by an unrealistic desire. A desire to emulate good government such as it might exist in pristine environments of the west. That is not going to happen. Much of the present intervention is to provide these agencies with new tools, new infrastructure and new skills without addressing what purpose they serve in the long run. It provides computers to people in government who for the most part cannot read, have no electricity to drive the processors and comes before the ability to affect an administrative system that cannot even operate on a manual system since almost none exists. If seventy percent of the public servants in Afghanistan were dismissed, there would be almost no affect on the functioning or well being of the Afghan community.

Government is necessary but it has to arrive from a position of demand. Afghanistan as it is possible has the most laborious bureaucracy in the world. The administrative process is rife with incompetence and payoffs. It is simple not needed. It is proposing to address the problems of a fully functioning economy and social system when there is no economy and the social systems is more in tune with the local mosque than it is with the warlords.

The US and the west would do better to reconsider what it is they are proposing to build in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is not going to advance simply because it has good government. It is going to advance if it has an economic activity that provides every one with a basic income and life support. Everything else will be or at least should be a flow down process from that. Inventing laws or holding up activity until the laws are drafted is the thinking that Lewis Carrol may have been considering when he drafted Alice. Allowing local officials unfettered power to dictate terms and conditions of projects has been the greatest stumbling block in developing a working economy and social reform.  

Afghanistan has traditionally had a socialist styled administrative system with hundreds of inefficient public departments, utilities and state owned enterprises controlling major sectors of the economy. The public service is increasingly large and cumbersome with multiple layers of bureaucracy at a national, provincial, district and village level, each sucking relentlessly on the public teat. So far through Afghan history, it has failed to function realistically. The international assistance program however continues to build on that failed model. Coincidentally, this flies in the face of a demand by the main providers and backers, the US where its domestic population is demanding smaller government and smaller government regulation enabling the market to sort out its own problems as part of whatever is perceived to be enshrined in its two hundred year old constitution.  

Where the west can assist Afghanistan is not in continuing to protect its failed government. It has an obligation at this stage to build a credible economy allowing market forces to regulate unfair practices as they evolve and not spend billions on creating a corrupt preventative environment before they even start. Hundreds of industries have stagnated waiting for the legislation to be introduced that in part will provide the legislators with unfettered access to the benefits that might flow out of them.

Afghanistan needs what might be termed “social venture capital”, funds and technology backed up with technical support to get the population and the economy moving forward and not simply allowing the unrepresentative government to control and restrict that process as it does. 

Of recent times, I have decided to scale back my thankless pursuit of money and opt to establish a more balanced set of objectives before me for the future. Now if you read my posts you will have established I am generally a liberal sort of person. For the past ten years I have been engaged in the humanitarian business, another thankless task. I have worked for non-government organizations in war torn high risk countries for the pittance they pay, I have been a UN volunteer living on a ridiculously small stipend, more recently I have worked for one of the beltway bandits sucking up US taxpayer money faster than the new hoover it has bought for our maid.  But things have changed, for my next exercise  I am looking not so much to how much I can make, but to how much I can do.

The beltway income has been sufficient to lay down a sizable deposit on a small house in Penang in Malaysia where we are currently setting down some roots and it will also pay to undertake a major renovation of the building before we finally decide if we will live in it or rent it out. The building however happens to be within the boundaries of a newly conscripted UNESCO World Heritage site which draws me into the reasons to do what I am doing. The idea that I can spend time on a project that will with some degree of personal satisfaction, recover some aspect of a history that has been allowed to degrade appeals to me. What I need to be conscious of is the possibility of over gentrification of the region and even in my own little project I am in since it is the cultural and ethnic inhabitants that form the heritage significance as much as it is the architecture.

What I am now also engaged in is putting together a proposal that will enable me to take on bigger projects that are not just for the moment, I will be able to create projects that, like buying art, are done as much for the sake that the end result can be enjoyed and is a sound investment.

I am reading a column by George Monbiot in the Guardian where  he is lamenting the fact that a TESCO is coming to his small Welsh village. The people who live in the village do so because they are satisfied with the slower pace it offers them and would seem to be universally driven to ward off the TESCO if they can however the inevitability of big business succeeding is ever present. The same can be said about my new project in Penang although not for the same reasons.

Penang is very busy. It has a multicultural community that over the years have bought in a diversity from all over Asia. Yet it is slowly dying. Over the past few years there have been local developers wanting to pul down part of the decayed buildings and construct multi storied hotels and office blocks. Thankfully they have been resisted. This small segment of the city should be enabled to retain its historic outlook, it will nto make one iota of difference to the world at large if these rich developers do not have their way.

The city blocks do however need developing and undertaken on a larger scale than private investment can manage before they totally disappear into a rotting mess. Money nees to be provided to preserve the cultural backdrop against which we measure our progress, money should be invested simply because the outcome provides us with pleasure. Not every thing we do has to be for a profit.

When I finish my tour in Afghanistan at the end of this month, I already have interested some major financiers in my proposition that there is investment potential in conserving Penang’s heritage. In it I am appealing to individual investors who care not just about the next tenth of a percent, but that they are contributing to worthwhile projects that will also repay due to the fact that their projects have greater interest than the availability of a new t-shirt. it may not be for everyone but then it doesn’t require everyone, just enough.

I was reading an article this morning in the British Guardian Online. It was about an isolated tribe of Jarawa natives who were starting to come out of the jungle in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for the first time and how they are beginning to interface with the tourists and recent arrivals. The writer, quite rightly alluded to the difficulties the tribes faces in the future in terms of integration, adapting to diseases, alcoholism, materialism etc as they become more and more integrated into the western notion of development. Necessarily these are traditionally poor people who have survived for centuries by their instinct and what the jungle can provide for them, the thing for the moment is that, they do not know they are poor, nor do they appear to care or are in any particular need of what the west can provide for them. Unfortunately that will progressively change as well meaning, but poorly advised “assistants” help them adapt to the western world. The richness of their present simple life will eventually become the symbols  of their future poverty.

Jarawa women of the Andaman Islands

It got me to thinking however about the general notion that we see indigenous peoples need to reach levels in their lifestyles that are consistent with western norms that may be askew. The Jarawa seem to have an idylic lifestyle. They are not constrained by any moral conventions that constrain the outside world, they live a semi nomadic existence where there appears no need for anything other than what their surroundings can provide for them. Ecologically and environmentally, the Jarawa appear to leave a negligible footprint on their surroundings yet seem happy with that even to the extent of repelling intruders with spears and arrows until quite recently. However, as they start to integrate as they are now doing, their lives will become irreversibly changed and it needs to be decided soon if that is for the better or should they be protected.

Their future is perhaps written for them as development takes hold of their tiny island. Inevitably they will through contact establish needs they previously did not have or could not obtain from the jungle.  Sweets, clothing, housing, liquor, medicine, education, money, communications, transport and a host of other symbols of development and advanced society. Through bitter experience of how other indigenous people have fared in the past, they will not fare well. They will lose their skills at living with nature, they will contract diseases, they will become indolent, always living around the edges of society eventually becoming a serial pest as that society loses its tolerance with their slow adaptation to western expectation. They will live in hastily constructed shanties at the edge of civilization instead of in their organized jungle village.

Going by the conventions set down by agencies such as the United Nations Human Development Reports, the Jarawa people will be included in deserving the minimum standards laid out for their existence yet what that fails to acknowledge is that these standards would generally exceed their current expectations and what is more, it needs to be asked if in fact they are needed or should what we be doing is to maintain the status quo.

Is development only a western perception that would enable them to live in a developing western world with western needs. Poverty world wide is measured against an immeasurable standard if say compared to the Jarawa people. The same, to some extent can be said for peoples all over the world in different locations and different sets of ideals. We tend to presume that what we can offer is what is best and fail to understand that sometimes what they have might well be what is in fact best after all.

For several years I have worked in Afghanistan. When I first arrived I had the opportunity to travel to remote regions of Nangahar province where I met with villagers whom I considered had an almost idyllic if not austere life, similar to that of the Jarawa however with a greater degree of development you might say. They had little to be sure however they had enough to live a lifestyle that was free of material needs. They live in mud houses with a mud floor and rarely a window. They grow and eat their own simple foods. They do not own cars and they do not travel far. They are uneducated but they can live under extreme weather conditions as they have done for centuries. It is rich in its simplicity. There were growing issues of education of which they had little and medical resources of which they had none and much of the issues of maternal and natal health were frequent problems that needed resolutions. Much of it compared to others who had only recently acquired these services.

Yet there is resistance. In the far reaches of Nuristan province to the east of the country, the local people are resisting all comers. That includes the US military and the Taliban as well as the development community. Their villages are only accessible by foot tracks in the mountains that even the donkeys find difficult to traverse. They don’t want change and will fight to prevent its arrival.

In terms of their material wealth however, apart from the land beneath their feet, they have little to show of wealth. Most Afghans live in harsh inhospitable environments where an austere religious lifestyle and work at subsistence levels of farm production that regulates their daily lives yet, for the most part, provides a sense of order and a level of social security within each tiny hamlet.  Many never venturing out even to the next village but remain within the family compound. It is only when change takes place that dislocations to these tiny communities begin to eventuate. They are poor however their poverty is relative to a system that they are being introduced to that advocates development.

A question that needs to be asked, is do they really need it until they decide for them self? Is development aiding in the destruction of societies? Well meaning but often self serving aid agencies who set an agenda that is rarely based on what these communities actually need as opposed to what they might say they want or promote ideas the aid groups can sell to them and proceed to offer a change to their lifestyles. A move towards one that emulates their own along with their own particular set of values, changing social structures, material wealth and complete with vague notions of democracy and the inherent politics of gender, education and health care.

Development at peoples own pace can be good. Development at paces they cannot maintain is not good. For the Jarawa people, development will most likely only bring them poverty and hardship that they otherwise would never have known.

I am engaged in a discussion on  whether aid agencies should be regulated. I am not necessarily in favor since I don’t really see that as the problem. This is in part what I have added to the discussion. What is more at stake is the way we do business.

Takes building schools for instance. We do a lot. I must have built 30 schools in the ten years I have been working in this business but I have to say, I am happy enough if I see a group of kids sitting under a tree and the teacher has a simple blackboard propped against it. It was good enough for Socrates. Schools are not just buildings, it is about what the kids are learning. Looking back at a situation I was faced with in Jalalabad in 2002. We wanted to build schools and clinics. The difficulty was for both there was a problem with staffing with health professionals or qualified teachers in some of these remote locations. The teachers and the nurses need to be trained before we start worrying about constructing the buildings.

That brings me to probably the most serious constraints we have in the aid industry. One of the things see all the time however is this fear of profit, particularly by the NGOs but also by the UN and for the most part the donors. I was in Aceh just after the tsunami and I along with several INGOs were in a meeting about the need for ice factories. Since they started making ice, it had been in the hands of private enterprise however no one wanted to fund the owner and figured that a cooperative would have been a better idea. I am sure that in a truly socialist environment it might have but this was not a socialist environment. What was necessary was that the owner needed funding to get his business back on track as much as they needed new schools. Without ice, the fishermen could not preserve their catch so the whole community was suffering because of this issue of support to an individual making a profit.

I come from Australia. The whole economy is profit-centric yet in crisis locations people argue for socialism and the development of a welfare economy.

USAID are the funniest in this regard. America has been built on small government, small welfare and the advancement of big thinking entrepreneurs however where ever they apply funds, Afghanistan for instance, it is big government, big welfare and prohibition of profit, all managed by government workers.

Rearrange that thinking and then we might start to get somewhere in solving poverty instead of simply supporting it while we hold their hands.

So do we need to regulate. I don’t think so. If the donors who are the providers of the funds are to change their thinking and recognise that supplying a country with donation wheat is not as good idea as getting a regional marketing organisation functioning then we might see progress. Too often we look at the small picture instead of the big picture and the small picture is certainly not working.

For some years I have been frustrated with the vast disconnection in crisis recovery that exists between compelling relief aid on the one hand and long term sustainable development on the other.

Looking for instance at the major economic disaster that occurred in the Pacific and in particular Aceh that wore the brunt of it, the western coastline and large tracts of the eastern coastline of northern Sumatra were devastated as was almost half of the provincial city of Banda Aceh. Relief aid poured into the country from all over the world. So much so that international aid agencies were overwhelmed with the public response attracting hundreds of millions of dollars intended to facilitate a recovery process.

For the aid agencies however, they were operating in the dark, many still are with no viable connection between the need to provide immediate emergency relief and the long term structural recovery of the sustainable economic climate that prevailed prior to the tsunami.

There is no doubt that emergency relief was needed and it was well founded in the clean up programs and planned reconstruction yet for the most part, industrial development within the community at the onset was ignored in favour of the various agencies compelling need to engage projects in order to spend their surfeit of funds.

There were two options open to the international agencies. Firstly they could establish a logistics supply base in Medan or Jakarta neither having sustained any damage and neither actually requiring the overload of economic benefit forthcoming or secondly, challenged the local supply and service companies to procure on behalf of the programs. That would have had several unseen benefits though employment and immediate local economic stimulation for expansion or industrial recovery that otherwise were now stripped of their labour resources and no longer able to fairly compete with the inflow of donor funding.

With the purpose of putting results on the board, most if not all, international agencies took the first option. Aceh had lost half of its supply and service companies either through being totally destroyed with the tsunami or the people involved in them had perished. The number of international agencies engaged in establishing cash for work and other recovery projects became the primary employers of the region soaking up all available labour and professional skills in largely non-sustainable immediate relief programs depleting even those surviving government and private sector industries of skilled and unskilled workers with the attraction of salaries higher than the local economy would normally command.

The largess of the international community through the lack of any planning process had the capacity to skew the normal economic utility of the city without any form of compensation to the industries that had functioned previously, who it might be added also now needed assistance to recover and continue yet were faced with inordinate competition from temporary supply chains set up outside the region.

The capitalist functioning economy although faltering due to the ongoing militant action had overnight turned into a more socialist one where through the influx of capital the idea that individual profit should be made was anathema and the community collective should prevail.

The same can be said of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Each one has a compelling humanitarian engine driving them to climb off the bottom rungs of development. The means of addressing each one however is largely non-sustainable requiring continued unsustainable sponsorship by the developed world through local government interventions that is prone to all manner of misuse in order to maintain them.

Objectively, the best means of recovery is the ability for the community to engage itself by means of long term sustainable employment whereby individuals can ultimately assist themselves to overcome the various MDG targets. Too often it is a bottom up approach by an expanded government service offering individuals small subsistence level cottage industry self employment solutions while too little emphasis is given to developing small to medium industries that can employ 10 to 100 individuals in long term employment.

The challenge of course is how to generate the development of these industries so that they can reach this point. Basically, what is required is the opportunity for them to attract the business in the first place.

In Japan following the World War, Toyota Truck Company was languishing with an annual build rate of some 300 vehicles per year. With the onset of the Korean war in 1951, the US placed an initial order for 3000 vehicles that was followed by subsequent orders. The influx of business enabled the company to eventually become one of the biggest automotive companies in the world. Much can be said for numerous other industries in Japan at that time benefiting though business and not handouts, sufficient that it turned the previously destroyed economy around to where it is today.

In many similar situations around the world where poverty is prevalent bought about by natural and man-made political crisis, assistance that aims itself to the bottom through relief or at the government through inter-country donations are not sustainable development strategies. Increased emphasis has to be given to build local small to medium industry either through preferential procurement strategies that favour local manufacture, through sponsored technological transfers between international industrial partnerships and even access to financial assistance to expand current operations irrespective of the security difficulties. Bankers tend to become security conscious when lending money to individuals yet increase loans to government economies that are in the same throes of recovering from upheaval.

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In all aspects of life, various segments of our communities have a common perception of their function and purpose. The military is regarded for what it is, a battalion of soldiers whose primary purpose is war, the idea that they might change that perception is difficult conceptually and ideologically and one that I believe is flawed. I have often wondered at the logicality of the “hearts and minds” efforts of military contingents in some of the places I have been engaged such as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Aceh. It is not just simple a matter of their extensive capability to do the work but the perception as to how they are primarily considered in a country where in the past, they may have crashed though doors, pulled down walls, taken captives and even wounded or killed people from the same neighbourhood where they are now installing a well or building a school or clinic. In the any event however, should the security declines they can easily revert to that more aggressive mode, the benevolent bully in the development cycle.

In most peaceful communities of the west, the military may be called out in moments of catastrophe and rightly so. They have the large machines, they have the manpower, the have the organisational structure and they have the logistics to support an immediate response however in terms of nation building they pose a political conundrum that is largely unnecessary and fraught with danger of abuse, abuse from both sides of the crisis. They do so at a cost that is both economically and politically prohibitive.

Where I saw the largest military response to a crisis other than from a military position was in Aceh immediately following the tsunami. Air, sea and ground forces from a dozen countries had descended into the province to provide assistance that raised an immediate dilemma for the national government. The Australian army for instance bought in a large medical and engineering capacity and did an admirable job that made me proud to be associated with them yet the preceding conflict in Timor also bought in a political opposition from the national army who had in a de-facto manner, forcefully opposed them at the time of that incident.

Although there was ample capacity and a willingness, there was a sense of animosity and restriction on movement that severely curtailed what they could and couldn’t do. More “friendly” armies but perhaps less capable units however were given greater freedom of movement, particularly with their air wings that worked tirelessly distributing aid along the coastline where access other than by sea had been completely cut off.

The US sent in a naval medical ship however it arrived some weeks after the majority of tsunami trauma cases had been dealt with by what was an absolute excess of private doctors and medical teams on the ground. Unfortunately it was relegated to dealing with a few special domestic and road casualties cases that normally go with any large city. Being obliged to locate in international waters it also entailed a ground-air-sea mission to treat even a simple appendectomy that may well have been undertaken in the hospital proper yet the large expended funds required to get them there dictated that they be “seen” to be contributing to the population at home.

In Kosovo there was a different agenda and political perspective of the military forces there yet all the time they were still regarded as that, a military force and not one assigned a nation building function. Under this circumstance however it was also largely unnecessary as the province had a surfeit of humanitarian and UN agencies dealing with almost every issue that the population could require and to engage the military in the planning and execution of programs was largely vacant other than in the application of cases that required a more difficult logistics. For a while I was based in a large village quite devastated and where a number of aid agencies had commenced reconstruction programs. The military capacity of the UAE contingent based in the town undertook a similar if not smaller rebuilding program however it applied itself to the most difficult mountain terrain where its numerous rough terrain vehicles and air support had the capacity to deliver the much needed reconstruction materials that otherwise may never have arrived.

Afghanistan was where I saw a transition from the exercise of dominant military capacity to one that was now interested in the hearts and mind campaign of the population, one that also posed an immediate conflict that even today the military and the involved governments are not facing up to while attempting to justify their intervention.

Like in Aceh, the military of the US and NATO is seen as the opposition to those that waged battle against them, in this case it was the Taliban. There is no excuse for the Taliban however the notion of nation building has since been integrated into the fight against them, a sort of play off to win tacit support from the population at large. The population however care naught for either side. They are more intent on resuming their lives after twenty-five years of war, to re-establish farming incomes or find a job in the ever declining economic travails that now beset the country as indeed it is affecting rest of the world, to resume a normal life.

The presence of the military and association with their programs however exposes the local people to the inherent danger of being charged with consorting with the enemy when these friendly armies finally depart, a real and ever present danger and one that on a daily basis is being waged by the Taliban to win back, or at least negate the support that all the good work invokes.

In this case, although the armies on one hand are building good will, on the other they are still applying themselves as an aggressor when the need arises and that is predominantly how the population continue to see them, no matter how much good they can achieve.

Being an aid worker for some years I have since learned that the psychological games that are played on a needy population can backfire and impede development rather than enhance it. Just handing out largess is not the answer if the population have no ownership of the projects or the resultant benefit. Too often a beneficiary or a village will wait until the free service comes along before they find the need to go and create the benefit them self. Too often they want to be paid for their labour that is ultimately for their benefit, it becomes a case of “greed comes before need”. It is this that has become a common issue in the distribution of aid and one that the military unknowingly serves to foster without taking account of the overall development issues at stake.

Often too, the military in its quest to improve its own public perception though aid development, do so outside the purview of those who have an ultimate responsibility, the government, as was often the case in Afghanistan. The final argument being however was that so much was needed that what ever they do will be well received. I would argue that more could be achieved in the application of these resources towards large projects that went outside the smaller hearts and minds exercise but came with wider benefit and of greater national importance, the creation of water storage damns, flood mitigation, the reconstruction of major access roads and the like. Instead the armies are delivering wells and playing with the children in the villages, creating a positive spin to account for their reason to be there.

In Afghanistan, the action of the army or at least those in the position to decide on initiating the hearts and minds campaigns must however take some of the responsibility for the decline in the overall security situation that now exists throughout the country. I was in Kandahar in January 2003 at the time the Taliban killed the first of the civilian casualties. It occurred because in their eyes, he represented the opposing military forces disregarding the fact that he worked for the Red Cross and was delivering water to poor villagers. This was before the US and NATO had taken to deliver these aid programs in the void created when the aid agencies retired to allow the war to conclude. At that time the US was seen as an aggressor, it still it. Its troops postured in that aggressive manner, unfriendly to the local population, disrespectful to local custom, intent solely on doing their job of routing out the enemy, of locating the Mullahs and finding al Qa-ida in a never clear landscape where anyone may have been and most likely was one or at least sympathetic.

The military have a role to play however once that is achieved they need to retire, if not to their base, then out of the country if that is appropriate. Countries prosper under the stewardship of self-determination with appropriate guidance, not a duplication of the existing government services as in some way the foreign militaries are now supposing to do. In Afghanistan and indeed Iraq, the military intervention has seen an escalation of insecurity partly in its quest to win public support and partly in its inability to solve the problems of containment of the enemy.

Communities exist around war. Afghanistan has existed around war for thirty years, Iraq has existed around war for ten years, what is not being addressed satisfactorily is the promotion of these communities to assist themselves achieve peace as opposed to forcing it upon them through constant military intervention.

The role of the military is many fold, it has a significant part to play in many aspects of life, it has no need to display its feminine side, it is desirable in the purpose of ensuing peace exists, in the removal of despotic regimes and powerful invaders, in providing is logistical might in times of critical need, however what it is not is a nation builder, it is not equipped physically or perceptively to play that role or the role of aid worker or to replicate the role of government, no matter how onerous that job might be to those that fulfill those tasks.

This article was the winner of an Essay competition conducted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in March 2007 

The notion of democracy for a country such as Afghanistan, a country that has been in political turmoil for the past century also demands considerable thought as to how that should be applied. The Bonn Agreement at the cessation of hostilities in 2001 established a pro-forma for the constitution and the form of government that would be introduced. There were some Afghans involved in the early discussions yet as a preliminary to the drafting of the constitution, little if any discussion took place in the communities and villages that make up the structure of this war ravaged land.

America, the most dominant architect to the constitution and the form of government that was to prevail looked no further than their own system of representational democracy, a means by which they could install an interim President with strong powers with a view to dominating the electoral process as the time came for elections.

The people of Afghanistan however know little about elections or even the sense of democracy but were excited at the prospect to the point that the fine detail was easily left without question. This was to be the first such exercise and was lauded as a significant transformation of a country that had until now been largely undemocratic, falling into the abyss of socialist thinking for more than half a century and before that a feudal kingdom. Even now the government bureaucrats still promote the notion of state run industries over a free market economy, stifling growth in these important economic agrarian areas.

What the US appeared to have had in mind was to retain an administration that would have the hallmarks of democracy yet leave the principal game play that would pay continued homage to them as their liberators. What has transpired is that the unelected and often criminal warlords who had served US interests in pursuing the Russians during the Cold War continue but now with some official blessing of both the US and the elected Afghan government who appoints them under Presidential decree. The constitutional Loya Jirga merely ratified his capacity to do that and their place in government, a point noted as early as the Bonn Agreement.

This point however destroyed the notion of democracy. Many of those appointments should have been held responsible for atrocious war crimes during the several years of civil war were now being rewarded by the US and following on its apron strings, the rest of the Western countries.

For the people of Afghanistan, many if not most have lost faith in the process of democracy. Their lives have not changed for the better as they had hoped but five years later they are mired in rampant corruption of the appointed officials, a debilitated economy with an illicit drug economy that stifles other economic pursuit, national security is as bad if not worse than it had been during the long periods of conflict and the ability to make change through the democratic process almost extinct.

The problem lay however with the initiators of the democratic process. It was bought about with little if any consideration for the population at large, the dynamics of the communities and tribal connections that influence the local political processes. It was as if the architects saw American representative democracy as the ideal solution failing completely to understand the political will and dynamic of Afghanistan, the very society that had little involvement in its design. Representative democracy with its party politics might suit a more fragmented society such as the US yet historically, previous incursions into the formation of top-down political parties in Afghanistan had transcended into corrupt and unworkable mechanism by which the country as a whole would be governed leading to a constant transition through coup and countercoup.

The present government has no particular strength in the community at large. The disenfranchised Taliban largely dictate security over almost two thirds of the rural electorate and can only be kept at bay albeit in a war zone condition by the large numbers of NATO and poorly trained national troops and police forces. The government has fallen into the depths of unmitigated corruption with positions reputedly being sold off by powerful Ministers that foster further corruptions down the line of their ministries.

The difficulty for Afghanistan is that the present form of government has been established to satisfy western demands of the country. A docile President that has an alignment with the US in particular, a legislature that will accede to similar economic and commercial dictates that in particular relate to the oil and gas fields and the political connections that it has with its neighbors.

The Cold War may have finished in this part of the world but the victory is still being decided.

What will happen in the future is any ones guess. Military experts from the west all agree that the battle for a secure Afghanistan will take a decade at least, disregarding the fact that the battle for total sovereignty over the Afghans had gone on for more than two hundred and fifty years without success. It is as if the conquerors have failed to learn any lessons from all the battle beforehand.

Of course more importantly, what is the ideal solution that will see relative peace transcend this beautiful if not badly damaged country politically and socially. Afghanistan is, like its neighbors, dominated by its religion, Islam. What many in the west fail to comprehend is however, that Islam is not just a religion, it transcends every aspect of daily life in these feudal communities. Without understanding this and determined by the austerity that the Taliban imposed, the west have presumed to have a government that largely negates this religious idealism and allowed it to only enter as a final condition that the new laws will not go against the principals of Islam.

How to serve the democratic process remains aloof from the present masters of its destiny. If the interests of the people and peace for the region were truly the ambitions, other forms of democracy perhaps should have been considered at the onset.

Experience has shown that all forms of top down government in Afghanistan have failed and failed dismally yet at the community and village level there is democratic process of administration that allows the people to participate in a more compelling form of government, that of direct democracy. With some modifications to its guidelines allow the landless and the women of the community to participate, this provides some impetus to a final solution, a form of direct democracy similar to that which functions in a somewhat peaceful Switzerland and in a less transparent manner although equally Islamic country, Libya. What direct democracy can do in these communities, is eliminate the power structures that prevail with strong individuals at the top with sufficient military might they have acquired over the past thirty years from dominating the political landscape. These communities provide the representation to the next level at district, provincial and then national government. At each stage the representative is not sealed into power by a political gerrymander but remains constantly answerable to the will of those committees that nominate them.

The need for a strong leader is insufficient if he is unable to exercise strong and at times barbaric discipline over those that resist the government. Karzai is a strong leader however he also lacks the capacity to rule according to the dictates that an unruly and insecure electorate demands. The principal key to Karzai retaining western support however is his loyalty to his sponsors and in particular to the US for which until recently he retained dual citizenship as have a number of those he has appointed, a policy that is not always in the best interest of his electorate.

To regain the total will of the people, they too need to be drawn into the democratic process, one where they have a determination over the running of and to contribute into the eventual peace process with its present antagonists that is necessary for their country to move forward.