Commentary | Rebuilding Afghanistan

As part of Time magazine’s extensive feature about the war in Afghanistan, Rory Stewart argues that “despite massive Western investment, Afghanistan is close to being a failed state.” Thousands more troops and billions more in foreign aid won’t solve Afghanistan’s problems. Ultimately, Afghans will have to rebuild Afghanistan.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a role for the international community. Stewart contends that the West has a part to play but that it “should invest in what it does well.” In Stewart’s view, this means supporting “more effective aid and a more limited military objective.” Investing in small-scale development projects in the relatively secure parts of the country and sustaining a counterterrorism (as opposed to a counterinsurgency) military strategy will give Afghanistan the greatest chances of success.

How to rebuild Afghanistan has been the operative question since the Taliban fell in 2001. Amidst a din of voices, Stewart offers a unique view on what constitutes useful aid. He addresses Afghans’ growing frustration about the slow pace of progress, noting that many obstacles impede development. Some of these difficulties are beyond aid agencies’ control—for example, all the problems that one might expect to find in a nation fractured by thirty years of continuous violence. But the aid agencies have created a mess of their own, resulting in millions of dollars of wasted funding. Lack of coordination between organizations is part of this. So is corruption. Far more vexing is a general lack of accountability—to donors, taxpayers, and the Afghan people, to name just a few interested parties.

Unaccountability characterizes many international development programs around the world but it is an endemic problem in Afghanistan. Oversight organizations including Transparency International and Integrity Watch Afghanistan have commented on this abnegation of responsibility. So has the World Bank, which observed in a recent report that 70 percent of foreign aid returns to donor countries by way of salaries for aid workers, development consultants, and security contractors, failing to reach the Afghans it’s supposed to benefit. Statistics collected by the Center for American Progress document scandalous malfeasance at all levels of operations.

The work of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which Stewart directs, models a kind of development that is arguably far more effective. It exemplifies the creative, small-scale project that Stewart advocates in Time Magazine. Based in Kabul, Turquoise Mountain “[specializes] in urban regeneration, business development, and education in traditional arts and architecture.” That’s not remarkably innovative in itself but the underlying insight is profound: saving Afghanistan isn’t as patently formulaic as rebuilding bombed-out infrastructure, stabilizing public health, ensuring access to education and jobs, and reestablishing rule of law. All of those things must happen. But even more fundamentally, Afghanistan must be allowed to regain a sense of its own dignity.

Spending huge sums of foreign aid irresponsibly does not help Afghanistan. Enabling Afghans to restore their own country does. That’s why Afghanistan needs more NGOs like Turquoise Mountain, which is guided by Stewart’s understanding that “creating a narrative of national identity is not a technical engineering problem but more a question of mythmaking.” Implicit in this view is a deep respect for Afghani culture. Foundational to it is a belief that Afghans cannot be mere “clients” or “partners” in the reconstruction of Afghanistan: they must be its authors, helping their country regain its pride by preserving its culture. In doing so, Afghans will begin to build a new future. The road ahead is long but Stewart and Turquoise Mountain are taking the long view. That’s a pragmatism that policymakers and politicians will do well to honor as their attention refocuses on Afghanistan.