Institutional Failures Hurt Everyone

Abdul Rashid Dostum, the warlord-BFF of Afghanistan scholar Brian Glyn Williams, is in trouble. He stands accused of abducting his former campaign manager last week. That he is finally looking at prison not for his decades-long history of atrocities (unfortunately, most members of the cabinet would have to be thrown into prison as well) but what amounts to mere trespassing and abduction is only scant comfort: Dostum is so powerful, he is probably for all intents and purposes above prosecution.

This highlights one of those wicked problems about Afghanistan: its reliance on personality to push through changes, and the ineffectiveness of its institutions to hold those who flaunt the law accountable. That is a fancy way of saying corruption is a terrible problem, infecting every level of government from the District Sub-Governors who take bribes from the opium smugglers to Dostum quite probably skating free of a major indictment.

But it isn’t just corruption. This has been a particularly harsh winter: hundreds of people have died of exposure thanks to unreliable utilities, a drastic shortage of flammable materials (thank you timerlords), and simple dire poverty. It’s not much better in Tajikistan, where Dushanbe has reportedly been reduced to 10 hours of electricity per day—much less than in Baghdad. Kabul is worse, and any outlying cities, towns, and villages are even worse off still. So now Turkmenistan has joined the long string of countries sending thousands of tons of aid—food, blankets, and heating oil.

The institutions of Afghanistan have failed its people. But it really isn’t Afghanistan failing itself, as the international community failing Afghanistan. The World Bank has spent over six years “building capacity,” yet has little to show for it. So much of the non-opium economy is still illicit and untaxed, the government is critically starved for funds (despite the annual influx of budget from ARTF). The police still can’t really call what they’re given a salary, considering how irregularly it arrives, and how pathetically small it is. It should be no surprise that the minor reform steps have been sabotaged by rampant corruption.

It is also the ex-pats. The Serena Bombing highlighted the ways in which the foreigners in Kabul, rather than achieving some measurable and concrete improvements, have created what amounts to a parallel economy serving their needs while 2 million people in that city alone go without potable water and freeze to death. This stems from, I believe, a fundamental disconnect, similar to what Laurence Jarvik has documented well—NGOs, and the international community as a whole, engages in a form of imperialism that soothes their egos and moralism yet rarely accomplishes lasting good in their host countries.

Blaming NGOs, however, is shortsighted: this is a problem endemic to almost all foreign interventions—from Germany’s pathetic refusal to shoulder any burden in the southern provinces to the very real ways NATO might dissolve under the selfish and needless hand-wringing over whether it is worth while to stabilize Afghanistan.

So it is systemic, then: far too many at fault, and far too many fixes to be made. This tells me it probably won’t ever change, not in any substantial way. No, it’s left to individual organizations, individual efforts, to try to rectify the broken system in place. That doesn’t mean it will never improve; there is every reason to have hope it will. But it will be an incredibly more difficult challenge than it needs to be.