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| Meeting with litigants outside an Afghan provincial court to gauge their reactions after a hearing |
An online article on the upcoming turnover of
diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in Foreign
Policy caught my attention this morning.
It talked about the fact that this summer, at a critical juncture in the
U.S. relationship with the Afghan government, almost all of our diplomats with
Afghan experience will be leaving, replaced by Foreign Service Officers who
have little to no experience with the Afghan government. This is a huge problem, and points to issues that I've been seeing in most post conflict environments -- the absence of continuity among development professionals and the inability of U.S.
government officials to actively engage with their host nation counterparts.
Politics
are personal everywhere you go, and especially in governments that are
organized around tribal, familial, ethnic, and religious affiliations. In these places, power sharing arrangements
are negotiated between individuals based on relationships that are nearly impossible
to discern from the outside. There is a
trust (and mistrust) component to every political deal. As a
result, to conduct effective development within the local context, it is
essential that outside interveners get in and engage on an equally personal
level. One’s ability to influence the governance
system is dependent on one’s ability to build a trust relationship with host
nation counterparts. Only then will they
begin to share some of the hidden details of why things work the way they do,
and what risks are involved if reform is to occur. Close collaboration is everything, and if one
is to be an effective adviser and development partner, one has to one must have
the kind of nuanced understanding that can only be achieved through sustained
presence and intelligent empathy.
Unfortunately,
there are several factors that are making this nearly impossible to achieve. Personnel rotation policies favor
quick-in/quick-out in order to mitigate the impact of separation and discomfort
for our personnel abroad.
Within the military, deployment rotation cycles move key individuals in
and out of a theater of operations in a matter of months, not years. Within the civilian community, the problem is
even worse. Labor agreements ensure
maximum consideration for working conditions, with minimal consideration for operational
impact. Furthermore, in the
post-Benghazi environment, our tolerance for security risk is nil. Embassy personnel are rarely allowed to leave
protected compounds or headquarters unless security can be guaranteed. The result is that we now have islands of
diplomatic and development professionals who never see the reality of
governance and rule of law in action in the countries that need effective development
assistance the most.
I saw
this firsthand when I returned to Afghanistan in January to conduct independent
research on the future of the Afghan National Police. I have been working on Afghanistan issues for
five years and never before encountered so many key U.S. and international officials
who were operating in a complete vacuum of personal experience and
observation. None of the individuals
with whom I met had any meaningful contact with Afghan leaders on their “home
turf.” They had never seen an Afghan
governing body in action, never seen a court in session, never observed police
performance outside that of the customs and immigration officers at the
international airport, and never had the opportunity to talk with Afghans who
were trying to access justice or other government services. And yet these were the people who were making
policy recommendations, programming decisions, and evaluating resource
strategies for development. It was
startling, and even a bit shocking. The Afghan officials with whom I also met were aware of the problem, and resentful. After all, they pointed out, they were the
ones who suffer the impact of ill-conceived, ill-informed, and poorly evaluated development.
I understand the security and personnel
concerns. But the bottom line is that that
governance and rule of law development is a participative and collaborative process. If we say this is an important U.S. strategic
objective, then our own bureaucratic decisions must enable relationship
building and allow the necessary trust to be established. Our personnel must accept inconvenience,
separation, and assume a certain degree of intelligent risk, and they have to
be empowered to do so. If we’re
unwilling or unable to build the relationships necessary to effectively engage
in partnered development, then frankly, we might just as well go home.
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