Keeping promises

One truism of counterinsurgency is that securing and winning over the population are the keys to success. So, what do the people of Afghanistan want? In December, ABC and the BBC conducted nationwide polling and discovered that one-third of Afghans said that poverty and unemployment were the biggest challenges confronting them. Another third named rising insecurity and violence. Meanwhile, relatively few Afghans were preoccupied by those issues that many Americans deem to be Afghanistan’s greatest problems. Only 14 percent of respondents said corruption and feckless government were the leading concerns, while a mere 2 percent selected the drug trade and the influence of foreigners. When asked to name the biggest danger in the country, around 70 percent of respondents chose the Taliban. The lesson flowing from all of this is that the United States must provide the kind of stability and prosperity that it promised Afghans after the overthrow of the Taliban.

On April 17, 2002, President George W. Bush spoke at the Virginia Military Institute, where General George C. Marshall had studied a century earlier. In his speech, he seemed to pledge some kind of Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. But no such outpouring of assistance ever came. Per capita U.S. aid to Bosnians following the end of the Balkan war in the mid-’90s was nearly 30 times that received by Afghans in the two years after the fall of the Taliban. Between 2001 and 2009, U.S. reconstruction and humanitarian aid hovered around an average of $1.75 billion annually-about $58 per Afghan per year. Ambassador James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s first envoy to the new Afghan government, has rightly observed that "the American administration’s early aversion to nation building" meant there was "low input" and, therefore, "low output," which resulted in "low levels of security and economic growth."

Nor have Afghans seen much for the approximately $36 billion in reconstruction aid that has flowed to their country since 2001. Many of these funds have been consumed by the various international organizations whose four-wheel drives clog the streets of Kabul. A 2008 report by the British charity Oxfam found that around 40 percent of aid to Afghanistan was funneled to donor countries to maintain home offices in the West and pay for Western-style salaries, benefits, and vacations. Another study found that less than 20 percent of international aid ended up being spent on local Afghan projects. Afghanistan remains one of the world’s poorest nations, on par with such basket cases as Somalia.

The United States could improve this state of affairs quite swiftly-certainly before the July 2011 deadline for some form of U.S. military drawdown. After years of war, there is no shortage of vital infrastructure in need of building or repairing. Focusing on several high-profile projects would provide much-needed jobs, establish the foundations needed for a functioning economy, and give Afghans a reason to resist the overtures of the insurgents. The most urgent, obvious task is to secure the Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, the most important road in the country, economically and politically. Under the Taliban, this route was pitted with giant potholes that could swallow cars whole. It was rebuilt as a blacktopped freeway by 2004, and, at that time, was the only large-scale reconstruction project to be completed since the U.S. invasion. Just two years later, the security situation had deteriorated so precipitously that to drive on the road without substantial security backup was a suicide mission. It remains so today.

To read the rest of this article, visit The New Republic, where this was originally published.

Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and at New York University’s Center on Law and Security, and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader. He is a national security analyst for CNN.