The Amir once told me, when speaking of the unruly character of the people, and the difficulty of making them, by the example of others who were punished, become peaceful and law-abiding, that he had ordered over a hundred thousand to be executed since the beginning of his reign, and there were still others who thought they could set his laws in defiance.
—Frank A. Martin, Under the Absolute Amir, 1907
When it is not corrupt, the bureaucracy is viewed as useless. People who have significant issues to discuss with the government will often go directly to the house of Ahmed Wali Karzai and wait for hours in hopes of getting attention for their problems. The proudly independent people of southern Afghanistan have traditionally lived without a strong central government, and they see no reason to accept a new regime in Kabul if this is all it has to offer.
—Kandahar Province Handbook, December 2008
As the months passed, Lt. Colonel Payne’s attention was taken up more and more with events in Panjwai as all his infantry companies, bar one, moved there from Dand. In the late fall the battalion headquarters shifted to Panjwai, too. The main base in central Dand closed. The battalion’s three wooden buildings and many outbuildings were handed over to the Afghan National Police.
As the police moved in, they quickly stripped the place, leaving the three wooden buildings standing but taking almost everything that was portable. For several days after the last American pulled out, we watched a line of trucks pass the district center headed for the markets of Kandahar City, loaded with wood left behind by the battalion.
Then in early December Lt. Colonel Payne finalized preparations to close six bases in Panjwai and Dand. The battalion began to prepare for its return to Fort Lewis in Washington State; having arrived in March, its tour was near conclusion, and its final few months would be spent focused entirely on Panjwai. A new battalion would move into Dand at much reduced strength in late December and early January.
At the district center Nazak was heavily engaged with the village elders. He held meeting after meeting, and increasing numbers of elders waited to see him in the hallway outside his office. Presumably he assured them that the departure of most of the Americans would not affect his ability to govern. The village elders still referred disputes to him, which was a good sign. Foot traffic to the staff offices in the district center increased rather than dropping off, also a good sign.
Every day Cip worked with some of the line directors while I tackled others. The agriculture director, Abdul Rashid, still refused to send his men into the villages to train the farmers. He claimed his people were too busy, didn’t have enough skills to teach, and had no money for gas to get there. Meanwhile most of the five men in his office continued to spend hours every day watching Iranian and Pakistani TV. Abdul Rashid kept busy by dealing with dozens of farmers coming in to discuss the next tranche of foreign assistance for farmers, including that from the UN and USAID.
Abdul Rashid and I had a sharp disagreement about all of this one day, and for about a month Cip took over mentoring him. Rashid’s dark eyes and poorly trimmed beard were set in a scowl as we went back and forth over what could be done. Confrontation usually offers one little hope of success when dealing with Afghans, but there were limits to my patience when the other staff displayed a strong work ethic. Nazak chose not to get involved, and there was little else we could do to get Abdul Rashid to do his job. Any farmer training program run by Afghans, with training conducted by the district staff, remained a hope rather than a reality. Rashid let the USAID-funded programs operate using U.S.-hired instructors. He spent his time organizing distributions of seed and plants, paid for by USAID programs. His attitude bode ill for the day soon to come when the distribution programs would cease, and the district staff would have to work with the provincial government to help anyone. Could I truly blame him? Why not take the easy option? By doing the absolute minimum and riding on U.S. coattails, he was just doing what much of the government in other areas did every day. Luckily the agriculture director was an anomaly. The other line directors were as eager as ever to improve the villages.
As 2011 slowly ebbed away we found that we had done quite a lot. The women’s program had trained women how to embroider items and sell them, and the women’s trainer visited other villages to evaluate their needs.
The village well-repair program had chalked up some 350 wells repaired. The two-person repair team visited villages where wells had ceased to function. Usually there was nothing wrong with the water, and often it was just a few pipes that needed to be replaced or repaired with some glue or new mechanical parts. The project, which cost $125 per well, including labor, generated enormous support for the district government. The staff photographed the wells and wrote reports that Captain Kotlarski showed to Lt. Colonel Payne, who in turn extended the project every month. To Mohammad Naseem’s relief, the provincial ministry vowed to continue to fund the program in the future, pending receipt of funds from the national level.
Using U.S. Army money, the health director worked with Matt Kotlarski to make additional modest improvements to clinics. And the district’s vocational school, which taught plumbing and motorcycle repair, was still functioning after a fashion, despite problems in getting the teacher paid by the provincial education ministry, which had promised months before to support the school with salaries for teachers, money for books, and eventually maintenance, just like any other of the schools in Dand. The money to refurbish the vo-ed school had of course come from Matt because the education ministry had no funds.
We were still operating off the original U.S. embassy plan that 50 percent of all development money would go through the national budget by 2012; that is, half of new projects would be handled lock, stock, and barrel by the Afghan government itself, from planning to payment. This would be a sea change, since up until then only a fraction of the development money had been spent by the Afghan ministries. In 2010–11 only $1.9 billion of total public spending ran through the ministries—so-called “on budget” spending—and much of that went to salaries, not development.1
The bulk of development funding was spent by the international donors themselves, as USAID or the Canadians did when they spent millions of dollars on roads. They contracted the work directly. None of that money got near the ministries. This proved to be a problem, because when USAID drew down its spending the Afghan government needed to continue to push projects into the villages to motivate people to stay on board with the government. Without that money going to the ministries they would not be able to spend much money on new projects.
The plan called for the Afghans to quickly and dramatically improve their ability to spend the money they had been given. But the plan to push more money into official Afghan hands hit heavy weather. The Afghan ministries were having a difficult time spending what limited money they already had in their budget. According to an official U.S. Department of Defense progress report, in 2011 the ministries managed to spend only 39 percent of the millions they had received, and in 2012 that figure was still only 52 percent.2 The rest languished in bank accounts, unspent, because the Afghan officials in Kabul could not make the system work. How could USAID hand over responsibility for even more money when the Afghans couldn’t spend what they had already received?
As years passed this problem persisted. As late as 2015 only 25 percent of the Afghan government’s development budget had been spent in the first six months of the year, an annual rate of spending that had changed little since 2012.3 Consequently the government would eventually try to do an end run on its own system and let provinces spend development money directly, without waiting for ministries in Kabul to disburse it.4 But at the end of 2011 we didn’t realize that the problems with the development budget would persist for years to come.
The budget for operations and maintenance (O&M) money had its own issues. While the Afghans were having a tough time spending the development money they had received for new projects, their O&M money was insufficient to cover all their needs. They could spend it, but they had too little of it for everything that needed to be done.
Enter Matt Kotlarski. Using battalion money for maintenance and general improvements, he facilitated the repair of clinic roofs or funded new paint or added an extra classroom to an overcrowded school. The infrastructure in the district was under constant assault by harsh sun and wind in summer and by cold temperatures and damp in winter. Even small items like fixing broken windows was important to the village elders who looked to Nazak for help.
In Dand we received reminders of how bad the overall situation was each day, as line directors tried to respond to the villagers’ requests. Staff at KAF criticized us, insisting we needed to push the district officials harder to ask the provincial officials for money. We had done so. Months earlier we had developed a system in which, before Matt sent a request to Lt. Colonel Payne, the line director would first send the identical request to his ministry, which would stamp that request and refer it back to us in the district, almost always because the province had no maintenance money to help paint a school, build a new classroom, or hand over a new solar panel to a clinic to run a refrigerator to preserve vaccines. The line directors grew accustomed to ferrying the requests up to Kandahar City, getting the stamp of rejection, and bringing them back to us. We had the letters and stamps to prove it.
Just how bad the situation had grown was driven home one day in mid-November. For weeks the Dand education director, Abdul Ahad, had asked Matt for funds to add space to a woefully overcrowded school in the northeast. Matt, Mohammad, and I had gone with a patrol to see the school in Kulchiabad. It was a low-slung, clean building with eight classrooms inside and two volleyball courts outside. The school director reported that his classes were jammed full, and he had four hundred more students than he knew what to do with. This was a high priority for us, because the school was so overcrowded, and for Abdul Ahad, because the school was in a Barakzai area and he was a Barakzai tribal elder.
That day Cip, Mohammad, Matt, and I walked into Nazak’s office and found Abdul Ahad there with Nazak and a well-dressed man in his late thirties. We were introduced, and it turned out the man was the deputy education director for all of Kandahar Province. Perfect! Now was our chance to find out why the ministry could not pay for an extra classroom or for firewood to keep the children warm in the classrooms. This was the meeting at which the deputy director told Nazak he had $35,000 to fix all the schools in the fourteen districts of Kandahar and when he wrote out a chit asking ISAF to help maintain the schools. The chit read, “As you respectfully know, the government cannot reach out to all the problems as we do not have enough in our budget.” The money was being spent only on schools in Kandahar City.
We had also heard unconfirmed reports that during the previous winter Abdul Ahad had sold some firewood that should have gone to heat classrooms, and we wanted to find out whether the persistent supply shortages came from problems within the district or from the more general funding issues at the province level.
As we settled onto Nazak’s comfortable brown sofas, the governor and the two education officials resumed their conversation. They were talking about the winter. So far there was no firewood in the classrooms, and parents were threatening not to send their kids to school until the spring, which would extend the usual midwinter break by an extra month. Also some schools had leaking roofs that needed to be sealed. Fixing the roofs and windows might cost up to 800,000 Afghanis ($16,000).
The deputy education director was patient but firm. There would be no firewood this year.
“We don’t have enough money for even one district,” he told Nazak. “We cannot send it all to Dand. We have a budget for wood for the whole province of 460,000 Afghanis [about $9,200].” The visitor wasn’t finished. “It is not enough. We have thirty-five offices for education,” he continued. “That money is not enough to even cover firewood for our offices. Abdul Ahad needs one million Afghanis [$20,000] for wood in Dand. We have asked Kabul for help. But we rely on the district governors and ISAF in the districts for help.” A few weeks later Kabul found some emergency money and provided a bit of firewood for the districts after all.
The discussion continued, with us asking questions and Abdul Ahad pressing for more resources. But the assistant director was adamant. Apparently the O&M fund for Kandahar Province would cover just about what was needed in one district. But there were fourteen districts in the province. We would never get what we needed.
Nazak said that what he really needed was an operational fund for Dand alone, so he could assign money to repair the roofs in the district and pay for other expenses, such as firewood. But there was no fund for each district; that was not how the system was set up. Districts did not control money. They could not tax residents. They could only make individual requests to the province for anything, whether it be a new school or the repair of a roof. All too often the answer was no.
The closest the United States had come to the idea of a district fund was a USAID program called the District Delivery Program, which set aside money for the districts to fund a little gasoline and some office incidentals such as printer ink. But it was not nearly enough to spread the benefits of government into the villages. The program, useful but limited, was habitually late in delivering what assistance it did send. There was no other reliable money for the district.
Nazak lamented that no one in the ministries was helping him maintain the district center either.
“I need the roof fixed, and they say to take the money from my own pocket!” Nazak exclaimed. He had received similar responses on all manner of requests to his higher command.
At the meeting the problem of repairing schools with Afghan money seemed unsolvable.
“We do not have a budget to do that,” the deputy education director repeated. “If they increase the budget, it is still not enough for education. We still rely on the district governors to get support from ISAF to repair the schools. We have engineers to assess the project. We will put the signatures of the provincial education director and the finance director on the document of request.”
Clearly that request would quickly come back to the Americans for action. The meeting wrapped up soon after on this less-than-hopeful note.
The information from KAF said that the current plan would push more money onto the official budget soon, and money should start coming through in about eight months, sometime in the summer of 2012. We shrugged and pushed on. Matt could channel military funding for some of the projects as a stopgap until the budget money started to come through.
Despite these problems, things slowly moved in the right direction, and most of the credit for this turnaround belongs to DG Nazak, who encouraged his staff, praising good ideas and criticizing poor performance. The line directors found they could make decisions, set priorities, and then see them through. This change of mindset—empowering the Afghan line directors and raising their expectations so they could do their jobs—was our main goal. The disillusionment among the Afghan staff I had seen when I arrived was gone. Things were hopping. Although the money at this time came from the Americans, we were also mentoring the Afghans on how to access money from their own budget in the future.
In spite of these improvements it was clear that the district center itself was going to suffer over time. In fact it would probably shut down because there would likely never be enough money to run the place. No one, least of all Nazak, believed the Afghan provincial ministries would ever send the fuel necessary to run the DDC generator or gas up the motorcycles staff used to visit the villages. Repairing the roof or repainting the district center would also probably not happen.
Even if the Afghan government eventually paid for many of the activities we’d started in the villages, the district center itself would fall apart and the district staff would remain caged in offices that would slowly deteriorate, with no funds to visit the schools, clinics, and projects. I repeatedly relayed this problem to KAF, but I received little response except from the senior USAID officer, who considered the issue to be important and said it needed a higher profile. Unfortunately she left KAF and had moved to the embassy by the end of the year, so we lost an important advocate.
Matters came to a head in early November, when staff members from KAF and the provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Kandahar City flew into Dand to discuss the eventual transition to full Afghan governance without American help. The staffers were a mix; some people had been in Afghanistan for years, while others were on their first tour and seldom left KAF. Unfortunately, as my predecessor Keith Pratt had earlier discovered, many of the people at KAF with greater Afghan experience had become set in their attitudes and opinions. Ironically it was sometimes the case that the longer they’d been there, the less interested they were in new developments. They already knew it all and had little use for more fact finding.
The staffers from the PRT were tasked with mentoring the provincial ministries, in the same way we mentored the district officials in Dand. They were easier to deal with, more helpful, and more interested in what was going on than personnel from KAF, perhaps because they worked more closely with the Afghans. A rivalry over turf and responsibilities had brewed between staffers at KAF and those at the PRT for more than a year. My sympathies generally lay with the PRT.
Cip had departed on well-deserved leave the day before the visitors arrived, and I faced a dozen civilian and military headquarters staffers alone. They came by helicopter and trooped over to the district center, where we sat in a dusty conference room on the second floor. Some of the staffers seemed happy to be away from KAF for the day, while others appeared to be along for the ride. I had not made much headway in my concerns over the future thus far.
I described the gains made in the district, talking about how the district staff were now prioritizing projects and completing them. They helped residents by running innovative programs. Things were getting better.
Then I ran through the problems, including the risk of the district center falling apart and how money from the official Afghan government budget had thus far failed to make much difference in the villages, except for the building of schools and clinics now scattered throughout the district. I explained that the Afghan system delivered on some things but not other activities the people wanted, and it was important to get this right in 2012 as the budget increased.
We discussed a list of issues in Dand, including setting and finalizing the border with Kandahar City, the political benefits we had accrued from the well-repair program, and the inability of our line directors to receive maintenance funding from the ministries in Kandahar City.
We then covered several of Nazak’s issues. Nazak had no faith the Afghan government would ever pay for fuel to run the generator. Therefore, as soon as the Americans pulled out, there was an enormous risk that the lights would go off, the computers and air-conditioning would shut down, and the district center would cease to function. One idea to prevent this shutdown scenario might be to hook the DDC up with the Kandahar City electricity grid, which already brought power to within a couple of kilometers of the district center. This would potentially give a new lease on life to the district center, but it would cost about $50,000, according to U.S. engineers at KAF.
I finished by suggesting that Nazak was probably right in his concerns, and the district staff would need support from the provincial government in Kandahar City in the future to remain effective. The Afghan government was not likely to help them out in the year ahead because the priorities at the provincial level were seldom the priorities in the district.
We batted the issues around a bit. One of the KAF people suggested again we weren’t trying hard enough to get money from the ministries.
“The district governor should take the line directors to their ministries to ask for money,” the man said. He suggested that this approach would be more successful in getting the money.
Other staffers agreed. “Push the district governor to push the agriculture ministry to help the Dand line director for agriculture,” said another.
At that time I didn’t know about the gaping hole in the O&M funding at the provincial level; it would take the visit of the deputy provincial education director a few weeks later to hammer that home. The suggestions sounded better in principle than they could produce in practice, though I already suspected as much.
Instead I pointed out that the suggestion was unlikely to work because we already sent requests to the provincial directorates on a regular basis. The result: the ministries rejected the ideas by claiming poverty. I explained that we had no way of knowing whether or not these claims were true, because our district staff had no idea how much money the ministries had. I thought they probably were true. But it would help if the staff from Dand knew if the provincial branches had any money before they made a request, so they could not be so easily fobbed off.
The group agreed and said they would start looking into how much money the provincial ministries actually had. It seemed that no one had really nailed down these numbers before. And the PRT would try to follow up on any requests Dand officials sent to the ministries. But because the PRT had serious problems mentoring the provincial directorates, in reality this offer was not likely to be effective. (PRT officials were hobbled by a serious lack of transportation assets from the U.S. Army.) But it was worth trying. The PRT staffers were eager to help, and they later figured out what money was available to the provincial government.
If going through the provincial ministries did work, it would tie in with the plans to send more money through the official Afghan national budget.
I also wanted to make sure the staffers understood exactly what problems would likely sabotage the district in the future. Essentially the government needed to be run on the cheap. So I described the services the villages were receiving, such as well repairs and training for farmers. I said these types of services needed to continue in coming years, because they cost much less than expensive construction projects. After all, repairing a well cost a twentieth of the amount needed to dig a new one. In the future the government would want to show plenty of benefit derived from small amounts of money. This would require some creative thinking and a new willingness to fund low-cost services that generated the maximum impact in the villages.
The elephant in the room continued to be the district center. If the lights went off and the staff ceased to work, the district could easily slide back into Taliban control. I said there seemed to be no solution to the problem of running the district center. We needed an innovative solution.
Knowing that the districts received almost no funds directly, that they only received projects, I nevertheless took a deep breath and made a suggestion. I pointed out that if the district center staff had a discretionary fund of $100,000 to $200,000 a year, most of the usual problems there would all go away. The district center could maintain itself and also provide cheap services. This was an inexpensive and effective alternative that needed to be considered in 2012, and it would be a useful addition to the idea of getting funding from the regular provincial ministries using the regular system. After all, I knew there were numerous precedents in directing money outside the regular lines of the ministries. Donors had a history of directly funding projects they favored. The Kabul airport represented a striking example.
A grant to the DDC would be a low-cost and effective way to ensure the districts functioned well. I doubted the staffers realized it would cost $20 million a year to give the one hundred highest-performing districts $200,000 a year. Compare that amount to the $1 million the United States spent every year to keep a single service member in Afghanistan, and it paled to insignificance. The current system would allow the districts to steadily atrophy over time. For the price of an understrength platoon of twenty service members, we would neglect the entire system of local government.
I also added that ISAF should organize training for the district staff so they could understand the system they were expected to use. I made it clear that no one at the district understood how the new, larger budgets would work. Common sense suggested that, if the district officials had a poor understanding of their own system, they would perform poorly. This training idea was destined to be stillborn, however, despite several efforts to get it off the ground at higher levels.
Except for the idea of training, these suggestions were not well received. Three times the staffers said I should not “think outside the box.” They said the national budget plan was in place, and we all had to follow the plan. Sure we could try to help the district staff know what money was available at the provincial level, but if the whole system was flawed, there was little recourse.
The meeting broke up. At least the staffers knew that Dand faced serious problems going forward. I doubted the solutions they suggested would work, but the idea of getting more information on the ministries was at least a good step. Maybe the new information would give the district officials in Dand more leverage to get support from the ministries. That hope took a big hit when we met with the provincial deputy education director a few weeks later and we learned there was little money anyway.
An unexpected upshot of the meeting was that I was branded as unhelpful because I had floated the idea of getting funds directly into the district. Still I warned about the danger of the district center going dark, the need for low-cost services, and the inability of line directors to get a positive response from provincial ministries. To the credit of the PRT staffers, in coming months they worked hard to get the information on what money the provincial ministries held. Rather than helping us get more projects, though, it only proved that there was little money to repair roofs, and the problem lay not at the district level but with the provincial directorates and the entire system itself.
The last chance we had to personally present our problems to the Americans at KAF came when the senior State Department civilian representative visited Dand toward the end of November. Andrew Haviland was midway through his tour of almost eighteen months. Tall, lean, with gray hair and clipped gray mustache and invariably dressed in a blue Brooks Brothers shirt, Haviland was not a great listener and not beloved by staffers at KAF or in the field. He also alienated many military counterparts by his failure to coordinate his civilian operations with theirs as thoroughly as they wanted.5 Knowledgeable but arrogant, he was not the chief of a happy ship. His eventual replacement in mid-2012 would be hailed as a radical improvement by most staff.
Andrew dropped in on the base in the late morning and walked the two minutes to Nazak’s office, settling onto the couches in the more formal meeting room that Nazak kept for higher-ranking visitors. Andrew and Nazak exchanged pleasantries, and Andrew reminded Nazak that the war effort would be changing radically. He offered some advice.
Andrew told Nazak that district support teams such as ours would be going away and that the Afghan government would then have full control over everything. Kandahar itself would be handed over in two years, at the end of 2013. The finances of the districts would rely on the official process, which had the national government pushing resources to the provinces, where the district could access assistance. He advised Nazak to ask for money for pet projects from members of parliament.
This was the system that Nazak had spent half a year criticizing to me, the military, and anyone else who would listen, including visiting NATO delegations. He didn’t hold back now.
“We don’t care if the money comes from you or from the Afghan government,” he told Andrew. “But with the Afghan government, if we ask them for something with a request, we need a response. We submit it and what we get is a no six months or a year later. My development plan is supported by USAID and the military. We are the only district with a plan. Can you push this plan and see that it is done? The budget for Kandahar Province does not have enough money.”
He also told Andrew that if he knew how much money the province received, he would adjust his district plan to accommodate it. But no one knew anything about the province’s funding.
Andrew sat close to Nazak, their two chairs only a few feet apart. The rest of us sat on sofas lined up along the walls. We waited for Andrew to speak.
“The province doesn’t get much,” he told Nazak. “No government does block grants to the provinces. Instead you need to say to them that you need an item and then you argue why you should get it.”
Andrew seemed to be reciting details of the system for Nazak, who knew far better than he the system and its failings. As far as Nazak was concerned, this business-as-usual speech amounted to allowing the districts to fail, because their requests were seldom honored. Even worse, no one could get any information about what was going on. He told Andrew as much.
“The provincial director cannot see the minister in Kabul,” Nazak explained in his high-pitched but authoritative voice. “Local services are important, and the only place for the people is the district.”
A failing district would cause the entire government to fail, he added, and so the government was on course to fail because the districts were starved by the system.
Nazak continued, “If the budget is not spent, we need to ask why the money was not spent. We need to know how much money comes to the district and how much goes to the province.”
This information was what was deemed vital in the meeting with the KAF staffers several weeks earlier. Nazak also believed getting that information would be a good way to hold the province’s feet to the fire; it would be easier to do that if we knew how much money the governments had in their bank accounts.
Andrew reiterated that the provincial directors had little money and said the U.S. staffers would try to get the information on how much money was flowing into Kandahar.
“We will ask in Kabul, too,” Haviland assured Nazak.
Nazak readily agreed. “The provincial director needs to know his subordinates and help the districts and monitor them to see they are doing their jobs,” he said.
Andrew replied, “What we have been doing so far has not worked, and we need to do something else.”
Nazak complained again that there was no money to fix the roof or run the generators. “We need an operational budget,” he told Andrew. That was probably a step too far for Andrew.
“Tell Doug your ideas,” Andrew told Nazak.
As I would find out a few months later when I moved to Maiwand District for a year to work with the district government there, other districts had similar views of the Kandahar Province government. Unresponsive, it made little effort to help the districts beyond providing salaries for the police, schoolteachers, and clinic staff. The points Nazak had made were the same elsewhere, to greater or lesser degrees.
I reiterated these concerns to Andrew in a side meeting held in a small conference room a few minutes later, and he told me again that the only way these issues could be resolved was through the established government system, which he had just heard, and well knew, was not working. I told him how an operational fund dedicated to the district, adding up to $200,000 per year, would solve all these problems, but he said this was impossible. So we discussed ways to find out how much money the provincial ministries had, which was information that might help when the district line directors went begging with their requests. The PRT and its budget wunderkind, Billy Woodward, could at least be trusted to do their best to dig up this information. Our meeting ended on a positive note.
Nazak didn’t believe any of it. Within two weeks of Andrew’s departure he complained again to the U.S. Army brigade in charge of Dand that there would be no money for generators to keep the lights on when the Americans left. The only way to avoid the loss of power would be if the army helped him string poles to connect the DDC to the Kandahar City electricity supply.
“We don’t have fuel to run the generators,” he told the U.S. deputy commander. He never trusted the Afghan government to do its job.
Nazak made one last try to find a solution to his problems when the PRT sent visitors in mid-December. Planning was under way to reduce the U.S. presence in the districts in 2013 and hand over to the Afghans. The PRT wanted the unvarnished truth on what the major issues would be. The PRT had a new civilian chief. She had not yet visited Dand, so we were pleased that she wanted to come and see the situation for herself.
Except for the twenty-eight schools and five clinics open in Dand, there were few signs of a government presence in any of the villages. Nazak pointed out to the PRT staffers that Dand received no money from the province to extend the presence of the government into the villages, and no one knew the amount or availability of funding at the provincial level.
“We need to know how much money the line ministries have to do things for Dand,” Nazak urged the PRT staffers. “We expect the province to tell us what they can do for the districts and then do their plan. We can spend however much we can get from the province.”
Nazak declared that, without an operational fund, he was very worried. He did not believe the province would send money for fuel. Only the district could be trusted to make spending a priority, but how could the district do that if it had no money? The district was legally forbidden to raise its own funds through taxes, and provinces never gave cash grants to districts.
“We need a fund to be used for our plan that is spent according to our priorities,” he urged.
The PRT staffers were helpful, but the problem exceeded their power to address it.
“What did you get from the line ministries?” they asked.
“I got a letter from the province asking about the furniture,” replied Nazak.
The military head of the PRT was not very impressed. He urged Nazak to continue his discussions with the provincial ministries. This was, of course, exactly the problem that Nazak complained about in the first place.
Nazak told the PRT staffers, “Even for the clinics and public health in Dand, the ministry does not have any money to help us.”
This ended our best and only chance to push KAF into finding an imaginative solution to a system that everyone knew was not working. The PRT couldn’t change the system that depended upon the province responding to requests by the districts.
In the coming months the promised extra money due to appear on the Afghan official budget failed to materialize again and again. We were told to expect extra money coming through in the summer of 2012. By the fall of 2012 savvy KAF staffers had despaired of seeing it. Planning began with the assumption that the money would be available in the next fiscal year, beginning in March 2013. That funding too was delayed. By early fall 2013 the big influx of on-budget government money to the provinces had not yet made its appearance.
In many ways this situation reflected the deep ambiguity in the relations between the Afghan central government and its regions. The only ruler in Afghan history to have securely subdued the regions was Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, who had ruled in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. He systematically eliminated his regional rivals. He ruled mercilessly, killing thousands of his opponents. But since the days of the Iron Amir, the central government had struggled to keep its power.
In the words of one noted scholar, “Those Afghan leaders who would best succeed during the next century would apply a ‘Wizard of Oz’ strategy. They declared their governments all-powerful, but rarely risked testing that claim by implementing controversial policies.”6
Nazak, told to rely upon the central government, found it had little ability or inclination to respond to the problems of the districts with innovative ideas. Nor, for that matter, did the Americans, despite evidence that the system wasn’t working well. I wondered if other DSTs had made similar complaints. How could they not? Perhaps they worried more about not being a team player than giving due warning. National budget issues were certainly outside the scope of most DST members’ daily concerns. It was understandable but very disheartening. I never knew the true answer.
Our solution was to wait for the official money while we also tried to keep services going with our own U.S. Army and USAID money. Without the official money getting to Kandahar, we could not transition away from reliance on the American funds. As each delay was followed by another delay, the wait felt like an eternity. Meanwhile the American funds dwindled more with each month that passed. We held our collective breath and worked to keep the district on the right path for as long as possible, hoping that the money would arrive in Kandahar City before the Americans left. In the end it would not even be close. We missed by a mile.