Interview with UNDP Administrator, Mark Malloch-Brown

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator, Mark Malloch-Brown visited the Afghan capital Kabul on Friday, to see at first hand the enormity of the challenge facing UNDP and partner agencies assisting the rehabilitation of Afghanistan. With development dependent on political stability, the UNDP head said there was an urgent need to demonstrate a peace dividend to Afghans, starting with immediate public works projects and revitalising education for children. While remaining cautious about Afghanistan's future, Malloch-Brown said that Afghans now had "a once in a lifetime chance". QUESTION: Is there a clear strategy for ensuring that Afghans will be able to set the pace and direction of reconstruction in their own country? ANSWER: In a sense there’s a flaw in the question, because it’s going to take Afghans themselves to be organised, to insist on setting the priorities and setting the strategies. And if it takes the UN to organise Afghans then there’s already something wrong - we’ve got a problem. But I think we are caught in this time-bind between now and the end of January and the donor’s meeting. There is going to be much too little time for Afghan consultation. What we therefore have to do is come up with a programme at the end of January, in which the broad outlines are sustained, but where there will be plenty of space and time to draw Afghans in, for consultation, assessment and design in each sector. And I think that can be done. Obviously, one’s talking of three levels of Afghan involvement. One is this issue of the UN itself being much more Afghan than in other big operations of this kind. I really do believe that our national staff can play a much, much, bigger role than what was the case in Cambodia or East Timor. When I went there six months or so after we began our operations, East Timor was a country with only a handful of people with university degrees. None of us had staff there before. There was just none of this human capacity that is available to us here in Afghanistan. So the relationship between the national staff in Cambodia and East Timor and the international staff was very different compared to here. So that's one level. The second is the community development level of civil society, which presumably will now flourish. It was nurtured in the soil of the Taliban leaving so much space, because they did so little in terms of government functions, yet made it very hard for civil society to fill that space because of their brutal opposition to people organising themselves around social issues. So now, I would not at all be surprised to see a very fast spurt in the growth of Afghan civil society.

UNDP head visiting the devastated south of Kabul

The third element is what happens on the government side. We say that there ought to be this representative government and that this is critical and indispensable, and I think it is. But people in Afghanistan are also telling me that the political class in this country is so despised by ordinary Afghans because it’s a class which has held power through the barrel of the gun. These are warlords with legitimacy through guns. I suppose it is possible that in a flourishing civil society-organised Afghanistan, that a lot more real political energy may eventually come from civil society rather than these warlord-cum-politicians. Q: Does that mean that the best thing that can result from the UN talks in Bonn is that they create a framework so that others can come in? A: I think that's right. If it’s an open framework presumably after a Loya Jirga [Grand National Assembly] and you move to competitive elections, a new generation of politicians could arguably emerge. Q: Do you think that once security and political stability is ensured, is it just a matter of time before Afghanistan can reach a more developed state? A: Well, I think peace is the most crucial element. If the UN learnt anything over recent years, it is the completely incestuous relationship between peace and development. You can’t have one without the other. Q: With international attention currently on Afghanistan, there is a danger that there will be a huge amount of money allocated and then pressure to be seen to be doing things. Will this not lead to a situation where the tail is wagging the dog, in the sense that we haven’t found what Afghans really want, but are forced to start rebuilding regardless? A: One of the reasons that I want to go for a five-year donor commitment is to prevent that, by saying, look, a lot of the money may be spent in years three through five, but there are some immediate priorities that are of a recover rather than reconstruction character, and therefore are easier to agree on, but not particularly capital-intensive. But in the next couple of years you will have this mix of relief and recovery activities, with relief slowly going down and recovery coming up. Then as recovery reaches a peak, reconstruction will be building up. I recognise that it is really twenty years of funding that is needed, but we are not going to have twenty-year commitments from donors. But if the first five years go well, then, as [the recovery of] Mozambique has demonstrated, you can sustain very high levels of resources. Mozambique received US $6.5 billion in the first five years, and now still receives about US $900 million a year. So success breeds success. I think there has to be this sense that the process goes in waves. There’s a need for Afghans to have time to allow civil society to flourish a bit and be involved in the selection of priorities. The national level of government also has to have time. In Kosovo and East Timor, there was this terrible [assistance] gap. The peace came, the humanitarians promptly left. OCHA [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] packed its bags and went. Although there was a World Bank reconstruction trust fund, within months we almost had riots in [the East Timor capital] Dili because there was nothing happening. This was because the World Bank’s money was all tied to reconstruction issues and to its own operating procedures that assumed a certain stability. So we are trying to learn from that, to deal with this gap in the middle - the recovery phase. Q: Can you give us a sense of what your thinking is on that middle recovery phase. You alluded to supporting civil society during the day, and also visited a community shura [forum] in Kabul. Is that the direction that early reconstruction efforts will take, or can we expect to see big infrastructure projects as well? A: I think that recovery can be pretty extensive as it can range from community development to the repair, but not reconstruction, of municipal infrastructure. It can include the extensive repair of the agricultural sector and irrigation schemes. Through extensive food-for-work schemes, you can deal with de-mining, demobilisation and reintegration issues. Not that one would want to hold back reconstruction, but it’s my instinct that these activities will fill the space and hold centre stage for the first phase, as people sort out longer term planning and priorities. Q: What quick impact projects would you envisage in the early days? A: I think for me it would be what we can do to ratchet up the PEACE [Poverty Eradication and Community Empowerment] programme as quickly as possible, in terms of community level development activities through participatory structures. Second, I would be very open, if my colleagues propose it, to a fairly major immediate public works programme in some of the key cities, to basically clean up and do some early rehabilitation. There is already a need now to start demonstrating a peace dividend. That would be very important. Getting the schools going again would have a huge impact on people’s attitudes. The idea that their kids and girls would be back in class, I think that would make a big difference. Q: With respect to the post-rehabilitation phase, what are your views on whether the international community should favour grants or loans to Afghanistan? A: The first loans that Afghanistan will qualify for, some years away, are IDA [International Development Association] loans, which are very soft. They are so concessional, that it is almost like a grant, although not quite, as IDA repayers are quick to say. You do have to repay it with very modest interest. But I think over time Afghanistan will definitely become an IDA borrower, once it has dealt with its other financial arrears. I think it will have to, because it’s going to be hard to get to the numbers that we want in terms of total assistance without IDA being part of it. Q: But given the international community's collective responsibility for what has happened in Afghanistan, would it not be morally right to offer grants rather than loans to rebuild the country? A: About 80 percent of what Afghanistan will receive will be grants. All of the bi-lateral and European Commission (EC) money are in the form of grants. The only loans nowadays are from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. Together they would add up to 20 percent of resources or maybe slightly more. While they are loans, they will be on very soft terms. So essentially the whole package will be mainly grants. Q: Finally, how optimistic are you about the whole reconstruction process? A: Having been here in 1988, when we thought we were going to make things happen then, I think we have to keep our wits and not be too optimistic. But I equally think that it’s a once in a lifetime chance for Afghanistan now. I hope that Afghans understand that.