The Unsustainability of Afghanistan

Michael Yon, an independent journalist and author, has written a great article about Afghanistan and the work that one Provincial Reconstruction Team is doing there.

Here is the overall feeling of the article:

On one hand, we have a fraction of the troops we need, but on the other, increasing troop levels increases hostility toward us. Secretary Gates has made it clear to me that his biggest concern is that we will lose the goodwill of the people and they will turn against us. This happens to be my own biggest concern. The agony is in knowing we need more medicine and the medicine can be highly toxic here.

Yon also makes an interesting observation about the “dependency” that foreign aid can induce.  He gives two examples of such instances:

Unfortunately, these kids had already been taught the benefits of begging and this analogy extends directly to their parents. In Afghanistan, like Iraq, when we invest resources into installing a dieselgenerator for a neighborhood, the people will complain that we don’t supply the fuel. When the Indians paid for local broadcasting equipment in Chaghcharan, the station manager complained that the Indians didn’t make a new office, and there is often a tone that we need something or “give us or we will misbehave.”

While I do not have similiar experiences to Yon’s, the international development literature is full of practitioners worrying about just such a situation.  The solution is difficult: on the one hand, not providing the diesel might result in the locals not using the very expensive diesel system.  On the other hand, providing the diesel simply encourages the foreign aid dependence and kills any long term sustainability to the project.  Once international development organizations cease to provide the diesel, who will step in?

The same concern is echoed with regards to the health facilities in Afghanistan.  Yon speaks at length with a doctor in the Ghor Province, who is upset that the national government is mandating “free” health care when the existing system can barely handle those able to pay.  As Yon writes:

Dr. Yaqubi wants to show people that health care is not free, but he says that the parliament in Kabul thinks it should be free to all. The Afghan government can’t even drill a well for this provincial hospital, and all their machines and supplies were probably donated, yet they want “free” health care. The beggars of Kabul who refuse to drill a well for the Ghor Provincial Hospital want free health care for all!

I told Dr. Yaqubi that the same argument is raging in America, and I asked the Lithuanian doctor sitting beside me if this is an issue in Lithuania. She confirmed that it is. Dr. Yaqubi said that if treatment were completely free, the hospital would be overwhelmed. With about 750,000 people in Ghor Province, they’ve got 85 dirty beds here, and two smaller clinics elsewhere. Free health care? How about steady electricity to run the X-ray machine?

The comparison to the U.S. debate is a bit of a stretch, but the story serves as a good example of the sustainability problems international development organizations, and the Afghani government, face.  The national government is unwilling (unable?) to provide for the basic needs of the hospital but wants to mandate “free” health care without a source of funding.  While international development organizations maintain a presence, they can subsidize the bad policy and mute the negative impacts.  Once their term ends, however, what will the Afghani government do when faced with a dilapidated health care system that slowly deteriorates every year due to the inability of the hospitals to either, a) receive electricity, water or medicine and materials or b) cannot afford to stay open due to lack of revenue?

Secretary Clinton on the future of USAID

Clinton made a few revealing remarks on the future of USAID, especially in the Q&A session.

Highlights include an effort to build USAID’s capacity to keep some implementation work in house, a question on the future of AID beyondthe Obama administration and a focus on increasing AID’s technical expertise.

Take a look at the transcript and video here.

Obama on Democracy Promotion

In Strasbourg, France today, President Obama gave a Town Hall style meeting. Among the many interesting questions was one about Obama’s strategy to help people living under autocratic regimes, victims of human rights abuses, and those living in poverty. I couldn’t find a video clip, but here is a section of the transcript:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. I’m a student from Heidelberg, Germany, and — (applause) — my mother tongue is German, but my French is not good enough, so I ask my question in English.

You mentioned in your speech that we are a lucky generation. We live in peace, we live in democracies and free states, and we really — we are very pleased to have this situation in Europe. But this is not the case all over the world, even not in Europe. Look to Belarus, for example; there’s an autocratic regime.

And so my question concerns the many children all over the world that live in poverty, under human rights violation. They have hunger, they have no education, and other problems. So what is your strategy, Mr. President, to solve this problem?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it’s an excellent question, and the — first of all, I think one of the things that we should be very proud of from the G20 summit yesterday was that we made a significant commitment to additional resources through the IMF and other mechanisms to provide assistance to emerging markets and poor countries that, as I said, are bearing the burden of a collapse in the financial system that they had nothing to do with.

The problem is so many of these countries had export-oriented markets, and when the economies contracted in our developing nations, it made them extremely vulnerable. You know, you have a country like Botswana, which is actually a well-managed country that has made enormous progress, but their main revenue generator is diamond sales, and they have literally seen the diamond market collapse — in part because they couldn’t get trade financing, in part because the demand in developed countries has dropped off. So we started to make progress there. Our most important task right now is helping them get through this crisis.

Over the long term, though, we’ve got to have a strategy that recognizes that the interest of the developed world in feeding the hungry, in educating children, that that’s not just charity; it’s in our interest. There’s not a direct correlation between poverty and violence and conflict and terrorism. But I can tell you that if children have no education whatsoever, if young men are standing idle each and every day, and feel completely detached and completely removed from the modern world, they are more likely, they are more susceptible to ideologies that appeal to violence and destruction.

If you have no health facilities whatsoever in countries in Africa, these days a pandemic can get on a plane and be in Strasbourg or New York City or Chicago overnight. So we better think about making sure that there are basic public health facilities and public health infrastructure in those countries, because we can’t shield ourselves from these problems. So that means developed countries have to increase aid, but it also means that the countries who are receiving aid have to use it wisely.

My father was from Kenya. And when I traveled to Kenya — I had just been elected to the United States Senate — everybody was very excited and they greeted me as if I was already a head of state, and there were people waving and lining the streets. I went to speak at a university and I had to be honest, which was, America has an obligation to provide Kenya help on a whole range of issues, but if Kenya doesn’t solve its own corruption problem, then Kenya will never grow. It will never be able to provide for its own.

And so there’s nothing wrong with the developed nations insisting that we will increase our commitments, that we will design our aid programs more effectively, that we will open up our markets to trade from poor countries, but that we will also insist that there is good governance and rule of law, and other critical factors in order to make these countries work.

We spend so much time talking about democracy — and obviously we should be promoting democracy everywhere we can. But democracy, a well-functioning society that promotes liberty and equality and fraternity, a well-functioning society does not just depend on going to the ballot box. It also means that you’re not going to be shaken down by police because the police aren’t getting properly paid. It also means that if you want to start a business, you don’t have to pay a bribe. I mean, there are a whole host of other factors that people need to — need to recognize in building a civil society that allows a country to be successful. And hopefully that will — that approach will be reflected not just in my administration’s policies but in the policies that are pursued by international agencies around the world. Okay, good. (Applause.)

While it took him a few minutes to get to the D-word, President Obama’s response shows his nuanced view of U.S. democracy promotion and the recognition that there is more to democracy than voting. Hopefully President Obama and the future administrator of USAID remain committed to developing accountable democracies in countries that receive foreign aid and making aid programs more effective.

Obama drops democracy. Or does he?

Saturday’s NY Times piece is causing a stir. These snippets capture the essence:

[Obama's] Inaugural Address a few days later was a sharp contrast from Mr. Bush’s four years ago. Where Mr. Bush called the spread of freedom the central goal of American policy, Mr. Obama made just passing reference to those who silence dissent being on “the wrong side of history.” Indeed, his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, outlined a policy of the “Three D’s” — defense, diplomacy and development. The fourth D, democracy, did not make the list.

And:

To many Democrats, [democracy promotion] ought to be lower on the agenda. America should not lecture others, if only because quiet diplomacy may work better, they argue. In this view, the whole focus on elections, particularly, is misplaced when so much of the world is suffering from poverty, hunger and disease. Mr. Obama seems to side with that point.

Going by the quotations, many in the democracy business are concerned that Obama’s foreign aid approach will emphasize AIDS, cholera and mosquito nets in rural Zimbabwe, for instance, over political reform in the capital city Harare. We cannot reject the possibility, however, that this is a recalibration of democracy assistance in light of new challenges.

The Third Wave has crested. As measured by Freedom House, the number of democracies in the world has declined for the third year in a row. Just as Huntington identified reverse waves of dictatorship following each of the first two democratization waves, we appear to be in the midst of a third reverse wave.

At a symposium held jointly by IFES and Georgetown last December, several experts and practitioners discussed the challenge and how to respond.¹ In sum, authoritarian leaders have become more sophisticated in the means by which they maintain power. They back each other in multilateral institutions like the UN, support each other with bilateral aid and share best practices on stymieing opposition without resort to naked repression.²

These manifestations of reversal call conventional democracy assistance methods into question. Conventional democracy assistance refers to the usual programs: political party development, NGO development, election assistance, training journalists, et cetera. It is important to note that, most often, these programs require permission from host governments. Broadly speaking, from the perspective of promoting democracy, there are three kinds of countries:

1) New democracies where underdevelopment poses a latent threat to the legitimacy of democratic institutions. These states represent the Third Wave’s most stable gains. These are the countries with leaders most amenable to democracy assistance. Therefore they can benefit from it most. At the same time, persistent underdevelopment combined with the current financial crisis means these regimes are at risk of losing performance legitimacy. Frustration with democracy’s perceived inability to solve complex social problems can make non-democratic ’solutions’ palatable to populations. So development assistance and governance reform are as important as democracy promotion in these cases.³

2) Weaker democracies whose leaders are ambivalent about democratic institutions. The number of regimes in this category is shrinking, most recently with the exits of Venezuela and many Central Asian states. Now Pakistan and Ukraine are at risk. In these countries, leaders may tolerate democracy assistance programs, but pressure at the top to respect democratic institutions is more likely to produce results. Likewise, development assistance is important for building bottom-up demand for institutions of limited government.

3) Closed regimes. These are countries where leaders do not tolerate democracy assistance at all (North Korea) or only to the point where an opposition might win an election (Egypt, Morocco). There is little sense in running programs to build opposition – that is, conventional democracy assistance – when leaders are unwilling to transfer power after a free and fair election. In these cases, combined pressure at the top and development assistance are jointly more important than conventional democracy assistance.

Gone are the days of smooth transitions. Most of those happened in Eastern Europe. Three factors explain much of their success: post-Soviet window of opportunity, strong incentives for economic and political reform and concerted, high-level pressure to effect it. The last two factors resulted from European Union expansion. The EU unfortunately does not exist in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America or Eurasia. The challenge, then, is to replicate elsewhere the conditions that advance political liberalization, free markets and more equitable distributions of wealth.

If the above is correct, Obama’s recalibration is not based solely on a widely recognized need to tone down democracy rhetoric. It reflects recognition that, in today’s political landscape, conventional democracy assistance is insufficient for consolidating and ineffective at creating democratic gains. Perhaps we are moving toward the unification of democracy and governance assistances with a dose of incentives to liberalize. In light of that possibility, it is worth revisiting a line from the President’s inaugural address:

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

1. The causes of democratic breakdowns are multiple and beyond the scope of this short blog post.
2. Several means have been covered on this blog. See our tag on authoritarian upgrading.
3. Paradoxically, however, these states get the least democracy assistance. States in the other two categories get more.

Britain doubling aid to Pakistan=change?

The BBC has reported that Britain has doubled aid to Pakistan to nearly $1 billion over the next three years. The three main recipient are the areas of education, poverty reduction, health care, including the North West Frontier. 

It remains to be seen whether a new strategy will help build state capacity in a climate of political uncertainty. Pressure continues to mount against President Musharraf but the lack of legitimate political alternatives, the continued struggle with militants in the NWFP, the troubles along the Afghan border and continued nationalist sentiments in areas such as Balochistan leaves the prospects for a strong Pakistani state bleak.

While increased aid is certainly needed, it remains to be seen whether aid initiatives will change the status quo…

One-stop site tracks MDG progress

The United Nations Development Program’s new MDG Monitor lets users track country progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Access data by goal, country or through Google Earth.

Thanks to Dani Rodrik’s weblog for the tip.