Over the course of the twentieth century, Afghanistan developed a civil service and pubic administration that became increasingly professional and skilled, while exhibiting many of the same weaknesses as the administration in other poor, developing countries. Unlike most developing countries, Afghanistan never experienced direct colonial rule. Its public administration developed from the indigenous model of the region, based on the appointment of munshis, or secretaries, for various civil functions. The administration of justice was largely the province of the Islamic learned clergy, or ulama. Both the administration of justice and civil administration came under the influence of continental European models, often by way of adaptations made by other Sunni Muslim states such as Egypt or the Ottoman Empire. These reforms, which introduced to Afghanistan the model of merit-based recruitment and promotion for public service, always competed with other models of state service and recruitment, conceived of as service to the ruler rather than the public, and based on tribal and family relations. The exchange of obligations and service among different clans, tribes, and families followed a set of norms loosely known as wasita, a system of exchange of favors.
The Afghan state has a history as, first, a tribal conquest empire, and then a subsidized buffer state. In the tribal conquest empire, a charismatic leader led armed Pashtun tribes in the conquest of wealthier territories (Punjab, Kashmir, Turkestan) and redistributed the wealth extracted therefrom. He established an administration to govern the urban areas and the conquests under his control for the benefit of the ruling tribes. The ruler tried to establish an autonomous state apparatus in order to provide himself with a basis of power independent of the tribes.
The advent of Western colonialism destroyed the possibility of external conquest. The attempt by the British to incorporate a pacified Afghanistan into India’s border defenses led to the payment of subsidies directly to the ruler, who obtained a source of income independent of the military power of the tribes. The creation of Afghanistan as a centralized buffer state thus tipped the balance of power away from the tribes and toward the ruler, leading to the creation of an absolutist state that gradually developed a professional army and bureaucracy.
Outside of the cities and towns, the administration did not penetrate the society much, and the activities of governance mainly consisted of negotiation with local powerholders through intermediaries. The conquest of the country was carried out in the same way. After some combination of negotiation and military conquest, the king or amir would form a hierarchical alliance with a local ruler. This alliance would be cemented through kinship: the king would marry a woman from the local ruler or tribal leader’s family, and the king would take the son of the local ruler or chief to court as a kind of privileged hostage. These ghulam bachas (slave sons) were trained as officials to serve the ruler. Together with the Muhammadzai ruling clan, they formed the core of the state elite of the old regime in Afghanistan.
Such a court created a politics based on kinship and intrigue, with family ties to the wives of the ruler and other officials, marriages among members of the elite, and other forms of alliance playing the principal role. Members of the elite used these ties to appoint relatives and clients to positions of power, in return for which they were supposed to favor the interests of their patron. This system created durable relations of trust and confidence among members of the elite, while dividing them into fluid competing factions.
The factionalized elite presided over a small, weak, and highly centralized administration, the main task of which was to impose stable control over the territory by the rulers in the interest of the foreign powers that were funding them. Such a centralized administration ensured control by the center over the very limited functions that the administrators were called upon to perform. This structure was ill suited to provide services to the population or implement major investments, but the population relied on its own resources for most services, which were provided by informal local governance structures. Petty corruption was pervasive, and nepotism was more the predominant system of elite recruitment than a form of corruption. The lack of major revenue streams and sources of wealth limited the scope of corruption.
During the Cold War, Afghanistan’s state expanded its functions to meet the new demands of development. In response to the Pashtunistan dispute with Pakistan and the need to establish state authority somewhat more firmly, Kabul expanded the military with aid from the USSR. It expanded the system of education with aid from the United States and European countries. Foreign aid funded road building, the construction of dams and power stations, and the extraction of natural gas, which was exported to the USSR. These limited tasks required the formation of a new educated class of military officers, engineers, teachers, and doctors. The state needed a corps of people with a degree of competence in literacy and numeracy as well as foreign languages and professional skills to acquire and use the new knowledge and to manage the new state functions. The state recruited the new elite from all parts of the population, largely through newly established provincial high schools. These high schools, as well as Kabul University, recruited individuals of diverse backgrounds largely on merit, leading to a channel of upward mobility. Highly desired scholarships to study abroad, however, which were the pathway to the highest and most coveted positions, continued to be distributed among elites largely according to patronage. For instance, one woman who is now an academic in the West and who has served as a deputy minister was enabled to take up a scholarship to study in Germany in the 1960s only because her father, a prominent elder of the Popalzai tribe (the same tribe as the Karzais and of the founder of the Afghan state, Ahmad Shah Durrani), intervened with the Ministry of Higher Education to get them to waive the rule that a woman studying abroad had to be accompanied by a mahram, or male family member acting as guardian. A woman from a humbler background would not have been able to take up such a scholarship. Hence modernization (including the higher education of women) and acquisition of foreign training became a privilege of an elite based on patronage.
For those who obtained senior positions in the administration, the salary and perks of office were such as to provide a dignified if not wealthy life, and officials enjoyed considerable social prestige. It became the ambition of many families to educate a son and place him in the civil service, where he could provide a valuable point of contact and financial support for the entire extended family. Hence success in a merit-based system was seen as a means to obtain benefits through wasita.
The newly educated faced a situation common in developing countries. First, even though entry to the civil service was largely based on merit, assignment and promotion still depended heavily on patronage and connections, leaving a feeling of frustration and injustice. Second, the public sector could not absorb all of the new graduates; nor did the private sector expand to offer them opportunities. Finally, the highest level of political decision making remained opaque and unaccountable, based on intrigues among elites around the various factions of the royal family. The resulting politics of frustrated counterelites generated a variety of radical movements, including pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese Marxism, radical nationalism, ethnic separatism, and radical Islamism, both Sunni and Shia. Such a weak state situated on a fault line of the Cold War and in proximity to the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf could not withstand these tensions, leading to the wars, invasions, and state collapse of the past nearly thirty years.
During the various historical periods since 1978, Afghanistan has been ruled by several communist factions, mujahidin and militia groups, the Taliban, and now an internationally sponsored government drawing largely on returned exiles. Regardless of the ideological and political differences among these regimes, one policy they all had in common was transforming control of the government into an employment creation scheme for the ruling group’s political adherents and family/clan/tribal/ethnic group.
The Interim Afghanistan National Development Strategy (I-ANDS) summarized the effect of these years on the legitimacy and capacity of the state as follows:
The series of coups, attempts at social change through violent coercion in the name of an alien ideology, and the capture of state administration by armed commanders damaged the legitimacy of the state. During the communist regime, hiring and promotion in the civil service, as well as entry to institutions of higher education, largely depended on membership in and loyalty to factions and sub-factions of the ruling party, undermining whatever weak commitment to merit-based recruitment had previously existed. During the mujahidin years of 1371–75 (1992–96), each region and ministry was controlled by a different faction which awarded positions and resources to its supporters. Under the Taliban, only clergy of the ruling movement could typically hold leadership positions. Some skilled and dedicated officials remained in the government through all these changes, but personnel decisions were based on neither technical nor professional merit.
Government ceased to be an instrument for providing even modest services to people. Though loyal civil servants tried to perform their duties, government either became an instrument of control through fear and violence, or simply disintegrated. The state lost the capacity to collect even basic information about the society it supposedly governed. The outbreak of war in 1357 (1978–79) halted the country’s first attempt to carry out a population census, which remained incomplete. Decades of war led to chronic political instability, fragmentation of society, militarization of public life and competition among power structures across the country. The repeated failure of successive governments led to the emergence of informal governance structures and to domination of political life by unstable, but interconnected criminalized political, economic and social networks.
We may add that, upon taking power, the first and most consistent policy of the Khalqi faction of communists was the arrest, torture, and large-scale liquidation of competing elites, including a large number of government officials whose political allegiance was suspect. Arrest and exile, though not execution, of such elites continued during the succeeding rule dominated by the Parchami communist faction. During the communist period, though no figures are available, it appears that most of Afghanistan’s Western-trained elites were executed or fled the country, usually for exile in the countries where they had been educated. As no new elites were trained in the West during that period, and as the quality of professional education and training in Afghanistan declined, the result was a twenty-year hiatus in the production of professional elites and the physical, social, and political separation of such elites from their rapidly changing society of origin. As the I-ANDS noted, “To replace the skilled elites who were imprisoned, killed, or driven into exile, the communist regime and its foreign sponsors trained a young generation of technocrats in Soviet-inspired management and governance, including a commitment to expanding the role of the state in the economy.”
As the USSR planned its withdrawal, the regime shifted from the direct use of coercion to large-scale bribery and subsidy of militias, financed mainly through the printing of money. The I-ANDS noted the effect of the resulting hyperinflation on public service:
Hyperinflation made salaries of government employees that had once provided a dignified if modest standard of living utterly insufficient to survive. The result was a further decline in the commitment and performance of public servants, including teachers, police, and the judiciary, and further incentive for corruption, which had also spread widely due to the politicization and factionalization of the administration. For lack of any alternative employment, however, functionaries remained at their posts even when earning less than US$20 per month, often seeking to supplement these earnings through corruption, trading, or other jobs.
The erosion of state resources by hyperinflation also resulted in a decline in the quality of physical facilities and working conditions. The government made no new investments in supplies or methods of operation. During the period that the world was rapidly developing an information-based economy using multiple forms of telecommunications, Afghanistan lacked a functioning telephone system. Documents were produced on manual typewriters, for which new ribbons could only rarely be found. Accounting and payment methods similarly stagnated or regressed. As money around the world became increasingly electronic, the Afghan banking system collapsed, leaving cash (devalued bills) as the only form of payment and handwritten entries recorded in account books with hard-to-obtain pens as the only form of record keeping. In 1998, when I visited Kabul as a UN consultant, I defied UN rules against capacity building of the Taliban administration by supplying a pen to the protocol department of the foreign ministry in order to expedite the issuing of my exit visa. By thus doubling the number of functioning pens in the department, I enabled an official to work on my forms, while another worked on those of a Sikh trader going on a business trip.
As the state lost capacity, however, it expanded. The number of ministries, departments, provinces, and districts continued to increase, driven by the logic of creating positions to accommodate interests, rather than the delivery of public services.
Mujahidin rule was characterized by a culture of predation. Officials from that time tell of ministers bringing their families from the provinces in order to distribute the furniture of the ministry among them. Positions became personal property, and the idea of public service seemed lost. In Herat and Mazar-i Sharif, where strong leaders imposed a greater degree of order than in fragmented Kabul, the administration seems to have survived in somewhat better condition. Many remaining officials fled Kabul for Mazar, Pakistan, or Central Asia.
The Taliban did not recognize technical qualifications except for religious (and medical) training and appointed mullahs to all significant positions. Their advent in Kabul led to a further migration of families marginalized by their strictures on women and their takeover of the administration.
The I-ANDS described the legacy of these events as follows:
The state inherited by the Interim Authority of Afghanistan in 1380 (December 2001) … was responsible for a large range of functions, all of which it performed very poorly or not at all. It was disconnected from the people at every level and accountable to virtually no one, including the government. The state was highly centralized in principle but in fact non-functional or operating under the control of different authorities. For years, demoralized government staff had received neither genuine salaries, training to meet new challenges, nor the leadership and equipment they needed to do their jobs. Virtually all institutions were penetrated by networks of corruption.
Some members of the UN team that convened the Bonn negotiations tried to address these issues. They envisaged the interim regime as a small technocratic administration and proposed reducing the large number of ministries to fifteen departments, each headed by a technical expert from Afghanistan or the Afghan diaspora who would be forbidden from running for office in the future. Another proposal was to establish a trust fund to finance government expenditure, in part to remove discretionary power over spending from these new officials and insulate them from the pressure of wasita. (This proposal evolved into the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund.) The original draft of the Bonn Agreement proposed a powerful civil service commission, which would vet all appointments down to the district and subdistrict level for probity and technical competence. The draft also proposed a strict code of conduct to prevent the emergence of corruption.
The Afghan delegates, however, rejected most of these measures. Those that nonetheless slipped through into the agreement were not implemented. When the UN proposed reducing the number of ministries, delegates stated that there were twenty-nine ministries, and that the Bonn meeting could not eliminate any of them. Instead, it added one more, a ministry for women’s affairs. When it came time to fill the positions, Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN SRSG who was chairing the meeting, asked each of the four delegations to submit candidates for each position on the basis of technical competence alone, not political affiliation. The main delegations instead proposed their own members for ministries. It was clear to everyone that ministerial positions were allocated according to factional loyalty, as spoils of victory, not in order to provide public services with greatest efficiency.
The discussion of the civil service commission was long and painful. All groups concurred that the agreement should in no way limit their ability to appoint whomever they wanted to government posts. In the end, the agreement stated that the civil service commission would “provide the Interim Authority and the future Transitional Authority with shortlists of candidates for key posts in the administrative departments [ministries], as well as those of governors and uluswals [district administrators], in order to ensure their competence and integrity.” The agreement did not impose on the government any obligation actually to appoint officials from among the candidates on these short lists. In practice, the civil service commission never compiled or submitted such lists. Instead it defined its purpose as “reform” of the system.
The UN draft required adoption of a strict code against corruption and sanctions for members of the administration who violated it. This also aroused near-universal opposition, on the grounds that it was not necessary beause an anti-corruption law from the 1970s was still in effect, among others. The agreement finally stipulated somewhat vaguely:
7. The members of the Interim Administration shall abide by a Code of Conduct elaborated in accordance with international standards.
8. Failure by a member of the Interim Administration to abide by the provisions of the Code of Conduct shall lead to his/her suspension from that body. The decision to suspend a member shall be taken by a two-thirds majority of the membership of the Interim Administration on the proposal of its Chairman or any of its Vice Chairmen.
Neither of these measures has been implemented to date.
When the interim administration took over in Kabul, it faced a chaotic situation. It announced that all those dismissed for political reasons by previous regimes, or who had fled the country as refugees and now returned, would be reinstated in their posts. This included both all the women dismissed by the Taliban and any men hired to replace them. When I visited the Ministry of Education in March 2002, the entire ministry was packed with returning teachers bearing a variety of certificates and other documents, asking to be rehired. There were no common standards or any method of testing for competence. The result was the swelling of the ranks of the bureaucracy without rationalization of tasks.
Because offices were allocated as spoils of victory, and because ministers and other high officials were political figures who had been marginalized for years, their followers and kinsmen flocked around them asking for jobs. Afghans said that the men came to the front door at dawn and the women came to the back door at night. One minister was once late for a breakfast meeting with Brahimi because—so he claimed—he was besieged by two hundred petitioners and job seekers he had to see before he could leave his home. My own informal observations were consistent with the general belief that most ministers hired primarily from their own factional, ethnic, regional, or tribal group.
The scramble for jobs was greatly aggravated by lack of employment and the increase in the cost of living. The war had generated its own expanding cash economy, in which warlords, commanders, opium traffickers, and other smugglers moved large amounts of cash through both domestic and international transactions, driving up domestic prices, while the productive assets of the country depreciated or were destroyed with no investment or upkeep.
The rapid expansion of the military and civilian international presence in Afghanistan after the inauguration of the interim administration created a second parallel economy, which placed the public sector under more pressure. The arrival of international staff, with their demand for first-world-standard housing, imported food and household goods, curios, restaurants, bars, prostitutes, vehicles, drivers, security, clerical staff, local administrators, translators, fixers, and others, rapidly drove up the cost of living in urban areas. The international agencies competed for the scarce supply of Afghan skilled labor. The result was to remove capacity from the government at the time that it most needed it, as the most skilled officials were hired by embassies, UN offices, and military forces.
The attempt to increase the capacity of the Afghan administration by attracting professionals back from the Afghan diaspora created further complexities. Roughly speaking, the diaspora could be divided into two groups: those living in the region (mainly Pakistan and Iran) and those living in developed countries (the United States and Europe). Programs operated by UNDP, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Open Society Institute, and probably others created parallel higher salary scales for these returnees, so that although an Afghan who had never left would be paid up to $50 per month, a returnee from the neighboring countries might be paid up to $500 per month, and one from the developed countries up to $3,000 per month.
The situation was further complicated by the presence of returned Afghan refugees and exiles who had become citizens of developed countries. Their foreign passports, degrees, and professional experience entitled them to full salaries and consulting fees as international expatriates; but their Afghan dual citizenship also entitled them to serve in the Afghan government. Sometimes they did so while continuing to receive the salary of an international or developed-country official through secondment or while receiving international consulting contracts rumored to amount to $20,000 per month or more. Resentment of Afghans who returned with dual citizenship to serve as ministers and other high officials turned out to be a very emotional issue during the drafting of the 2004 constitution. This issue led to an angry division between cabinet members from the Northern Alliance and returnees from the West. The delegates to the Constitutional Loya Jirga, like most of those who responded to requests for public consultations, largely opposed allowing Afghans with dual citizenship to serve in the government. Only a last-minute compromise, requiring special parliamentary approval for such appointees, made it possible.
It was in this highly charged political atmosphere that the Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission (IARCSC) began its work. President Karzai appointed Vice-President Hedayat Amin-Arsala as chair of the IARCSC. Arsala, a former official of the World Bank, had been foreign minister in one of the exiled mujahidin governments and was a member of the Rome group’s delegation at Bonn. He is a descendant of one of the most important Pashtun tribal families in Afghanistan, which dominates the city of Jalalabad and the areas of Nangarhar province south of the Kabul River.
Forming the civil service commission was not a high priority for the interim administration, in which Arsala served as minister of finance. Most of its energy was devoted to its primary task, convening the Emergency Loya Jirga, and trying to restart the functioning of a moribund apparatus of government. After the still-unsolved assassination of his cousin, First Vice-President Hajji Abdul Qadir, in July 2002, Arsala became first vice-president in the position de facto reserved for Ghilzai Pashtuns from Eastern Afghanistan. In that capacity he became chair of the Civil Service Commission, which defined its mission as reforming the civil service rather than vetting appointments.
Since 2005 and the inauguration of President Karzai after his election, the IARCSC has come under the direction of First Vice-President Ahmad Zia Massoud, brother of the late commander Massoud. Inclusion of Massoud on his ticket was President Karzai’s gesture toward the core Panjsheri group of the Northern Alliance after his decision not to run with Defense Minister Fahim. Under the administrative system of the Afghan government, the two vice-presidents chair various cabinet committees, and the first vice-president chairs the economic committee, in which capacity he also oversees the work of the IARCSC. The new head of the IARCSC is a Northern Alliance appointee. It seems to have declined in influence relative to Arsala’s tenure.
The major reform introduced by the commission was the program of Priority Reform and Restructuring, which was supposed to establish centers of excellence within ministries. The most effective officials would be transferred to PRR units, which were exempted from the usual salary scales, so that they could be rewarded according to merit. Eventually the idea was to reduce the size of the ministry establishments and retain the best officials, who would go through the PRR process. Both the president and the ministers, however, resisted aspects of such a process. The president did not want to dismiss people from government employment when alternative employment was not available, and ministers, though welcoming the opportunity to pay some of their officials more, did not want to fire anyone, especially those whom they had hired through patronage. There are no doubt cases where PRR has functioned as planned, but its general reputation is as a program for raising salaries largely at the discretion of ministers, without increasing competence or streamlining ministries.
Those ministries with the greatest success in delivering services thus far have done so not by reforming the existing administration but by bypassing it altogether. The Ministries of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and of Public Health have implemented the National Solidarity Program and the Basic Package of Health Services largely by contracting with NGOs and international organizations for the delivery of services. The activities of these contractors are supervised by small groups of expatriates and Western-returned Afghans within the minister’s office. Similarly, the Ministry of Defense presides over an entirely new Afghan National Army, the creation and management of which is largely controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense. No more than 2 percent of its recruits came from the militias that constituted the former Ministry of Defense.
Two important ministries that currently have ministers from the former Northern Alliance—Interior along with Energy, Power, and Water—illustrate some of the obstacles to reform. The Ministry of the Interior has extraordinary importance in a highly centralized unitary state. All governors and police chiefs are employees of the MOI, with governors holding the rank of deputy minister and serving at the pleasure of the president.
Afghanistan suffers from a severe lack of energy, and the lack of electrical power in Kabul is a politically explosive issue. According to the Afghanistan Compact, donors and the Afghan government will meet targets for increasing power supply by the end of 2010, and the government of Afghanistan will engage in reforms to ensure cost recovery for power supply. [By that time Kabul received a significantly increased electricity supply through transmission lines from Uzbekistan, but the Kajaki Dam project in Helmand, which was to provide power for southern Afghanistan, has still not been completed in 2012. No measures for cost recovery have been implemented successfully.] The agreement makes no provision for how power is to be supplied before 2010; only emergency provision of diesel fuel for generators can make up the gap. Donors demand that rather than only wait for them to pay for expensive and inefficient power supplies, the government should immediately start measures to recover more costs. The obstacle, however, is more complex than a public unaccustomed, unwilling, or unable to pay. In fact, many people do pay exorbitant amounts for power. Some pay for private provision through generators (this is what all foreigners do). Many others, however, have unofficial connections to the grid. It is common knowledge in Kabul that one has to pay bribes to the workers at the local power relay station in order to get a newly rented house hooked up or to ensure continuity of power supplies to an existing hookup. Many of the connections concluded through this parallel system are never recorded, like the power connections in a Brazilian favela.
The bribery does not stop there. The workers’ superiors know that this is going on and expect that the workers will kick a percentage upward, and so on toward the top. This is only fair, since the employees owe their jobs to favors that their superiors did to their families, and wasita dictates that they must reciprocate. “Corruption” is an inadequate word to describe a pattern of behavior that constitutes not so much deviance from an existing system as a parallel system that is more real than the de jure one. The minister himself, Ismail Khan, is not generally thought to be involved in this system, as his political and patronage base is not in the ministry but in his native province of Herat, where he was the major leader of the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban resistance for decades.
Indeed most institutions in Afghanistan work this way. The Ministry of the Interior largely consists of various predatory factions, increasingly engaged in protection and organization of the narcotics trade. As documented in a recent report from the World Bank and the United Nations Organization on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), appointments of police chiefs and sometimes governors require the payment of huge bribes, which can be recovered (as expected) only through the “taxing” of narcotics trafficking, extracting bribes in the course of crop “eradication,” and confiscation of drugs seized in the course of “law enforcement.” This tribute flows upward into the highest levels of the government, where the drug trade’s political protectors are to be found.
As noted above, the Afghan state is highly centralized. It was created in this form to enable a ruler supported by foreign powers to control the territory through officials whose mandate was to serve the ruler, not the public. In this sense, “public administration” is a misnomer; a more accurate term would be “state administration.” The state, however, legitimated its power variously by agendas of Pashtun ethnic nationalism, modernization, or Islam. Therefore Pashtun ethnic nationalists, modernizers, and radical Islamists (especially when they are Pashtun) have tended to support centralization.
The reality of power in Afghanistan is a complex combination of a de jure centralized administration and a de facto decentralized (and, most importantly, deinstitutionalized) exercise of power, often through networks that reach far across the country’s border to governments and private organizations in neighboring countries and beyond. Hence an agenda of decentralization or federalism also conjures for many the fear of disintegration of the country and its division among the neighbors.
During the drafting of the constitution, the non-Pashtun groups took different positions on how to balance the power of a presumably Pashtun president. Tajiks, who could compete for power at the center, favored a dual executive system with a president and prime minister to check each other. Uzbeks asked for the election of governors or at least the right of provincial councils to provide the president with shortlists from whom he would have to choose, to prevent the imposition of Pashtun governors who would seize land and engage in other abuses as in the past. They eventually compromised on obtaining recognition of their language. Hazaras retreated from the demand for federalism in return for recognition of Shia jurisprudence for personal law among Shia and the establishment of Afghanistan as an Islamic state rather than a Hanafi Muslim state.
The Pashtun modernizers around the president argued that, under the current conditions of the Afghan state, localities would be captured by armed commanders, and that the central state would be powerless. They saw the central state as the agency of reform and service delivery, especially through the creation of direct links to the villages, as in the National Solidarity Program (NSP), with international organizations and NGOs acting as intermediaries using foreign aid. Most people in the country of all ethnic groups echoed the demand for a strong central government, which they seemed to define as a government that would eliminate the gangs of armed men that were abusing them, seizing land, and generating insecurity.
As noted below, however, in the current security environment and with the growth of drug trafficking and administrative corruption, fewer people see the central government as a consistent agent of reform. Given the reality of a government that is largely dysfunctional and corrupt, the idea of devolving service delivery to local authorities with little or no capacity (or even buildings) has little appeal.
The one arena where some devolution has taken place is through the provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), and it has happened by accident. Each PRT has a budget for the province where it is stationed. These are the first provincial budgets in the history of Afghanistan. Within the Afghan government itself, there is no provincial budgeting process, as the center never wanted to allow any alternative centers of power to develop. For similar reasons President Karzai rejected the original proposal by the U.S.-led coalition for Joint Regional Teams in eight or nine regions, as these JRTs would have tended to interact with the major regional leaders that emerged from the 2001–02 war with their own U.S.-funded armies. Instead he insisted that these teams be organized at the provincial level, so that their interlocutors would be governors, appointed by him. To the extent that the PRTs work closely with governors and do not insist on flying their own flags over what they do, the governor has in effect a provincial development budget for the first time, which he can use not only to deliver benefits to the province but to build a political coalition of support for the government. The management of the provincial budget by the PRT provides a check on the creation of autonomous provincial power, which reassures the center.
The PRTs’ partnerships with governors could become focal points in some cases for the creation of processes of budgeting and public inspection (through provincial development shuras and provincial councils) at the provincial level. So far this is not reflected at all in the formal rules of the state administration or in legislation.
At the same time, much service provision takes place at the village level through funds administered by the mosque or local tribal or clan leaders. The mosque is the most important institution in most villages. The mosques collect some Islamic taxes, such as zakat and ushr, for public purposes. These include taxes on local incomes from opium production and trade. Villagers have greater confidence in services provided by these means precisely because they are provided outside the state, which remains a distrusted and foreign body. To some extent the indigenous village councils meeting in the mosque are competing with the new elected Community Development Councils established by NSP. The latter have much more money, but villagers also know that the money comes from foreign donors through incomprehensible and opaque processes and can stop at any moment, whereas the mosque is eternal.
Both the NSP and some independent Afghan and international researchers are now trying to understand better these locally rooted and trusted methods of service provision. These institutions, if they are articulated at all with the state, answer to the Ministry of Hajj, Awqaf and Irshad (often called Religions Affairs) through the Department of Mosque Management, not to the MoI like the administration down to the uluswali (district) level or to the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) like the CDCs. Some are considering whether it might be possible to unite the separate channels of administration and service provision and incorporate these village institutions more productively into the state and its development models. UNICEF has successfully made use of mosques and religious leaders in its vaccination programs. In order to carry out its programs, NSP often has to make unofficial use of the same institution and elite. Mosques provided a basic social safety net, or perhaps more accurately were used by villagers to provide one to themselves. Now, however, mosques are much more integrated into national and even international Islamic political movements, so that making use of mosques for service provision could also strengthen those forces. In any case, using mosques for service provision would confront obstacles in the differing perceptions of opium income and foreign aid on the part of villagers on the one hand and foreign donors on the other. For now Afghan state elites and Afghan villagers retain a high level of mistrust for each other, which poses a nearly insuperable obstacle to integrating the two systems.
The high point of reform in Afghanistan was probably the period from the Berlin conference of March–April 2004, which constituted the major triumph of Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, and the appointment of a new cabinet without Ghani by President Karzai after his inauguration as elected president in December 2004.
Since that time, the weakening of reformist leadership, perceptions of increased corruption, and the decline in security—and in particular the remobilization of the Taliban—have had additional negative effects on prospects for reform. The insurgency confronts the government with an immediate security threat. Reforms based on professionalism and merit will take years to create effective security agencies and ministries for service delivery. In the meantime there are only two alternatives to fill the gap: international provision of security and services, or reliance on the mechanisms of patronage that became strengthened and took on new forms during the decades of war. The international community now presses President Karzai to rely on it and the reform programs it now sponsors, rather than warlords that the United States formerly sponsored, but Karzai and many other Afghans have progressively lost faith in international support, which has seemed too little and too late and utterly ineffective in coping with the sanctuary that the Taliban enjoy in Pakistan. The president points to weak support for the police, in particular, for the first five years, and asks what alternatives he has.
The nature of the struggle was revealed by the 2006 tug-of-war over the governorship of Helmand. For several years the governor of Helmand was Sher Muhammad Akundzada, a commander and big landlord of the Alizai tribe. He was reputed (like virtually every power holder in Helmand) to be involved in the drug trade and also of creating problems by favoring his clansmen in northern Helmand. His family was a prominent one. His uncle, Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, had become one of the largest commanders and drug barons in southwest Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as the deputy defense minister of the exiled mujahidin government in 1988. That year he struck a deal with U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley to stop opium poppy cultivation in Helmand in return for a mere $1 million in development projects. As a result Akhundzada was assassinated, probably by other factions to whom he had promised to deliver the raw material. When the U.S. Congress intervened and banned such negotiations with drug dealers, his successor reinstituted cultivation.
According to press reports, under pressure from the British, who were preparing to deploy several thousand troops to Helmand, Karzai moved Akhundzada to the upper house of Parliament and replaced him with Engineer Daud, a respected technocrat, while leaving Akhundzada’s brother as deputy governor. Over the summer of 2006, the battle in Helmand became very intense. Governor Daud was instrumental in negotiating a controversial truce between ISAF and the Taliban through elders in Musa Qala district. Daud complained, however, that Akhundzada’s brother made it impossible for him to work properly and came to Kabul to demand his removal. President Karzai, under pressure from supporters of Akhundzada ostensibly over the security situation in Helmand, from the United States over the Musa Qala deal, and from the British over drugs and other issues, finally dismissed Daud. The president claimed he was ineffective, while Daud attributed the decision to insistent pressure from the drug mafia.
The relevant consequence for public administration reform is that the immediate security emergency plus the strengthening and consolidation of political control over drug trafficking have weakened efforts at professionalizing the administration. In accord with the Afghanistan Compact, in October 2006 the government established a vetting mechanism for senior appointments similar to the one originally proposed at Bonn. Despite the adoption of this formal institution, however, the security crisis is aggravating ethnic tensions, driving many Afghans to seek refuge in the patronage relationships that actually function, if imperfectly and unjustly, rather than trusting new institutions that would be preferable if—a big if—they could actually be established and would then function as advertised. The continued involvement of some officials of the government and their close relatives as patrons and protectors of the drug trade and the creation of pyramids of narco-trade protection payments similar to those described above for electricity supply discredits counternarcotics efforts and leads some people to conclude that reform is just a charade to legitimize a Western counterterrorism agenda from which they are unlikely to benefit. Though there are many appointments at issue other than the high-profile ones of governors and police chiefs mentioned here, these set the tone for the entire public sector. In the big political game that is now going on over the control of the state and assets of Afghanistan, the IARCSC is not a very important player and cannot do much if anything to change the political atmosphere. At most it can present plans that may be adopted and that eventually might be implemented at least partially if the atmosphere changes.