Pressing need for civil service reform

Revitalising the country's civil services presents the Afghan interim administration and the international community with a major challenge as they both struggle hard to put in place a working system of governance. "Our primary aim is to bring back and enforce a merit system into the civil services," Gul Rehman Qazi, head of the expert group for the revitalisation of the Afghan civil service, told IRIN in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Thursday. "We also want to put in place a mechanism of recruitment and training for civil servants," he said, adding that the formation of such a commission was necessary under the Bonn agreement. Qazi said many of the 200,000 to 250,000 government employees in Afghanistan had been recruited without being subjected to any procedures. Most of them lack the necessary experience and qualifications. Afghanistan has suffered its worst-ever brain drain as the result of years of fighting and economic stagnation. A senior UN official told IRIN that the expert group had presented its recommendations to the government and the UN on the immediate problem of recruitment and the long-term plan of civil service reform. These recommendations will be important for the interim government's various ministries as they start appointing officials. Qazi said he believed that his country only needed a small bureaucracy. "Our basic aim is to care for the country, not for the individuals," he explained. He went on to say that in the past many of Afghanistan's cabinet posts and ministries had been created to accommodate individuals as opposed to fulfilling the needs of the government. The Afghan civil service commission was originally set up in 1963 to approve all official appointments, particularly in the higher ranks of the civil and military bureaucracy.