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.

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.

related articles listed under development

If you read the “about me” on this blog you will see that between 2003 and 2005 I spent two and half years in Afghanistan working on large job creation programs with the UNDP. These were aimed at employed large numbers of local workers at rebuilding public infrastructure such as roads, schools, clinics and irrigations systems particularly in the rural areas of Jalalabad and Kandahar while aiming to find alternatives to the cultivation and production of opium. In the early days I was with Relief International managing their “Creating and Restoring Alternative Livelihood’s Sources” (CRAWLS) program that was funded by USAid and that flowed over to my engagement with UNDP. It was one of those vexing problems that the wages we paid to build these roads, schools and irrigation systems although common for the region were less than the poppy farmers paid to the labourers causing our programs to suffer during the planting and harvesting periods.

Afghanistan as you may appreciate has some 80% of the population working in agrarian based industries where correspondingly free water is one of their major deficiencies, a cause towards which we were often engaged to overcome the seasonal irregularities building or restoring irrigation systems and wells.

To that end, working with my partner Akiyo, we are now looking at a small investigative project that involves utilizing the worst of one situation in Malaysia in solving the worst of another in Afghanistan and hopefully arrive at a genuinely positive outcome.

We are soon moving from Thailand and Malaysia and in doing so we looked at what we could usefully do there. One of the things we came upon was the millions of tonnes of waste materials resulting from palm oil production and that prompted me to consider how they may be used beneficially in resource poor Afghanistan.

My niece first put me to the idea of using a compost in plant propagation and initially I was thinking along these lines and will come back to that as we get more established. What we are looking at initially is to investigate the use of the fibrous material waste material as mulch/weed mats around certain crops, in particular cotton or various vine crops and other arboriculture projects that have a high demand for moisture retention. The idea of a mulch mat around the plants slows down the process of evaporation that 40 degree heat will induce giving the plant a greater chance to survive.

One outcome of poor water supply we found in Afghanistan was that the farmers were prone to plant opium and hashish in lieu as they were more drought tolerant than normal crops.

Successful trials of the material have apparently been conducted in similar climatic conditions in Australia and we want to establish similar trials in Afghanistan. What we are initially pursuing is to:

• produce a mat material that meets with the agricultural demands in Afghanistan.
• design a suitable configuration that can be easily shipped and distributed
• field test in comparative plots the effectiveness of using a mulch/weed mat during the formative growing periods.

In that respect we are seeking to link up with interested parties who may have the programs, resources and the capacity to support the design process and research in Malaysia and to then conduct the field trials in Afghanistan.

If you would like to assist our quest please contact me. We are currently in the process of setting up a legal entity in Malaysia that will enable us solicit funding specifically for this purpose.

Water is going to be one of the world’s major problems of the future. Doing something now will soften the damage it causes.

For a large number of people in the west, there is a rather strange myopic view of the Israeli – Palestinian question and the Gaza issue in particular. One that sees the people of Israel as being those that suffer most in the conflict, that if Hamas (and Hezbollah in Lebanon) were to suddenly cease their armed resistance to its perceived oppression by Israel then peace would automatically prevail in the region.

Peace might prevail under those circumstances but at the same time, if history is to be any judge, the oppression being waged on the Palestinian people wouldn’t.

For the Palestinians, their plight is a situation that has gone on continuously since the ethnic cleansing of the Arab people that occurred in 1948 following the Arab-Israel war, the same sort of ethnic cleansing that occurred with the Kosovo Albanians in 1999. However, in that case the Serbians did not have any influence with the US or British government as does Israel that would fail to arrest it. The refugees in the camps surrounding Israel and the Palestinian territories have become grandparents in the process of waiting for a solution that will be agreed to by the Israelis.

In response to an article I wrote recently that highlighted certain parallels with the present treatment of Palestinians in Gaza with the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto I received a number of emails that all pointed to the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel as being the sole cause of the dislocation of the peace process yet this is so far from the truth that it beggars belief.

Too much emphasis is given to the Israeli situation and far too little is given to the Palestinian arguments; a function of the undue influence Israel has over the major media in the US such that the enemies of Israel are simultaneously the enemies of the US. Ignorance has become a weapon. The rhetoric that surrounds the whole peace process fails to adequately acknowledge the position of the Palestinians. They are perceived as the protagonists. From the Israeli perspective, the rockets are the sole cause of destabilisation of the peace process. The obligations for peace rest fully on the Palestinians as an oppressed people with no agreed rights and largely not on their oppressors whom are simultaneously seen to be fighting for their rights.

Hamas itself formed in 1987 at the beginning of the First Intifada as the Palestinian uprising was known. That itself was a consequence of the stalled peace negotiations the PLO had been engaged in over a 20-year period as well as protest to the brutal treatment then being meted out by the Israelis, treatment that included then and still includes today, mass detentions, extra-judicial killings and the wanton and unjustified destruction of Palestinian property. It is said Mossad supported Hamas in its early days as a means to counterbalance the political strength the PLO had at the time. It was a deliberate interference by Israel to destabilise the domestic politics of the territories. The converse of course is now the case, Israel currently provides support to Fatah to contest Hamas in a continued process of divide and conquer.

But why did Hamas form? What were the core tenets that gave rise to its base? The answer being that diplomatic discussions had failed successively to achieve anything towards settling the myriad issues that came with the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, or the rights of the four million people confined to external refugee settlements. Hamas with the support of the Palestinian people argued that peace was only likely to be achieved with a more militant process since diplomacy had consistently failed them. The Israelis were not being forcefully obligated to comply with successive UN resolutions and statements condemning their actions and the demands by the international community for peaceful solutions. The Hamas platform as did Hezbollah took on an extremist position as more moderate positions had consistently failed to achieve anything of substance.

Even while Hamas took part in the heavily monitored political process of legislative elections in January 2006, it was not meant to win nor was it meant to win as decisively as it did. The Israelis had miscalculated the feelings of the Palestinians of Gaza. Since then Israel has persistently attempted to derail the Hamas parliament, by targeting its leaders for assassination and by arresting the elected parliamentarians en masse, in favour of negotiations with a more conciliatory representative in the West Bank based President Mahmoud Abbas.

The indiscriminate guerrilla tactics currently employed by Hamas are a definite sticking point in the negotiations but they are not the cause of the conflict. The intransigence by Israel to reach a clear conclusion, the twists and turns that they employ to set any peace negotiation back for another year or decade are legendary. It is when the only major power to whom they will contend with, from whom that they receive the most lucrative financial and military support, decide that enough is enough and that an equitable peace must prevail and apply to all the pressure within their capability to both side with equality, that peace will prevail and not a moment before.

The Israeli occupiers and their US supporters have labelled Hamas a terrorist organisation even though Hamas would call themselves a resistance movement; there is a parallel in the Warsaw Ghetto that the occupying Germans would have called the ZZW and the ZOB that resisted them terrorists by the same broad but fuzzy definition, opposition to occupation.

I am not necessarily in favour of Hamas or Hezbollah or the methods they employ yet I see them as a consequence of a failed peace process and international ambivalence towards the humanitarian and political needs of the Palestinian people. Their strength will only continue to garner support while the world stands by and allows the people it represent to be constantly downtrodden in pursuit of a neighbouring populations unrealistic desires to dominate them.

The way to counter Hamas is not through suppression of the Palestinian people but by the world pressing forward the agreements that have been set aside in doing so. The two sides after sixty hears of discussion have not shown the capacity to reach a mutual consensus and it is in the interest of the world to arbitrate conclusively and fairly on their behalf.

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.

Ideally, Afghanistan was presented with a new beginning on the routing of the Taliban and the backing by the US of a new western style democratic government. The reality however has been less dramatic. Afghanistan in 2007 is as lawless and disrupted as it was during the civil wars with more than 40,000 international troops in the country, more than 5000 people being killed in violent attacks since it was liberated, 100,000 people have been displaced due to the fighting in the southern provinces, development is stagnating, the promised democracy floundering under the weight of corruption and flailing institutional capacity along with an opium trade that now provides 92 percent of the world’s supply and constitutes 50 percent of the national GDP.
Where did it all go so wrong?

At the onset of 2001 and the initial promise of some billions of dollars in international assistance, the people of Afghanistan had reason to believe that their lives would change. Even though the country remains steadfastly Islamic, the severity of the Taliban rule had faded giving prospect for schools to be recovered and the expectation that the girls of the towns and the villages would be able to attend them and the people could live their lives with more liberty although greater change will take years. Village people as they do in most of Asia see that the means to climb out of their poverty is through the advent of education of their children.
The difficulty has been that the west, and in particular the US has largely been diverted with the invasion of Iraq shortly after and the initial thrust by the US forces of routing out the terrorists as opposed to providing any semblance of nation building although this has now become an unfortunately belated priority.
The government was resurrected on the basis of past allegiances and not on the basis of capacity rendering managerial skill and facility within the government vacant. The influx of international organizations were vying for the local expertise and paying up to five times that of the government services consumed all of the talent leaving those warlords appointed to the Ministry positions to in turn appoint family and tribal members to all the positions within the ministry. This not only afforded them protection from below, it facilitated the corrupt practices that has blemished and held back the progress of the country ever since.
Much of the existing problems today arrive through the corruption at the top of the administration. Regional Governors have a large hand in the production of opium clearing out fields of opposition growers as a sign of doing something positive while allowing production in their own fields to continue unimpeded. It is even reported that the brother of the President is a major figure in the opium production and international distribution in the south of the country where the majority of the present fighting is taking place.
With the invasion by the US, they facilitated the existing warlords whom they had allied with during the war against the Russians to assume command of strategic Governorships and ministerial positions, many still retaining these posts now even though a much-touted democratic electoral process has taken place. As time passes however they are cementing their position with even greater firmness that it will prove almost impossible without a major recovery at the top to eliminate them.
The opium trade has also usurped the economy to the point that more than 3.3 million people are reportedly involved in it out of 22 million and more than 3 billion dollars a year being invested into the national budget through its international trade. The task of removing it is being rendered almost impossible with a dramatic change in the way the country approaches the issues.
To recover, Afghanistan is going to require a complete change of conditions by the west. No longer can they rely upon the weak structures of government that President Kazai is able to offer but they need to insist that real power and corresponding real accountability is afforded to the people. The centrist government and the pre-drafted constitution have proven to be an abysmal failure and have no significant effect other than within Kabul itself and even that is suspect. The up-scaled drug trade in the major markets of Europe and the US has a cost estimated to be 20 times that derived in Afghanistan, some 60 billion dollars worldwide. Can the world afford to allow it to continue?
Prior to the war Afghanistan was at the lowest point in its economic and social history with all the development indicators pointing it out to be one of the poorest countries in the world. The approach by the US was inadequate and cavalier paying no serious attention to the economic recovery required. If democratization and development is a real concern as was the promise of 2001, the international cost to bring the country back into a path away from the criminal activity that now consumes it will be massive and at least be equal to that which is being derived illegally and take a generation at least. That cost in many ways will have to be born by the west.