Afghanistan, Foreign Aid and U.S. National Interests

John Stuart Blackton

It has been almost a year since American forces and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan defeated the Taliban regime and liberated Kabul. With a growing sense of confidence about America’s military strategy in Afghanistan, attention has turned to the post-conflict situation and the role of foreign assistance, whether described as "securing our military gains", "nation-building", "economic and humanitarian assistance" or simply "development".

Not all that attention has been laudatory. Afghanistan’s foreign minister asked in a recent Washington Post op-ed: "Are we on the right course toward recovery and reconstruction? Above all, what do we—donors as well as Afghans—need to do now to ensure success?"

The Afghan Foreign Minister worries that Western financial commitment to Afghanistan is faltering. He noted that in four recent post-conflict cases—Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor—donors spent an average of $250 per capita per year in aid. In Afghanistan, only $75 per capita has been pledged for this year, sliding down to $42 per capita for the next five years. And he went on to ask: "Why such a discrepancy?"

The issue is a complex one, and it is useful to recall how foreign assistance became a part of American foreign policy and what roles it has played in the past. Although force and diplomacy capture the headlines, foreign assistance remains an important, if not always well-understood, instrument of U.S. economic and security policy.

Foreign assistance is a relatively recent tool of American foreign policy, with a history largely defined since the end of World War II. In this relatively brief period, foreign assistance has taken various forms and directions reflecting changing global needs and a changing series of short- and long-term interests of the U.S. government.

The aims and content of foreign assistance programs have also reflected the rise and decline of different – often competing – economic, political and security ideas.

Foreign assistance has typically involved transfers of capital, technology, equipment, food and advisors who provide technical assistance. It has sometimes focused on broad programs (the reconstruction of Western Europe in the late 1940s) and country strategies (assisting Russia to move towards a market economy in the 1990s). At other times, the focus has been on specific projects such as the Friendship Highway in Thailand (1960s) or American financing to build agricultural and technical universities in India (1960s).

Progress in meeting the American policy objectives in individual countries continues to hinge, in part, on the adequacy and appropriateness of this external assistance. But foreign assistance also is limited by the absorptive capacity of the recipient country –limits shaped by each country’s unique stock of human resources and physical resources, and, above all, by the depth of its political will as demonstrated by its ability to conceive, promulgate, implement and sustain critical domestic policies.

Fifty years of operational experience has demonstrated conclusively that foreign assistance cannot replace the political will of nations. Aid helps willful nations achieve their goals but does little for nations that lack political vigor.

The largest and most costly development program ever undertaken by the United States has been our quarter century of assistance to Egypt. Massive and sustained foreign assistance, however, has not changed the fact that illiteracy rates in Egypt are amongst the worst in the world, while much more modest investments in the technical universities of India helped to foster the Indian "silicon valley" in Bangalore and the Green Revolution in wheat and rice production in the sub-continent.

And so, what to do in Afghanistan? First, and foremost, we need to be clear about American interests.

America has limited, but very specific, strategic interests in Afghanistan, and we need to define and understand them before leaping to solutions and specific programs – and especially before committing to the idea of comprehensive national transformation.

America needs to be prudent even as we finance the very real, on the ground, needs identified and agreed to by all factions of the Afghan polity (e.g., reconstruction of essential infrastructure, reconstitution of basic government functions like tax collection, de-mining of the countryside, etc.). We should be even more circumspect before we consider making financial and organizational commitments to the no less real but far more problematic needs championed by the international development community (e.g., secular rule of law, gender equality, poverty reduction, poppy eradication, etc.).

While each of these categories is legitimate, and indeed virtuous, on their own terms, they are not necessarily within the scope of American interests or responsibility. What, in fact, is our pre-eminent national interest in Afghanistan? Clearly, it is the elimination of sanctuary for terrorists. This will require a national government in Afghanistan which can effectively carry out the minimum basic functions of a nation-state: providing essential law-and-order functions; assuming responsibility for its borders and for those who transit those borders; and other minimal attributes of governance including the conventional functions of foreign affairs, an interior ministry, ministries of education and health, a national system of justice, courts and police.

The task of defining our foreign assistance objectives in Afghanistan fits within a broader strategic framework. Assistance resources are limited requiring us to set priorities among competing interests, and to accommodate the allocation of resources between multiple objectives. Means and ends must be judiciously matched within strategies designed to accomplish national objectives.

A successful foreign assistance strategy must start by identifying American interests and honestly assessing the challenges to those interests. It must specify the objectives to be met through the use of specific assistance instruments, and it must recognize the limits of these instruments (they do not function effectively in the absence of order, for example).

The instruments of a foreign assistance program must be orchestrated within a cohesive strategy that integrates the selected instruments (projects, programs, commodities, sectoral foci). This integration should achieve objectives that are consistent with our national interests and objectives that will be willingly and actively promoted and sustained by the recipient government and its citizens.

Before we construct a program to support our national interest in the re-emergence of a viable nation-state in Afghanistan, we need to define what it is that defines a state system in the Afghan context. 

Afghanistan is not a tabula rasa. To protect itself from Russian, Persian and English imperial designs, Afghanistan began to take on basic elements of a nation-state in the 19^th century. For most of the 20^th century, Afghanistan was a recognizable nation-state with a government carrying out the essential functions of statehood (i.e., physical security, economic infrastructure, education and other basic social services).  And, in its own context, the Afghan state worked relatively successfully. The Afghan state left many details of governance, law and education to local authorities reflecting the linguistic, religious and ethnic mosaic of Afghan society. The division of power and authority between Kabul and the provinces was not haphazard; rather, it reflected an Afghan-considered and carefully crafted approach to the idea of a state.

 American and UN planners will find it instructive to recall what happened in 1978 when the communist revolutionary government tried to reach out beyond the "center-periphery" premise to assert a stronger central role in national affairs and to use the central government to promote a transforming Western social and political agenda.

Two points are central to an American assistance effort: firstly, the job is to reconstitute, not reinvent, the state in Afghanistan, and secondly, our goal should be to reconstruct the core functions of a central government leaving adequate space at the periphery to accommodate the traditional expectations of moderate regional autonomy in Afghanistan. 

American interests require an Afghan government with moderate legitimacy, some ability to raise resources domestically, a viable political balance between Kabul and local political interests at the nation’s periphery, a preponderance of force resting with the Kabul government within the national borders and an ability to control what and who comes across those borders.

Aggressive foreign efforts to transform Afghan society could well bring the fragile government of Mr. Karzai to an untimely end. Afghanistan’s King Amanullah lost his life for his efforts to promote more western social transformation in the 1920’s than Afghans desired.  The Russians were hated and ultimately expelled less for their godless Communism than for their transforming social agenda in Afghanistan.  It was the Soviet’s "westernizing" agenda that Afghans most despised.

Rhetorical "Marshall Plan" analogies should always be taken with a very large grain of salt; however, one thing about the Marshall Plan worth remembering is that its goals were restorational--not transformational.  America was putting Belgium and France back together again, not changing the fundamentals of Belgian and French politics and society.

In Afghanistan, we have combined the Marshall Plan metaphor with publicly articulated idealistic, transformational goals for Afghanistan.  While neither the United States government nor the other donors have actually yet delivered much reconstruction assistance, our rhetoric frightens much of the leadership in the Karzai government.  

At the last two donor summits in Kabul, President Karzai and his ministers have been very blunt about priorities.  The Afghan government has said plainly that rural health clinics and girls schools are all very well, but that Afghanistan won’t survive if the major roads are not put back in order and the core ministerial/governance functions of his government are not given sufficient wherewithal to earn legitimacy in the eyes of post-war Afghans.

After a year of circumspection the American government should move promptly to provide Karzai’s government with the wherewithal for minimal, but effective, governance and rebuild the core national infrastructure without which an Afghan nation cannot survive.

This is a challenge well within the financial, political and operational capabilities of the United States government, and we should get on with the job.

John Stuart Blackton, a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer, was formerly Director of USAID Afghanistan in the early 90s and served in USAID Kabul in the pre-Russian period in the early-mid 1970's. After retiring, he was on the faculty of the National War College for several years.