Interview with regional analyst Barnet Rubin

Almost five years since the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban regime from Afghanistan, observers say security is at an all-time low outside the capital and confidence in the international effort to rebuild the country is questionable. Despite presidential and parliamentary elections leading to the country’s first democratically elected legislature in more than three decades, economic progress has been painfully slow with opium production remaining widespread. Barnet Rubin is an acknowledged expert on the country and wider region and spoke to IRIN in Ankara about the challenges Afghanistan faces in consolidating reconstruction and extending governance beyond Kabul. QUESTION: What’s gone right and what’s gone wrong in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era? ANSWER: What has gone right is that Afghanistan now has a government. It succeeded in carrying out all the terms of the Bonn agreement [the series of measures drafted in December 2001 designed to create a new Afghanistan]. The government has elaborated an Interim Afghan National Development Strategy, the parliament is meeting and debating and there is also an Afghan national army, which is relatively successful. What has gone badly wrong is that the international actors underinvested in providing security for the Afghan people by not expanding the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF – provides security mainly in the capital] earlier. They didn’t invest adequately in rebuilding the administration and also there were huge delays in starting reconstruction and development programmes – often inadequately funded. And now the Afghan government has very little capacity, it is corrupted. In addition, we really failed to address the complex regional roots of the problem, particularly Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan. Their interaction over the drug economy is really what’s behind the Taliban insurgency. The drug economy was something the military wanted to ignore and the law enforcement people wanted to tackle it in a very dysfunctional way. It is really basically a development problem and it should have been attacked from the beginning. We have lost a tremendous amount of time. Q: Was the Bonn agreement a good start? A: Yes, the Bonn agreement was the best thing, but the problems we have now are due to the way the United States responded to the 11 September attacks. What they decided was to put a primary emphasis on military action and to do that with a small footprint, which meant essentially arming a large number of uncoordinated and, in many cases criminalised, militias in order to take control of the ground that was abandoned by the Taliban in response to the US bombing campaign. So that meant that power was essentially transferred from a very repressive, highly centralised regime to a group of criminalised, armed groups that took control in different parts of the country. And the Bonn agreement, which was designed to give political legitimacy to the whole process and increase that legitimacy, had to contend with huge centres of illegitimate power in these armed groups, whose leaders then funded the revival of the drug economy and other kinds of trafficking. If we had put more emphasis on the political settlement, if we first had formed the government that we had formed in Bonn before starting the military effort, much less of a military effort would have been required because a lot of people who were with the Taliban would have defected. And we might have been able to get support from the regional governments without needing to arm all those militias to replace the Taliban militia. The emphasis on purely military victory without taking in account political dimensions, as in Iraq actually, made the process start out with a kind of birth defect that has still not been overcome. Q: Why is Afghanistan still unstable five years on? A: First, no matter what you did, Afghanistan would always have been unstable after only five years because Afghanistan is one of the five poorest countries in the world. It has the weakest government in the world except for Somalia, which has no government. And I think that the US government and others maybe built expectations very unrealistically or maybe they didn’t understand the situation about what you can actually do in Afghanistan in a short period of time. And maybe now they have too low expectations, because I think it’s still possible to save the situation. About security, what the riots [in Kabul on 29 May, left nine dead] showed is that the international presence is still necessary and most Afghans, I think, still believe that. But now there is a political process, there is an elected president, parliament, developed legal system, so having a foreign army operating under its own rules without any legal or even political accountability in the host country is undermining the sovereignty of that government. So there has to be some sort of status of force agreement that is reached between the two governments and approved by the Afghan parliament. And we need to build up the police much better around the country. The international effort has not been satisfactory and now President [Hamid] Karzai has lost faith in the reform effort and is appointing local commanders and starting new militias in various parts of the country to try to provide security. I am afraid that this is going to re-empower some of the groups that have been demobilised. But I understand his reasons for being impatient; it is because the reform effort has not really borne fruit thus far. Q: Afghanistan remains the world’s leading producer of opium. What impact does this have on security, governance and development? A: First of all, for the farmers who grow opium, for many of them it’s their only source of livelihood. But some have gone into debt and unless there is a solution to the problem of indebtedness they are not able to do anything else. It empowers criminal power holders and the money is used by warlords [and] by the Taliban, so its overall impact on governance is very negative, even though many people depend on it. So the problem is to provide a cushion for these people so that they will be able to support our efforts to build an alternative economy and bring greater security. Unfortunately, if we start our policy with crop eradication we drive these people in the arms of warlords and the Taliban and too many of our efforts with narcotics have been focused on eradication instead of rather helping farmers. Q: Do you think donors are comfortable with investing money into the country bearing in mind the security situation and the drug industry? A: They are not doing it as a favour to Afghanistan. They are doing it because rebuilding Afghanistan is necessary for global security. So there is a common interest for Afghans and the international community. Unfortunately, it creates a kind of blackmail situation where Afghanistan can say: well, if you don’t give us [aid] we won’t cooperate with what you want us to do, but if you don’t give us any aid, the country will go to hell. So, it is very difficult to find the right path. Q: Has the UN managed to make an effective contribution to Afghanistan? A: Well, you have the political part of the UN - the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). It has played an extremely vital role and an essential coordinating role. It is the organisation which really assured the political process in the Bonn agreement was fully implemented. The developmental parts of the UN were much less successful. They are known throughout the world for being very top-heavy in their administration, very slow and [their work in] Afghanistan is no exception. Q: What needs to be done to re-engage the international community in Afghanistan? A: Relatively speaking, the involvement is very broad, that is that there are a very large number of states and organisations involved. And the London conference on Afghanistan at the end of January/beginning of February, there were 60 delegations from governments and international organisations present, committing themselves to a five-year programme of aid to Afghanistan. Of course, in terms of aid money, each country has its own limitations on what it can produce [and] in terms of providing troops, countries have the limitation in terms of what they can provide. The key is, probably, that they are seeing that the aid is effective. The US has a major role to play, because they are the leading donor, they are supplying more than 50 percent as the leading troop contributor. So they have to assure somehow that the whole operation is well run and effective, together with the UN, which has the legitimising role. But at the moment, countries are relatively willing to be involved, I would say it is their effectiveness that needs to be improved at this point. Q: What changes do you see in the coming five years? A: I have no idea. There are too many imponderables. If you had asked five years ago what Afghanistan would be like today, I would have been completely wrong and I don’t expect that I would be right this time.