Nation-Building Elevated

[Steve the Planner]

Be skeptical. Be very skeptical. Make each proposed effort justify itseld in the actual circumstance.

Reconstruction, in the real world, means fixing things that are broken, putting the shelves back up and the dishes back on them. In Iraq and WWII, physical infrastructure damage (accumulated from Iran/Iraq, embargos, us (but not just us)) was huge, complicated and expensive. Not so in most Afghan areas.

Development is making some thing happen that has not happened before. Especially when applied to Afghanistan, the burdens and challenges of any success must be incrementally built on a solid foundation, Doing so while security, corruption and lack of framework/context is almost spitting in the wind, and with very little reasonable expectation for bug strides.

Oneof my first bewilderments in Tikrit was arequest for scads of generators. So I asked, how many generators have been deleivered to that little village in the last five years. The answer: Who knows? That went out at the last Riptoa. All we know if that we are here now and these folks say they need generators, and you have funds for that.

The answer was: the village needed a generator, but had no mechanism to "own it," maintain it, keep it in fuel. So when the fuel went out or it broke down, somebody sold it for scrap, and they came back for another.

The solution to a sustainable generator was for some identifiable party to take responsibility for it, and the government to agree to maintain, supply it. Otherwise it was a waste of time.

Dayuhan only gave a piece of the Phillipine-style story. Load them with fancy amercian projects that cannot be sustained, or even afforded, by local government, and you make the local government look incomptent, by default. In large part these places have limited development, infrastructure and services because there is no system to male them valuable and sustainable. The trade-off will not always be the same if the choice is "give up your traditional ways and customs so that you can become prosperous enough to use/support new and expensive infrastructure." Some will just teach you what they told the Russians" Nyet!

The first big lesson of Appalachian Redevelopment---the Kennedy Plan to revive the Appalachians, involved building great new roads into the Appalachians to stimulate trade by linking them to city regions. It never occured to them that it was easier, and more successful, to follow the road to the city than to try to develop the Appalachians (a US version of the same constraints faced in Afghanistan). How many of these big projects create substantial unintended consequences---like shifting rural poor to urban poor.

Yesterday was a conference at CSIS, and a British and Norwegian Ambassador explained the upcoming London Summit. Security aside, an hour is assigned to SUBNATIONAL Governance.

In theory, the Afghan gov is expected to deliver it's proposal to the nations for creating and implementing subgov structures in Afghanistan. Although many at the national level are skeptical about creating subgov (and especiially effective subgov) is that it diverts their power.


Back up the truck a sec. There is no effective sub-national governance structure, and, if needed to be built, you can do the math as almost as big a separate effort as training police and soldiers---let alone the hundreds of offices, desks, cell phones, bicycles and bongo trucks needed for that. Now, we have an hour scheduled to hear how (if) the new Afghan government wants to pursue this objective, and whether int'l aid will accept/support their plan.

An ineffective national government, no effective sub-national governance structure, or credible plan for one, and, at the bottom of that pyramid, soldiers are supposed to build local governance to hand off to the national system that does not exist.

Two things are missing. If there was a subnational gov plan, us civ/mil could synchronize efforts to focus on support for implementation, but there is none, and there is no entity to either link or hand it over to.

A district with a $6 budget, no staff, and no cell phone is hardly going to be able to accept a hand-off of responsibility for an island of villages "redeveloped" by the US, and certainly cannot sustain or support any level of infrastructure/projects.

Same in Iraq. The US declared provincial governments, but did not provide the road maintenance shops, equipment and staffs to make them so. Without an independent tax base, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, all local governance is small and ineffective.

The US cry was about "Taxation without Representation." Afghanistan has no resources except those we give it, and those it chooses to distribute...

What's Schmedlap's rap: With a plan this compicated and full of wholes, success is assured?

Steve

[M-A Lagrange]

Dayuhan,

Humanitarian "science"? First time I've heard of such an animal, tell us more...

Apparently it’s a French delicatessen… Well, actually in France you have 3 Universities teaching humanitarian actions and humanitarian Rights and Laws.
Plus one more university teaching logistic/administration… all the NGO administration stuff.
This came to the point they are developing humanitarian anthropology which is based on different bases that development anthropology.
Myself, in order to be much more bankable, I just passed a master in Crisis management: humanitarian and development actions at la Sorbonne, Paris.
But you have the Oxford Master program… There are some stuffs being developed on Humanitarian action as a “science” integrating civil security, emergency management, legal issues, rule of law…

“Science” is the only work that comes to my mind actually concerning this. There are already devastating bad effects: you see coming in the field young guys and girls thinking they know everything because they have been taught to do so and have a degree on it.
Sometimes, I’ll just like to sunk them in concrete, head first, just to remind them the hard way “we”, the stupid guys with long years spend in the field, we have learn our knowledge the hard way.
They do the same mistakes as us but now have a degree to back it up…
But the good thing is that some quite interesting theories as the continuum/contiguum have come out. Also some analyses of Culture as a tool to legitimize “civil society” disconnected from politic.

May be not a Science but certainly an Art

Steve,

An ineffective national government, no effective sub-national governance structure, or credible plan for one, and, at the bottom of that pyramid, soldiers are supposed to build local governance to hand off to the national system that does not exist.

Two things are missing. If there was a subnational gov plan, us civ/mil could synchronize efforts to focus on support for implementation, but there is none, and there is no entity to either link or hand it over to.

A district with a $6 budget, no staff, and no cell phone is hardly going to be able to accept a hand-off of responsibility for an island of villages "redeveloped" by the US, and certainly cannot sustain or support any level of infrastructure/projects.

We can give all the advices of the world to good guys trying to do their best to build local governance capacity (a local administration basically in a good governance cheap dress). But without plan and vision of where to go by the Afghan… We build a white elephant. No doubts on that.

But anyways, I still think that there are best practices coming from the field. It’s may not be plug and play projects but rather how to build a project, what to do for assessment, what to look at, what to not do…
Still, it’s best practices that will help to have a better use of the money, time, energy… And may be achive results in the end
Standards are not meant to be: 1 you build a school 2) you build a well 3) you build a road…
Standards can be: 1) you assess the local production and markets. 2) you dress the gender task division. 3) you conduct focus groups…
Standards can be approaches…

This, it self is a debate. But once you have decide what you want to support then you have a good list of stupid stuff to not do, just like the Appalachian example.

[Dayuhan]

Be skeptical. Be very skeptical. Make each proposed effort justify itseld in the actual circumstance.

I'd agree with that... and I'd add that skepticism should be matched by the will to not act when circumstances don't justify action, especially when to act would simply mean throwing money at a problem that money will not solve and could exacerbate.

Development is making some thing happen that has not happened before. Especially when applied to Afghanistan, the burdens and challenges of any success must be incrementally built on a solid foundation, Doing so while security, corruption and lack of framework/context is almost spitting in the wind, and with very little reasonable expectation for bug strides.

This runs back to my initial comment about trying to build things that have to grow. All too often, in all too many places, we've assumed that if we build the concrete evidence of administrative and organizational capacity, the capacity will somehow be summoned into being. The result has been billions of dollars tossed down black holes, and all manner of expensively constructed artifacts rusting in peace in odd locations.

In theory, the Afghan gov is expected to deliver it's proposal to the nations for creating and implementing subgov structures in Afghanistan. Although many at the national level are skeptical about creating subgov (and especiially effective subgov) is that it diverts their power.

Back up the truck a sec. There is no effective sub-national governance structure, and, if needed to be built, you can do the math as almost as big a separate effort as training police and soldiers---let alone the hundreds of offices, desks, cell phones, bicycles and bongo trucks needed for that. Now, we have an hour scheduled to hear how (if) the new Afghan government wants to pursue this objective, and whether int'l aid will accept/support their plan.

Is there really no subgovernance structure at all, or simply none that falls into categories that we recognize? Are the villages without any form of governance? No councils of elders, no village headmen? No traditional system for resolving inter-village disputes? Instead of imposing a top-down structure of subgoverenance according to our model, why not start with what exists (I suspect there is something) and try to provide minimally invasive assistance aimed at letting it grow upwards... accepting of course that this will take a lot of time.

If there is an existing system of local administration, they may be comfortable with the idea of being rebuilt according to somebaody else's priorities. They are likely to be reluctant to see their power diluted by national government intrusion and they are likely to be very uncomfortable with the idea of being handed over to anybody.