File Photo: Village elders listen to U.S. soldiers of the 82nd Airborne during a meeting in Chinar Village in Ghorak district of Kandahar province Southern Afghanistan, Tuesday, March 13, 2007. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

"When a country is being subverted, it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered." - Bernard B. Fall, 1965

By now it is well understood that "good governance" is the key to an effective counter-insurgency and stabilization strategy in Afghanistan. In fact, one of the few differences between the Obama and Bush administrations is the relative weight attached to non-military methods vs. military methods in the occupation of Afghanistan. Even though the Obama administration has continued the policy of a troop surge planned by the preceding administration, its goal is to place greater emphasis on improving local governance. Ambassador Eikenberry has requested $6.6 billion in nonmilitary spending. Eikenberry has explained that this amount is necessary to show the "results" demanded by Congress in 14 months (Washington Post, 12 August 2009).

It should be noted that the US has already spent $38 billion on reconstruction since 2001, although half of that money was actually spent on training the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. Moreover, annual nonmilitary spending has been about a tenth of military spending in Afghanistan. International donors have funded governance projects for the last three years, however the emphasis on improving the capacity of governors, police chiefs, district chiefs failed to improve governance (Vanda Felbab-Brown, "2009 Afghan Elections and the Future of Governance," Brookings, 13 August 2009).

Nevertheless, since there is now more than adequate funding in the pipeline and a commitment to prioritize nonmilitary methods of counterinsurgency, the real question is what is "good governance" at the local level and how can it be set up?

We as Americans tend to equate good governance with an idealized image of our own political system, i.e. a liberal constitutional democracy with a high level of transparency and accountability in policy making and implementation processes. It is believed that democracy and legality foster more durable bonds of loyalty and hence "legitimacy." Of course, in reality, a system of governance need not be democratic or even benevolent to be effective in fostering obedience and development... this is amply evident to any serious student of comparative politics. Nevertheless, it is difficult for most Americans to be critical of the noble lies on which the republic was founded.

In general the most cost effective mode of imperial governance is to formalize and reinforce existing systems of government (particularly for the purpose of revenue extraction). This was the classic approach developed by the East India Company toward its conquered territories in South Asia.

US administrators have generally rejected the "East India" approach. They argue that decades of war in Afghanistan have almost completely destroyed prior systems of administration even at the local level. Moreover, the residual system of governance from the Taliban era was viewed as wholly inadequate and highly regressive, particularly in relation to the rights of women -- which was a major post hoc rationalization for the war. So the US and its allies have chosen to rebuild the framework of governance at the national and sub-national levels. (There are some inconvenient parallels here with the PDPA and Soviet approaches to building a "modern" socialist state in Afghanistan after the Saur Revolution in 1978, especially in regard to the mandate for including women in government). Much of first seven years of occupation were devoted to rebuilding a national and provincial government. Village level governance was not prioritized by the US but other donors did make attempts to improve local governance. The result of this neglect is that a series of contradictory bodies were established with access to donor funding at the provincial, district, and village levels (Sarah Lister, "AREU Briefing Paper, April 2005, p. 1).

The objective of the Obama administration is to rebuild local shura councils for day to day administration at the local level and create "development councils" to help decide which development projects a locality would prefer in their area. The administration has also decided to continue a policy begun under the Bush administration to economically co-opt local leaders. The leaders of the local councils and tribal leaders are provided a stipend (reportedly $200 per month) to encourage them to act as informants on the activities of local Taliban militias.

The difficulty with creating a system of local governance from the ground up is that there are varied traditions of local governance throughout Afghanistan. There is also a complex relationship between the central government, the provinces, and local leaders. Decision making within the state apparatus is (at least on paper) highly centralized, but relatively decentralized in practice. Provincial governors have very little budgetary discretion (Sarah Lister, "AREU Briefing Paper," April 2005, p. 3), but may wield great power, particularly if they earn revenue from the drug trade.

Thus one key issue is calibrating local governance structures to existing traditions of governance. The other issue is discovering the proper level of centralization or decentralization to promote efficient solutions to solve coordinations problems (i.e. economic development) and create security. The challenge as laid out by the US is creating a state which has sufficient capacity to encourage development and security; while also being sufficiently decentralized to promote meaningful participation and accountability.

Unfortunately, most Americans have little understanding of how our federal republic became a great industrial and military power. Even fewer Americans have studied the developmental states of East Asia in any detail. This is not to imply that either the US or the East Asian Tigers are remotely appropriate "models" for the current regime in Afghanistan. However, it does indicate that the contemporary American impulse for decentralization, liberalization of markets, and participatory politics may be counter-productive to the objective of state building and development at this time. Good governance is essential to defeat the insurgency, but a serious debate needs to be undertaken on how to achieve improved governance in the context of a systemically corrupt government with weak state capacity at all levels. Holding elections and soliciting local participation in an ethnocracy will not create accountability or reduce corruption. More likely, elections will increase corruption as power brokers who are able to deliver ethnic or tribal "vote banks" gain greater control of the reigns of government. Soliciting local participation on selecting foreign funded development projects will not institutionalize a sustainable mechanism for resolving coordination problems. Given time constraints imposed by Congress on the current occupation, the US may need to choose between creating a state which has sufficient capacity to encourage development and security or promoting citizen participation and the appearance of democratic accountability.

Labels: afghanistan, counterinsurgency, south asia, us