The State Department and USAID are spending approximately $320 million a month on foreign aid in Afghanistan. In part, the administration has been using aid to “win hearts and minds.” For instance, roughly 80 percent of USAID’s resources are being spent in Afghanistan’s restive south and east. Only 20 percent is going to the rest of the country.
—U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan, 2011
“If the generals had been allowed to sustain the early impact on security and the civilians in charge had just focused on roads, irrigation and electricity with governance being devolved to the local level rather than too much held centrally, things would be much brighter.”
—General Sir David Richards, quoted in Sandy Gall, The War against the Taliban, 2010
The flying time from Dand to Maiwand was less than thirty minutes. The nose of the old twin-engined helicopter surged forward, leaving Dand quickly behind. We flew over the Arghandab River with its brown water dividing the green fields of Panjwai and Zhari Districts. On our right the desert hues of sand stretched farther north in northern Zhari District. We flew past a line of burnt-umber ridges seemingly close enough to reach out and touch with your hand. Barren, jagged peaks towered over the helicopter. Suddenly the hills gave way to a flat and dusty desert floor, the broad landscape of Maiwand opening out below.
The villages were widely scattered, and green fields lay in strips across a broader mass of bare ground. Farther north a few jagged peaks rose out of the haze. Twenty miles to the south a thin band of green marked the Arghandab River, known locally as the Dari Rud, as it curved westward toward Helmand Province. Across the river lay the high dunes of the orange-tinted Reg Desert.
Then the helicopter banked toward the base. We passed a large outdoor marketplace and skimmed over the inevitable wall of double-stacked HESCO gabions. The nose came up, and we bumped down onto the gravel landing zone. The ramp dropped. A soldier helped me move my bags and boxes out of the helicopter before it lifted off with a blast of air that blew the bags against the wall and peppered us with gravel. Welcome to Maiwand!
The base was tiny, the size of COP Edgerton in Dand, less than two hundred meters across. Dust-laden tents huddled between two hard-walled buildings, and a few single-wide trailers were scattered against the walls next to some plywood shacks used as barracks and a laundry. Guard towers were built at irregular intervals around the wall. The camp wore an air of great tiredness, as if it had been there too long. Unlike Dand, Maiwand was a bit of a dump.
The Maiwand DST was different too, with three men instead of two. One of the men was on leave and the other was about to go. Unlike in Dand, the district center was in a separate compound two hundred meters from the base. Instead of starting the day with a short walk to the district center, we accompanied a section of armed soldiers who never carried fewer than two weapons.
The team leader in Maiwand, Eric, was tall and thin with a gray-flecked beard. A veteran USAID employee, he had worked in a number of development jobs around the world. The other was Skip, a State Department surge draftee who had spent much of his tour at KAF. Getting out to a DST was a treat for Skip, who spent most of his time trying to figure out the personalities in the district, writing reports, and compiling the information into a document for future teams.
The feel here was different. The DST didn’t visit the district center every day, and the close ties we’d enjoyed with the district staff in Dand were almost completely absent in Maiwand. Not just the physical space was different; trust and camaraderie were missing. They would need to be built up, almost from scratch. I got the sense early on that the Afghans regarded the Americans as being on a separate team, a feeling I had never experienced in Dand, where we all worked very closely together.
The district center was scattered; it wasn’t really a district center at all. It was a district center complex, with offices spread over separate buildings. In contrast to Dand the hub of the Maiwand government was the building housing the police chief. On one side was a small graveled parade ground rimmed with small buildings used as barracks and offices. Beyond the parade ground and past a swing-up barrier stood a large meeting building where the district governor, Salih Mohammad, had his office.
On the other side of the police building stood an open patch of ground that was used as a demonstration garden and beyond that an agricultural center, built at great cost several years earlier. The agricultural center had five buildings, which were large, two-story affairs, now completely empty except for the agricultural director’s office and meeting room. The district governor had taken over another one to use as a residence. A third would eventually be turned into a legal office where a judge could hear cases. During my time there the judge held court only two times.
The hub of the government was the complex, not the government staff, who were largely absent. The health director preferred not to operate out of the district hub at all. He kept a small office at the health clinic in downtown Hutal, the market village adjoining the base and the district center. He rarely appeared in the district, much to the annoyance of the district governor, even though he was well paid. I recalled Dr. Mousa in Dand, who toiled for free. One Maiwand District staff member who handled projects also doubled as the education officer and operated out of a nearby school. The rest of the civilian staff was made up of the DG’s bodyguards and men who issued ID cards from an office near the inner barrier. In Maiwand issuing ID cards was big business, which I witnessed the first time I went to the DG’s office building.
The DG sat on the veranda of the squat concrete building. A line of men sat against the wall, waiting their turn. Each man clutched in his hand a piece of paper that served as an identity card. The line began at an inner gate and snaked around the corner of the building, barely moving. The men sat for hours.
The line ended at the DG himself, where one man crouched in front of him. The DG held the man’s identity paper, or tashkira, in his lap and spoke with short, jabbing sentences. The DG was irritable, and though it was only 11:00 a.m. he had been there for two hours, servicing the line of men waiting for his signature.
DG Salih Mohammad, a bulky man in his mid-fifties with a gray-flecked beard, was conscientious but lacked efficiency. His official stamp, needed for each identity paper, was a long time coming. The Taliban had a strong presence in Maiwand, and he wanted to be sure that each man was who he claimed to be.
“Who is your father?” DG Salih Mohammad snapped. “Who is here to vouch for you? Which village are you from?”
Snap, snap, snap. No time to waste with the men lined up for hours or sometimes for days; he had to get through them all. The pace was both hurried and slow at the same time.
In Dand DG Nazak had also issued ID papers, but via a much simpler system. His staff asked all the questions and brought him the identity papers ready to sign. The DG would stamp them, one after another—stamp, stamp, stamp—as his assistant or his police guard pushed the correct paper in front of him and whisked it away once stamped. DG Nazak hardly touched a piece of paper, spending no more than a few seconds on each. He trusted his staff to get the details right.
DG Salih Mohammed was not so fortunate. He asked questions, then scribbled on the application, signed it, and handed it back. Next! Amid this hurry the DG would squeeze in other business. As the line of crouching men sidled up, the DG would discuss district matters with a circle of elders in front of him.
It was scarcely surprising the DG was usually irritable. The phone also rang constantly, and newly arrived visitors would butt into the circle of elders to speak first. Life with DG Salih Mohammad while doing business was never restful. Yet each of the crouching men paid good money for his identity papers, perhaps $5 or more, and the DG kept some of it, perhaps a dollar or two or three. On his salary, not even $500 a month, he could not afford to turn the line of men away even if he’d wanted to. Poor security in the district necessitated that everything be carefully verified.
Maiwand was no Dand, in either the particulars of the district nor life in the villages. In Dand, after years of effort, the Taliban been kicked out of most areas. They skirted the fringe of the district, their movements exploiting a narrow, lightly policed area dividing the district from Kandahar City, but in general the insurgents were furtive and unwelcome
In Maiwand, however, the Taliban ran more of the district than did the district governor. In May 2012 the DG dared not enter most areas in the north or the far south. In most of central Maiwand the Afghan and American security forces routinely got into firefights if they ventured more than a few kilometers from the district center.
Only the daily routine was familiar. Each morning the sun rose from behind a ridgeline to the east. At about nine o’clock I headed over to the district center to make the rounds, talking with the DG and his staff, if they were there. Sometimes the other DST members joined me and sometimes they didn’t.
All the advantages of Dand seemed to have been reversed in Maiwand. In Dand the district governor had already mastered the political arts, forging alliances easily and bending the elders to his will. This district governor lacked the political ideas and resources to persuade the elders to enter into a bargain with the government. A former officer in the Afghan police, DG Salih Mohammad failed to make the political calculations that DG Nazak in Dand had found so easy to produce.
Marginal security, absent district officials, and the inconvenience of checking their attendance all degraded the government, as did the overt corruption. The projects director for the district, the one who doubled as an education official, spent a great deal of his time trying to steal from the education account and to grab a share of the funds from the few projects paid for out of the official budget, which sporadically helped people in the villages.
Yet he couldn’t be fired because no one would be foolish enough to replace him. He spent thousands of dollars a year paying off the Taliban so he wouldn’t be killed. The money he made from corruption paid off the Taliban, making his illegal takings a life-or-death issue for him, according to the men he worked with every day. I soon longed for the cheerful face of Mohammad Naseem, who had singlehandedly managed a program that repaired five hundred wells in a little more than six months and who had also typed up the weekly reports on his computer.
In Maiwand only one official school was open, along with several more unofficial ones hidden away in mud houses in the villages. The Taliban killed teachers in the official concrete schools, but they turned a blind eye to teachers working incognito in the mud-house schools. The thirteen empty concrete shells of schools around the district testified to the power of the insurgents.
Even when the district staff did turn up, little could be accomplished. It was unsafe to operate in most of the villages. A small bubble of security extended out three miles from the district center. A small medical clinic operated in the bustling market located next to the district center. It was open about four hours a day and closed on Fridays. It was the only clinic in the entire district of about seventy-five thousand people. At least the provincial government paid salaries for several dozen teachers and medical staff, but almost no projects arrived. The windows in the school could not be repaired without American help, because there was no official money (a problem we had also seen in Dand). The district’s monthly operating fund was tiny, and the official development budget was almost nonexistent.
Nor had ISAF made up for the shortfalls. Projects carried out in the villages were few and far between. The villages farthest from the district center received nothing. People in villages wanted wells, walls, and roads; none of these projects had been carried out except in the most sporadic manner. Meanwhile the concrete culverts that dotted the dirt roads in central Maiwand were dilapidated and stamped with markings such as “2004 Government of Japan.” A USAID program had pushed a thousand parcels of seed and fertilizer into about thirty villages, but most of the other programs run by the Afghan government or U.S. military either didn’t work or were clustered around the district center, where security was best.
It was not an auspicious start. Even worse, in April 2012 the district governor and much of his staff were on nearly hostile terms with the Americans.
The U.S. military and the civilians on the DST were in a war of words with the Afghans, accusing the district staff of being ineffective, milking projects for money, and generally being uncooperative and unimaginative in running the district. They argued the DG should hire more staff and criticized him for failing to place more employees behind desks at the understaffed district center.
The DG replied that no competent staff member would want to work for low wages in a district with such poor security. He faulted the Americans for failing to bring projects to any of the villages in his charge. Deadlock.
Both were partly right. It was hard to blame the DG for his attitude. In truth there was too little for the existing staff to do. No wonder they seldom showed up. In previous years ISAF had not pushed most of its limited budget into the villages scattered across the district. Instead projects were showered on the central hub near the district center, where security was tight. The villages were starving for projects.
And many of the projects they did do were not explained well enough, so the DG and his staff never understood everything that was going on. The Americans had fallen into the trap of thinking that one or two briefings would be enough to explain a project. Consequently the DG felt constantly surprised with the goings-on around him and not really in control of his district.
He often complained, “You don’t tell me what is happening!”
But the Americans thought he had a problem listening to what they told him and so responded with equal vehemence, “You are just trying to control the projects!”
The Americans believed the DG worked only to line his pockets, by fleecing the contractors. The DG believed the Americans wanted to cut him out of the decision making. He assumed they lined their pockets too and thus wanted him out of the way to make it easier to take their cut.
This situation had turned from dysfunctional to acidic. ISAF officers in Maiwand routinely pushed complaints about the DG and other staff up their chain of command to headquarters at KAF. This stream of complaints spawned visits from the abrasive senior State Department official, Andrew Haviland, who descended by helicopter and threatened to pull all ISAF projects out of the district unless the DG reformed himself. After these visits the DG felt even more disempowered and under assault from the people who were meant to help him.
The DG grew angry when projects did not go where he wanted—in the villages—or had too little effect on the people. His criticism further incensed the Americans. For example, the Americans wanted to begin a training program near the district center to teach twenty young people how to pour concrete, which would help the Afghans get jobs. But the DG argued it wasted money because it took funds out of the villages, where projects were most needed. The project, run by an American NGO, went ahead despite his objections.
As another example, when I arrived a new USAID program started up that aimed to employ hundreds of local people. Initially the Americans decided where the projects would go, with a bit of input from the DG. These ideas soon proved unworkable, because security was poor and the Afghans who lived in the villages didn’t want the projects, nor did the elders of the development assembly, a council charged with organizing projects in the villages. As I began to work with the Afghans of the assembly and the DG, we quickly decided to scrap these impossible ideas and put the onus instead on these key district players to figure out what they wanted and where. They soon developed a whole new list of projects that we used going forward.
In other ways what had occurred before I arrived was unsatisfactory. The USAID program known as S-RAD was winding down. We had used the same program in Dand with great success. Having S-RAD money available allowed us to gravel eight dirt roads and use hundreds of thousands of dollars for other projects needed in the villages, including large distributions of seed. The economic and political benefits for DG Nazak were enormous, giving him tremendously powerful leverage over the village maliks. This same program had produced little for Maiwand besides distributing seed wheat and fertilizer to almost a thousand farmers, giving villagers chickens that soon died, donating several tractors, and building a wall at the district center.
It took six months of work to straighten out this knot of problems. As in Dand, we operated on the principle of empowering the Afghans to help themselves. In this case, because the district staff was so small, we used the district’s development assembly of elders (the DDA) in a much more proactive role than we had in Dand. They developed lists of projects and plans, prioritized them, and worked closely with the village elders, along with DG Salih Mohammad. The DDA became the de facto district staff, and they did almost everything.
First I tried to squeeze projects for villages out of the existing S-RAD agriculture program, and the Afghan staff quickly nominated several project ideas. But it was too late and the program folded too quickly to accomplish much more, even though we were promised an extension that would allow us to extract a few more projects, such as culverts.
Even though this effort failed the Afghans began to feel that their opinions mattered. Less sidelined, they took charge of the district. Our goal was to make sure that most ISAF-funded projects would henceforth respond to their wishes and come from their ideas. This simple proposition seemed to them quite radical. The situation mirrored the exact issues we had encountered when I arrived in Dand almost a year earlier.
We also streamlined the handling of projects. The DG and the district development assembly would henceforth approve all projects not related to security. Almost no project could go forward without the members’ signatures. And we tried to push the district staff to figure out what they wanted to do and match those wishes to available funding. Once the projects began to flow, we turned to maximizing political impacts by demanding accountability from maliks and elders, just as DG Nazak had done in Dand.
The turnaround proved to be a quick one, and ISAF found that DG Salih Mohammad no longer held up projects. We instituted an official list of companies, so the district staff felt in control over who worked in the district. This trade-off, giving control in return for performance, was not foolproof, as it offered an easy way for the assembly elders to extort bribes. But over time it ended the bureaucratic skirmishing between the Americans and the Afghans, who previously had sent the police to stop contractors from working on projects when they felt blindsided.
Even the poisonous dialogue between the Afghans and the headquarters people at KAF stopped. The DST no longer sent up reports criticizing almost everything the government did, and the government had less reason to criticize the Americans. Peace broke out between allies.
This progress underscored a simple goal: get the Afghans ready to handle their own money. Our thinking was that if the Afghans could identify and manage projects now with American money and the DST’s help, then they should be able to handle the projects that were sure to be funded soon by their own government. This idea was tied into some initially encouraging signs at the national level. America poured almost as much development money into Afghanistan in 2012 as it had in 2011. But in 2012 much more of it was being directed to the Afghan ministries. This offered hope for a time that money would finally begin to flow from the budget to benefit the countryside.
Unfortunately this plan failed because most of the money sent to the Afghan ministries never arrived in the provinces and districts. It transpired that throughout 2012 the Afghans in Kabul sent only some of the official money down to the provincial government in Kandahar City because the national officials distrusted the provincial staff. Much of the money stayed in Kabul. Of course Kabul was too far away for the district officials to have any influence on how the money was spent. Our main goal—to bring the district officials to the point they could work with the upper levels of their own government—faded away. Yet, without the upper and lower levels of the government working together, nothing the government did would be sustainable in coming years. It was like falling at the final fence of the Grand National.
So much had been going so badly for the Afghan in Maiwand for so long that I didn’t see how it could get any worse. Then for nearly six months almost no ISAF money came through. DG Salih Mohammad and the elders he worked with complained to us that they had promised more than they could deliver; their reputations had been undermined by the extreme shortfall in funding.
Finally, as 2012 drew to a close, some emergency USAID money arrived and we could begin to work on some projects. A good omen? As 2013 approached we hoped the new year would be a lucky one.