Under the old regime the city revenue amounted to about 6 ½ lacs of rupees, and this was sent direct to Cabul, not a pice of it being spent in municipal improvements or otherwise at Kandahar.
—Augustus Le Messurier, Kandahar in 1879, 1880
Every Friday several four-wheel-drive armored trucks called MATVs left our gate at COP Edgerton and drove ten kilometers south to the main battalion base near the Tarnak River in the center of the district. At the base the few of us who worked every day with the district government climbed out of the vehicles with their reinforced doors and went inside for the weekly staff meeting.
The battalion base was a maze of tents and workshops, with razor wire and mud walls surrounding the camp. Three large wooden buildings with sloped roofs held the offices of the battalion staff, including the operations room, where soldiers kept tabs on every military patrol out in the area. Made of prefabricated sections standing fifteen feet high and forty feet across, the sun-bleached pine of the buildings reflected bright amber light from the late afternoon sunsets, like three Swiss chalets that some madman had planted in the middle of the desert.
It represented the nerve center of the 850 troops of the battalion, which had companies spread across the district. Every Friday the staff officers and company commanders assembled in the conference room, with a long table facing two screens and wooden benches arranged in stadium-style seating against walls. The company commanders, all captains in their late twenties, sat at the foot of the table while the senior battalion officers sat at the head. Straphangers from units attached to the battalion sat on the benches. Everyone faced the two video screens. The meetings could take hours as up to forty PowerPoint slides flashed on the screen, one after another, each slide filled with words, arrows, and staccato phrases hard to understand without further explanations.
Lt. Colonel Payne would inspect the list of activities he expected the companies to do, read the PowerPoint descriptions of their activities, and listen to the explanations. Sometimes company commanders explained their slides. Other slides came from Captain Matt Kotlarski, who explained how the battalion was helping DG Nazak. Other slides from supply people, the intelligence officer, and other staff officers flashed on the screen. Everyone presented in turn.
Each meeting began with Payne explaining the grand scheme, which often involved the need to help the Afghans take over from the United States. Antoine Huss, and later Cip Jungberg and I, commented on how we could improve operations or added cautionary notes. Meetings were long and tedious but also useful and necessary. This weekly gathering was where the nuts and bolts of our help for the Afghans could succeed or fail. The weekly pilgrimage to Tarnak was also a chance to get away from the district center for a day, so we made the trip every week in reasonably good humor.
The meetings were a mix of plans to kill Taliban who continued to pass through the outskirts of the district, to shift the battalion from Dand and into Panjwai, and to support the government. As weeks turned into months and the line companies began to leave Dand for Panjwai, the emphasis turned more and more to the security problems in Panjwai. The meetings proved important, because we could explain in detail to Payne why he needed to spend money on ideas that would help the district government.
Payne, a blustery and aggressive man, responded well to ideas that promised results. Unfortunately the results we promised would be hard to measure, which could potentially cause serious problems because the military and their civilian counterparts in Afghanistan were obsessed with metrics. How well are we doing? Are we winning the war? Is the situation better this week than last week, last month, or last year? How to measure progress has never been satisfactorily answered. In counterinsurgency almost no simple metrics used in a vacuum, such as the number of attacks, are suitable.
Payne had to report progress to his higher headquarters, and the only real progress on the civil side we would show would take months to appear. If events went awry and the Taliban seeped in and undermined the government, it would happen after Payne’s companies had already left, and thus it would be too late to remedy the situation. In supporting USAID and the battalion’s governance people, such as Matt Kotlarski at the district center, Payne took a leap of faith in a result he could not hope to measure beforehand. He had no real choice in the matter, because our ideas were the only game in town.
In the meantime we measured how well our civil initiatives moved forward as best we could. There was no alternative, because how else could we evaluate progress? The number of bombs and attacks? That worked poorly. If there were no attacks, that might mean the insurgents controlled an area but that the security forces were not strong enough to fight them, and so paradoxically a lack of attacks could be a bad sign. The amount of money spent on projects? Possibly. But money did not always bring results. In many districts the U.S. government spent millions of dollars and achieved little in improved security or in attracting more residents firmly to the government’s side. Complicating matters was that the U.S. strategy called for the most money to go to the least secure areas; 80 percent of the aid flowed to the restive east and south. The amount of money spent could misleadingly suggest that more aid led to more violence.
One true measure of progress in Afghanistan is the relationship between the government and the people. The more the villagers support the government, the better the war is going. And this is relatively simple to measure. The best metric is how many people visit the district center every week. The presence of many elders indicated the government was doing well, because the people weren’t afraid to work with government staff.
It was significant that the hallways of the Dand District Center were busy almost every day. Some elders sought identity cards. Others talked to the agriculture director about USAID programs, while others met with the rural reconstruction officer. A small crowd always wanted to talk to DG Nazak, and they lounged on plush couches next to the peeling paint in the hallway outside his office as they waited to see him.
Our challenge was to keep them coming and to figure out ways to keep them coming even as the aid dollars dwindled in number. At the same time, we needed to get the line directors back into the game and make sure they were able to help people, not just channel USAID programs, which often did not address what the people most wanted.
The district’s Afghan line directors saw many people, but when I arrived their work mostly involved handling paperwork that turned ISAF money from USAID and Canadian Army civil affairs soldiers into projects in the villages. Pushing paper often left the staff overworked but underfulfilled. It drove the heavy traffic of elders into the district center. The staff were reduced to observing more than managing, but they believed they could do better. More than shuffle paper, they wanted to act on their own ideas.
The problem stemmed from the way projects were run. The Afghan staff had limited input on the course of USAID programs. And they oversaw projects that the Canadians and the villagers had worked out. But they had their own ideas to contribute. Sometimes the flow of projects completely bypassed the district staff, with the villagers talking directly with Canadian soldiers. Improvements to schools and clinics were seldom high on the agenda for village elders in search of a new well. This problem needed to be solved quickly, because when the Canadians left in midsummer of 2011, they would take their pot of village assistance money with them.
This problem was brought home sharply one day when the district health officer, Dr. Mousa, became unhappy and loudly expressed his feelings. He spoke with me and Captain Kotlarski, who had recently moved to the district center to fill the gap left by the departing Canadians.
Dr. Mousa, a thin, intense man of about forty-five, spoke in a fluid wave of Pashtu. He began with a frustrated wave of the hand. “I cannot get the projects I need to improve the clinics approved,” he complained. “They are never done!”
For five minutes he described how his five clinics needed more storage space, more electricity, and a coat of paint. Because he received no funds from the provincial health department, he could not make the most rudimentary repairs. Neither the Americans nor the Canadians appeared willing to fix the problems.
Dr. Mousa was passionate and committed. After all, he worked for no pay. He just wanted something done. Eventually I broke in. Already familiar with Dr. Mousa’s issues, Matt Kotlarski and I had prearranged a solution.
“Dr. Mousa,” I said when he paused. “We have discussed this, and we insist that you spend $10,000 in the next two weeks. We will not take no for an answer.”
He barely listened, instead resuming his complaints. It took him about fifteen seconds before he stopped. I repeated our offer. I explained that we all wanted improvements. He would need to prioritize, provide us with a list, and we would get started immediately using military funds.
Understanding and shock filled his face. Did we mean it? Yes, we did. We would spend U.S. and Canadian military money to help him. And with that we took our first step to get the district staff to begin addressing their own priorities.
Dr. Mousa would need to take his list to the ministry and have his proposals approved. He would need to check on the projects as they were built. He would coordinate the work with the clinic directors. Dr. Mousa, in short, would need to start doing his job of managing the district’s health-care system. For good measure we suggested ways he could improve his reporting to the province. In time he would be able to secure official Afghan government money to pay for needed projects, even if there was not yet any money available from the province. By the time we explained all the things we wanted him to do, he was beaming.
Dr. Mousa was not alone. Every line director faced the problem of receiving no money from the Afghan government to do anything—none to visit the clinics and none for making repairs. This lack of money had several effects, all of them bad. Some district line directors stopped working and simply waited for ISAF to hand out projects. The agriculture department in Dand simply handled requests from farmers, hoping to tap into USAID programs. Just as bad, the normal planning and coordination that should exist between the district and provincial staffs atrophied from the lack of anything substantial to discuss. The district staff informed provincial officials what was going on but rarely consulted the province about anything because no one had insisted they do so before.
Worst of all, the lack of money stifled initiative. Line directors had many good ideas about what would help people. Those ideas wouldn’t cost much to implement, but there was no way to do so. Their ideas were routinely ignored by the province. And ISAF usually went to the elders and villagers, while making little use of the district staff.
Unfortunately this practice reduced the staff to managing the run-of-the-mill projects ISAF had been doing for years, such as digging wells, refurbishing mosques, or building walls. While useful, the line directors lacked the power to initiate good ideas. The district lost its finest resource: the expertise of its own staff. While there were weekly meetings between the staff and village elders to work out priorities for projects, these shortchanged any initiative by the staff. They often tried to manage the desires of elders, who pressed to obtain scarce resources for their own villages with little regard for the district as a whole.
We were determined to change this dysfunctional dynamic. Henceforth, if the staff had innovative ideas, we would do our best to find the money to back them.
The easy answer would have been if the Afghans had called up the ministries and asked the Afghan government to pay for whatever the district needed. Not possible. The Afghan government had little money for projects. They rarely spent a fraction of what money they did possess, because top officials performed poorly, the system was flawed, and the financial workings were too complex. The provincial officials resisted help that was offered by their American mentors, who only visited once a week.
The numbers were astounding. Aid in 2010–11 amounted to more than $15 billion, roughly the GDP of the entire Afghan economy.1 The bulk of those funds paid for the Afghan security forces, though considerable sums were also spent on the civilian side. But most of that spending was not handled by the Afghan government. Outside players such as USAID and the U.S. military spent the bulk of the money, and while the Afghan ministries in Kabul were consulted, they often did not actually dispense the money. As the World Bank described it, “In 2010, of the roughly US$16.9 billion in total public spending, only US$3.3 billion were channeled through the ‘core’ budget and was under the control of the government’s PFM [financial] systems.”2 So for every dollar spent by an Afghan ministry, five more were spent by its international partners.
This imbalance was due to be evened out by 2012, when half of the money allotted for development projects would be spent by the ministries. We planned for this to happen. It promised to give district staff some positive answers to their requests. Little did we know the whole idea would prove to be unworkable and the timetable hopelessly optimistic. The extent of the problem was hard to imagine. In the three years leading up to 2011 the Afghan ministries managed to spend 40 percent of the money they were given for development projects: they spent $950 million, leaving more than $1 billion sitting idle in bank accounts.3
The Afghans did manage to spend the operations and maintenance money that the ministries received. The bulk of this money paid the salaries of government workers, such as teachers and the police force.4 This money also paid for the maintenance of schools, clinics, and district centers. But relatively little money was actually devoted to this funding pool—a paltry $335 million in 2011, according to the World Bank.5
The money that was being spent also didn’t flow easily from Kabul to the provinces. The World Bank reported, “There are problems with efficiently allocating funds from the center to provinces/districts.”6 This inefficient disbursement explained why Nazak never had money to pay for the fuel for the generator at the district center and why the staff lacked fuel for their motorcycles. There just wasn’t enough money making it through the system to all who needed it.
This bottleneck in the distribution of funds would not have mattered if the district staff was performing badly, because they would not have needed the money. But for the most part our district staff were raring to go.
We focused our daily mentoring of the line directors for health, education, rural reconstruction, and agriculture on helping them decide what project would most improve the district and then try to fund it. Their lists of previously unfunded projects were long; they wanted to repair roofs, add classrooms to schools, and repaint clinics. In previous months villagers had asked for rugs for mosques because that was what the village could absorb. (For instance, projects funded by the Canadians were required to benefit the entire village, which led to an unusual number of projects installing new solar lights in mosques or building a new village shura room, because that fit the criteria). Now the district staff asked for a new storeroom or solar panels at a clinic.
We slowly shifted from empowering village elders to empowering the district staff, because the number of projects that could be addressed would shrink as the Canadians and their dollars departed. This would be how the system would work in the coming years, as the Afghans used more of their own government money.
Some interesting ideas arose within just a few weeks. The rural reconstruction and development director, Mohammad Naseem, decided that we should repair the wells in the villages. In many villages old drinking water wells stood dusty from disuse. Often a well had one or two minor things wrong with it but otherwise functioned adequately. For want of a metal part or a new join where the plastic pipe had separated, the well was useless. Residents said hundreds of these wells needed to be fixed, and we figured we could do it for about $100 each.
Mohammad Naseem decided to hire a two-man team to go to villages and fix the wells. The team would repair two wells each workday, forty-eight wells per month. This would cost about $6,000 per month. Because several families used each well, the project would help hundreds of families very quickly, which would turn the villagers toward the government and improve security. Lt. Colonel Payne dedicated military funds to cover the costs of the well repairs.
So Mohammad Naseem quickly hired two men, who piled $2,000 worth of spare parts into a beat-up van and started to visit the villages. Naseem took requests from village elders and placed a list of villages on the wall of the district center by the staircase.
Within weeks the well repair project proved to be a howling success. Mohammad Naseem did everything. He planned, prioritized, budgeted, and wrote the monthly reports. Matt Kotlarski read the reports, checked their accuracy, and then paid for the next month’s repairs.
Well repair represented a low-cost service that answered the villagers’ needs. Because it was low cost, Afghanistan could probably benefit from similar homegrown ideas in years to come.
Some U.S. officials at KAF would criticize the program in the months ahead, unsure how it would continue in the future. But DG Nazak and Mohammad Naseem assured us the ministry would be happy to fund the repair team when the official budget money finally came through.
Meanwhile the education director, Abdul Ahad, came to us and complained that little progress was being made on his pet project, a school offering vocational education. With Kandahar City a few short kilometers away, a huge demand existed for skilled workers such as plumbers and mechanics. The U.S. Army had been considering a proposal for a vo-ed school for months, and the budget had ballooned north of $1 million.
After Abdul Ahad complained to Lt. Colonel Payne that the officer in charge of the vo-ed school had made little headway, Matt Kotlarski and I took a look at the plan and trimmed it down by about 95 percent. Assured that the project might work, Payne approved a modest budget of $52,000, which paid for a new teaching shed, some equipment, and tools for the initial enrollment of 120 students.
Abdul Ahad had not been able to get approval for a new school building to be built and equipped. By refurbishing an old madrassa at the edge of a village in southern Dand, we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and got a vo-ed school up and running within four months. Education ministry officials in Kandahar promised Abdul Ahad they would pay for teachers and a nighttime security guard. The U.S. Army paid for the improvements, because what we needed to do could not be fit into any USAID programs, the latter being devoted mainly to aid for agricultural and infrastructure such as roads. The school opened in the fall.
In trying to empower district staff we were not always successful. The agriculture department in Dand had little interest in increasing its workload. The office had five men on staff, but they continued to watch television for much of the workday and wait for ISAF handouts, no matter how much we poked and prodded them.
The agricultural director, Abdul Rashid, had worked in Dand for nine years, but he spent several days a week at his large farm in Helmand, fifty miles to the west. He was also recently married. In the past he had worked in the powerful secret police under the Communist regime, which led to a sense of entitlement on his part. He ruled absolutely. One of his men begged to be given something to do, even raising the problem in front of Nazak. Enraged, Rashid soon eased him out.
We suffered other reverses. The village affairs officer, in charge of keeping a list of elders who ran each village, was a tall and very thin man with a sparse beard. He had a problem showing up for work, missing days at a time. Eventually word filtered through from the maliks that he was soliciting kickbacks on construction projects, which was doubly outrageous because he had nothing to do with managing the projects and was relying on the gullibility of the villagers, who assumed he had influence. Nazak fired him. A month later, he popped up again on the staff in neighboring Panjwai District.
Other staff were found with their hands in the kitty. In July word came that agricultural director, Abdul Rashid, had been beaten up. Two district officials, the executive manager and the administration manager, both young men, had been demanding kickbacks from Abdul Rashid. A USAID contractor company called IRD was distributing subsidized wheat to hundreds of farmers, each of whom received bags of seed wheat and fertilizer. The two officials pressed Abdul Rashid, who oversaw the distribution, to set aside seed wheat and fertilizer for them. A single bag of wheat fetched forty dollars in Kandahar City.
Nazak told us the story the next day in his office. Abdul Rashid had refused to cooperate with the men, even after being beaten and threatened, and he had instead sought help from Nazak. Nazak called in the police and the Afghan intelligence officer for the district.
Confronted by the DG, the two officials made up a story that flipped the blame. “I’ll fire either Abdul Rashid, or the executive manager, or the administration manager,” vowed Nazak. He also ordered security forces to keep a closer eye on the seed distribution.
This was not the first time the executive manager had run afoul of Nazak. Six months earlier Nazak had gone to Dubai and left the executive manager in charge of the district. The executive manager and another official had pressured Abdul Rashid to pay them 100 Afghanis, worth about two dollars, each time he handed out subsidized seed wheat to a farmer. Presumably Abdul Rashid would in turn have dunned two dollars from each farmer so as not to be out of pocket, if he had agreed to the scheme. Eventually Nazak returned from Dubai and Abdul Rashid informed on the officials.
“Abdul Rashid was ready to quit,” Nazak said. “I sent a letter to the prosecutor. They needed to interrogate these guys.”7
As this situation unfolded we received anecdotal reports that seed and fertilizer had been stolen by the chief of police and other district officials. Distributions offered an opportunity for corruption that brought out the worst in people. We took extra precautions, such as guards, razor wire around the piles of wheat and fertilizer, and careful paperwork, but it proved almost impossible to deal with the vultures. Every time a new farm commodity distribution was announced we improved the measures to thwart corruption, but the cycle of attempted thievery and new precautions remained unbroken.
Over time our scorecard with the district staff was pretty good. The line directors planned, prioritized, and managed projects. The requests were countersigned by the provincial directorates, which solidified the relationship between the district staff and their provincial counterparts.
Even as the Canadians left and Dand’s aid budget steadily declined over the summer and fall, villagers saw that the government was working for them. Because the staff developed ideas that cost little to implement, such as well repairs, there was a good chance they would eventually be funded by the Afghan government. Over time our informal motto became, “Spend a small amount of money that gives big results in the village. Always respond to people’s needs.”
The fly in the ointment would be twofold. First, when would the Afghan government have its own money to spend and could they spend it? And second, how much opposition would our ideas run into from KAF?
Soon after July 2011, when our aid budget began to shrink, the number of U.S. soldiers also began to shrink. We had one chance to set up the district for the future. We hoped that when we stepped away, the Afghan government would step up. From the district all the way up to Kabul the system would have to work properly or the peace we had won would be in trouble.