Floods in the Arghandab are reported to occur twice in the year, and result in damage to a greater or less extent to the canal-heads. There is a superintendent of canals, Akram Khan, and after a flood a new head is generally dug in the line which then strikes the eye as most suitable. The labour for this is supplied by the owners of the fields; no rent is charged by the State for the water, and no pay is given to the men for their labour. The canal continues in working order for about six months.
—Augustus Le Messurier, Kandahar in 1879, 1880
Most of all, funnily enough, they want security. Who wouldn’t? It’s a very basic need for us all and is too often lost in an over-focus on governance. Secondly, irrigation, then roads and electricity all of which leads to the most important thing overall after security which is jobs.
—General Sir David Richards, quoted in Sandy Gall, The War against the Taliban, 2013
During our training in Washington DC a favorite question had been, “So what does a field program officer in a district actually do all day?” We received no straight answer. Instead we were told, “Do not promise projects to the Afghans. Do not think you are able to fund projects yourself; there is no money for this. Do write reports. Do coordinate with the military unit that is on the ground with you.”
No one explained why either the Afghans or the military would want to talk to a USAID district officer who had neither money nor any intention of using U.S. government funds. One recently returned USAID veteran had told us in vague terms that he spent his time “putting out fires.”
In fact the district officer spent most of his time mentoring the district government to help it learn to manage projects that were funded by foreigners and would eventually be funded by Afghanistan’s own national government. Unlike district officers in British India a century before who ran the district to which they were assigned with sovereign powers, the priority for a field officer in Kandahar was to engage and empower the local government, while simultaneously making visible changes in the district by managing projects. This simple but effective mandate was not always echoed at the embassy or at KAF, which often valued report writing over mentoring the Afghan staff, as well as rubber-stamping USAID programs over ensuring they actually generated usable and effective projects.
USAID spent millions of dollars every year in districts like Dand. In fact, however, USAID doesn’t directly spend the money. Instead it hires large American companies or nonprofit organizations based in Arlington, Virginia, or Bethesda, Maryland, to run its multimillion-dollar programs. Once these companies receive the contract from USAID, they open in-country offices and hire local people and contracting companies to do the real work on the projects. These Afghan contractors all too often turn around and hire other subcontractors, and this subcontracting process might recur perhaps two or three times on a project before it is begun. The impact of the program dollars is diluted with each layer of the subcontracting cake. All of the nearly $15 billion spent by USAID between 2002 and 2012 passed through this USAID system.1
It is a convoluted and often wasteful process made necessary by the limited number of USAID staff working in the field. According to James Petersen, a former U.S. government inspector for Afghanistan, only about thirty cents of every dollar spent reaches actual projects in Afghanistan. And of that thirty cents, even more is swallowed up. Petersen stated, “Add in the cost of the USAID’s bureaucratic superstructure—including $500,000 annually for each U.S. employee in Kabul, and the supporting staffs in Washington—and sometimes less than 10 cents of every dollar actually goes to aiding Afghans.”2
Since the mid-1980s the number of USAID people posted around the world has steadily shrunk, and staff numbers dropped by half over twenty years.3 In southern Afghanistan only a few dozen staff were in the districts at all. In 2012 there were 130 embassy staff members to cover four southern provinces and 3 million people. By mid-2013 that number had dropped to 40, with none in the districts.4
The USAID system, which is built around the international development companies that manage projects directly, has a historical precedent. Even in its heyday of the 1950s, USAID hired private contractors to build its projects. American engineering giant Morrison-Knudsen built the Kajaki Dam in Helmand Province in the early 1950s, bringing irrigation canals to farmers downstream. Now the USAID field officers spread across the country oversaw what they could of the projects they officially supervised, their access hindered by limitations in security, transportation, time, and the meager inclination of many USAID field officers to get in armored vehicles and visit villages where the projects were actually under way. Many, though not all, officers felt that the risks outweighed the benefits and avoided ever leaving the security of their bases surrounded by high walls and razor wire.
Within the USAID system the USAID field program officer is supposed to make sure the money is spent wisely and the district improves, with better roads, better canals for irrigation water, more wells for drinking water, or other projects that improve people’s lives. When I arrived in Dand, USAID had about eight relevant programs there. Four of them were having a significant effect, one had a positive effect only part of the time, and three were moribund or almost completely ineffective. None of the latter three had been canceled, however.
Two of the best programs involved building fixed infrastructure, such as roads and canals, and training villagers. One program dug wells for drinking water.
Another program, the District Delivery Program, offered extra funding to district staff to compensate them for the harsh conditions they endured, though the money usually arrived late. It also paid for sofas and printers in the offices. Bizarrely it failed to fund the district staff’s requests for fuel so they could visit the villages. This funding was denied by provincial officials, who exercised veto power over the disbursements and didn’t see why the local Afghan staff should visit project sites to ensure the work was on track. In this matter the U.S. staff at KAF agreed with provincial officials, against our objections.
The District Delivery Program also represented a warm-up exercise in handling money—a training tool for the Afghans so they would be prepared when the national government began to release funds to the provinces. The program didn’t go well and was canceled early, after only a fraction of the money allotted had been spent. It was an ominous foreshadowing of later problems we would encounter with the national budget.
USAID managed significant progress in some areas, such as improving access to health care, even as it fell short in a number of others. But it was not the only offender in designing programs that ran into trouble. I spent my first four months in Dand trying to determine what had been done by Americans and Canadians during the preceding two years, a nearly impossible task. Projects would be completed in villages only to wither and fade away. Mohammad Zahir and I tried to track down these projects when we visited villages with U.S. Army patrols. In one example a Canadian agency had sent a dozen hives of bees to Dand, and they all wound up in the backyard of one of the largest landowners in the district.
This diversion was a good thing, one of the elders explained, because ordinary people feared bees. “The local people do not accept them,” he said.
Canadian-funded vocational training had been conducted in several villages, but these projects failed to create any new businesses. When we visited the villages, no one could tell us who had undergone the training or confirm that any training had taken place.
Another Canadian-funded project delivered between six thousand and seven thousand sheep to eleven villages. The animals had been given out in two lots: once to help poor farmers and a second time as compensation for working on communal improvements. The district agriculture director, Abdul Rashid, promised to get information about who received the sheep and what the result had been. That was the last we heard of the sheep.
Abdul Rashid explained apologetically, “The powerful village men try to take the sheep.” Undoubtedly that was what had happened.5
Another time chickens had been distributed, along with a complete set of machinery to grind grain into feed. The machinery, which we never located, was apparently sitting within a mile of the district center gathering dust, and most of the chickens were dead or had been eaten. USAID also paid for 123 farmers to receive new orchards. For that project outlay we could at least get the details of which villages were supposed to benefit, though no one on the ground could ever point to any new orchards. Getting the full picture proved to be impossible.
Lackluster efforts that sank with barely a trace took tens of thousands of dollars with them. This waste drove District Governor Nazak to anger and borderline despair. He counted the waste as the cost of doing business with foreigners. He threatened to quit if the Americans continued to implement the projects they favored without making any of his wishes a priority. He wanted support for his staff, both in outside mentoring on a variety of skills and in money and assistance to help keep the district center running. Nazak lacked funds from his own government to cover the most basic costs of running the district. For instance, the U.S. Army had to pay for the fuel that ran the generator outside the DDC. He also wanted projects that would prompt people to cooperate with his government. Above all he wanted to improve the economy, enrich the people, and dispel any lingering temptation to work with the insurgency.
Nazak’s priorities made sense. What he said was in line with what researchers had found in a survey for the Asia Foundation. When asked what they cared most about, ordinary Afghans said they most wanted security and an improved economy for their local areas (their replies differed for the problems of Afghanistan as whole). Of people surveyed, 32 percent said unemployment was the worst problem, topping even security, which 31 percent identified as the most critical matter.6
Research showed that one of the prime reasons young men decided to join the Taliban was to make money. It made sense that, if we improved the economy, we would remove the incentive for Dand youth to stir up trouble.7
Consequently the first priority was to create an economic plan. When I arrived I found no such workable vision to execute. Keith Pratt’s plan had been smothered after he and the stabilization officials at KAF punted his ideas back and forth for six months without agreement.
Dand is agricultural and arid. Its scattered villages would wither and die without irrigation water, which people pump from canals or wells into the fields. Villages follow the German model, with dense settlement surrounded by green fields, the whole encircled by sandy dirt baked hard by the sun. The southern part of Dand was more arid than the north, in part because the Tarnak River cuts the district in half and prevents irrigation canals from extending from the north into the south. Water from the mountains north of Kandahar City moved along a series of canals in use for several centuries, but it benefited the northern area almost exclusively. Southern Dand remained drier, poorer, and less secure.
Keith developed a plan that proposed spending a million dollars to buy thousands of sheep to pasture in the north and to grow alfalfa in the south that would be irrigated by digging deep new wells. The alfalfa would be sold to the farmers raising the sheep, which would then be sold in Kandahar City. Everyone would make money. In his plan USAID would pay for the wells, the sheep, and new tractors to plow the alfalfa fields.
Keith’s plan made sense only if all the moving parts could come together simultaneously. But I knew nothing about deep-water wells, and no one else I spoke with did either. I also did not know if the farmers in the south would grow enough alfalfa to feed thousands of new sheep in the north. My ambivalence became irrelevant because KAF said no to Keith. Back to square one.
A minority of rich landowners sold cash crops such as pomegranates or grapes in Kandahar City and made good profits. Most farmers worked as subsistence farmers or sharecroppers, renting the land by giving part of their crop to the landowners. Other small farmers tilled tiny allotments of their own. Poor farmers often supplemented their incomes by working as day laborers in the bazaars of Kandahar City or Kabul, or in very bad times they went to labor in the dismal coal mines over the border in Pakistan. Inequality was rife, and the sparse wheatfields of a subsistence farmer might lie next to the vineyards of a rich landowner, the grapes ripening before being exported to Central Asia, Pakistan, or India.
Our problem was how to spread benefits throughout Dand and set up a system so that, when we withdrew, the economy would continue to hum. Keith’s plan had aimed to set up a sheep industry. Nazak had a few ideas, Antoine Huss had others, and the farmers still more. After spending $85.5 billion in Afghanistan for military and civilian assistance (while other countries had added another $29 billion), we still were playing these improvements at the district level by the seat of our pants. (Of course 60 percent of the U.S. money had gone to fund and improve the security forces, but what remained was still huge; USAID alone had spent $15 billion.8) The United States was spending millions of dollars to boost farm incomes with USAID programs such as AVIPA and CHAMP, which trained farmers and distributed subsidized seed. There were plans to bring several agricultural processing factories to Kandahar City, but these efforts were not properly joined up with an economic plan for the district. And many of the grander plans at the higher level ended up being canceled or delayed indefinitely.
Planning by the U.S. team fell short in a number of other areas, not just the attempts at improving the districts. The United States spent more than $11.5 billion to build bases for Afghan security forces, but a SIGAR report noted in 2012 that the United States risked constructing bases that were either inadequate or “do not meet ANSF’s strategic and operational needs.”9 These issues made me question our war effort. I also wondered if the U.S. government could plan and execute a counterinsurgency campaign.
In Kandahar Province some USAID programs arrived in what seemed an almost haphazard fashion. Similar districts received a completely different mix of USAID programs, which was understandable because of the huge war effort and limited resources. District economic planning represented a haphazard effort of U.S. officials, Afghan officials, and individual aid programs that applied to different districts. The Afghan government developed an economic plan for Dand, but it languished, in part because it was mostly a wish list of projects. The overall strategy left much to be desired.
We on the U.S. district team began to look at the available resources and figure out what would work best. Some of our resources were more flexible than others, because some programs, such as one for microcredit for small businesses, could not be altered at all. Consequently they proved almost useless. But other programs, such as a large one to assist farmers, could change the kind of activities supported, and we could get more or less what we wanted from them. The military was exceptionally flexible in pushing money into activities that were Nazak’s highest priority, because the local battalion commander, Brian Payne, could spend military money where he wanted, and he met with us and Nazak at least once or twice a week.
So within a few weeks, after getting input from Keith, Antoine, the district governor, district staff, and people in the villages, we developed a plan. It contained three parts—for short-term, medium-term, and long-term horizons. We hoped each stage would lead logically to the next.
District Governor Nazak said that he eventually wanted factories, electricity from the Kandahar City power grid, and more jobs. The district staff said they wanted to build more roads, refurbish irrigation canals, and give farmers free or subsidized seed and fertilizer. Irrigation canals in the past had been maintained by villagers without government assistance. But since the Soviet war, when many people fled to Pakistan, this practice had dwindled. Now the crops were at risk if the water did not flow. The villagers in northern Dand said they could get to the market fairly easily because ISAF had just built several roads, but they didn’t know how to tap into the Kandahar City market for new types of crops and thus needed help.
We decided in the very short term to continue to expand the road network and try to bring outlying villages in the south into the orbit of the Kandahar City bazaars. By pushing the road south we would reduce the travel time to Kandahar City from four hours each way to about forty minutes. In turn it would help to cement the security situation there.
Our medium-term goal would be to develop villagers’ market crops more intensively and help farmers sell more of their vegetables in Kandahar City. With more than 500,000 residents Kandahar City had a voracious appetite for fresh vegetables, meat from chickens and sheep, and other crops. Even poor farmers could increase production and boost their incomes. We would try to develop new products for sale in the city, such as commercially produced eggs, and also find ways to export the cash crops more efficiently.
In the medium and long term we hoped to develop craft businesses and tie the grapes and pomegranates into the new processing plants being planned at the provincial level. Nazak’s ultimate goal of building new craft factories and selling tomato paste and other processed food would depend on the economy continuing to grow and ultimately on whether the Kandahar City power grid could be extended to Dand, an unlikely prospect in the next few years since the grid was already overstressed and improvements behind schedule.
So three weeks after arriving we had the outline of our first economic plan. The plan built on what Nazak wanted, repackaged his ideas, and added a few new elements, such as improving production and marketing of new crops. It would be cheap and leverage existing USAID programs, which would provide the money and labor. It also had plenty of unknowns, such as whether USAID’s plans to build provincial processing plants would succeed, be delayed, or fail outright. But it seemed to have a good chance of working, as well as of boosting incomes.
We felt a great deal of pressure on us because the clock had already begun to tick. As the U.S. surge wound down and American forces left, U.S. civilian assistance would wind down too. Less money would be available to fund stabilization and development projects, which would benefit the villagers. Those were the projects that brought people onto the government’s side and helped to create security where none existed before. Boosting the economy would, we hoped, allow us to remove the projects without people turning back toward the Taliban when the funding dried up. Getting the economy wrong would jeopardize all of the progress already achieved. We needed to get it right.
But it would depend on us not getting stymied at KAF. If officials at KAF heard we were concentrating some program efforts into activities they thought unproductive, they could easily block us. We worked closely with the international development companies that actually ran the USAID programs, which in turn paid for the projects we wanted. We needed Nazak to make the case to visitors that our plan would work. Antoine and I schooled Governor Nazak on how best to present the plan as a series of linked and progressive ideas. Nazak, a quick study, soon began to brief visiting VIPs on the short-, medium-, and long-term aspects of his plan to transform the economy and make Dand self-sufficient as outside aid steadily dropped over the next year. He assured his guests of his confidence that the district staff could manage the job of managing the new ideas, too.
Nazak told visitors the economic plan would enable the district to use less NATO money because farmers would be richer and would demand less from the government. Nazak, a clever and articulate advocate, soaked up ideas like a sponge. The visitors were typically delighted with this kind of talk. An Afghan with a multistage plan! At the district level this was as rare as a dodo bird. The Afghan district staff members were enthusiastic as well. They followed the governor’s lead, ensuring that the farmers would continue to throw their lot in with the government.
Obstacles would soon emerge. In coming months we would face constant pressure to reduce resources in Dand. We would need to constantly refine our ideas for new business development. Improving the district staff’s ability to manage and oversee projects would require months of concentrated effort.
But all that was blissfully in the future as we began to rapidly make changes that would prevent Dand from backsliding. We had less than a year to improve lives in the villages in order to solidify Nazak’s system of political control. If the aid ran out before we finished, the entire district could be ripe for a Taliban takeover.