Is Afghanistan ready to take its fate into its own hands? Not yet.
The first thing you notice about the Canadian mission in Afghanistan is how tired people are. At the embassy in Kabul, at the airfield and Provincial Reconstruction Team's camp in Kandahar, even the military's staging base Camp Mirage"”they're all going flat out, working 18-hour days, seven days a week.
The second thing you notice is that everyone vibrates with a sort of high-strung urgency. A lot has been written in recent months about the military surge, thanks to Barack Obama's decision to flood Afghanistan with 30,000 additional troops by summertime. But what you don't get from the papers is a sense of the surge of effort and intensity from everyone involved"”military personnel for sure, but also the diplomats, development workers, and civilian advisers who are all pitching in to the whole-of-government project of building a stable and functioning state.
After almost a decade of mucking about in Afghanistan, the next 12 to 18 months will decide the country's fate. In one of the many sporting metaphors that people naturally slip into, one Canadian military official described it as "the last college try."�
How are things shaping up? It's hard to find anyone who will utter a discouraging word. These are almost all type-A personalities, optimists and overachievers used to succeeding at whatever they put their minds to. But as upbeat as they all are, despite their exhaustion, and despite the Sisyphean character of the war against the insurgency, Afghanistan's fate does not depend on the efforts and abilities of these Canadians, or their counterparts from the U.S., Britain, Australia, Japan and the rest of the 42-member International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The future of Afghanistan depends ultimately on the Afghan people, and there is little indication that country is remotely ready to stand on its own two feet.
While public attention is focused almost exclusively on our combat mission in Kandahar, Canada has a hand in helping rebuild almost every aspect of the Afghan state. In Kandahar, we are helping train and advise Afghan National Army battalions, while we have police trainers helping build up the basic competence of the Afghan National Police. We are engaged in large-scale engineering and public works projects, building schools, helping train the judiciary and modernize the correctional services, and delivering humanitarian aid. Add Canada's efforts to that of the dozens of other international partners, and it is clear that what began in 2001 as a military campaign to overthrow the Taliban has evolved into a comprehensive plan to build an Afghan state almost from scratch.
To get a sense of the scale of the challenge, here are some facts about Afghanistan. Life expectancy is 44 years. It has the second highest infant mortality rate in the world. Outbreaks of diseases such as hepatitis and polio are common, and much of the population is generally unhealthy, malnourished, has bad teeth, and"”in Kabul anyway"”suffers from breathing air said to be full of dusty fecal matter. On the economic side, the country is grindingly poor. Corruption is rampant; last year Afghans paid bribes equivalent to one-quarter of the country's GDP. Municipal infrastructure is very weak, with electricity supply unreliable even in the cities. The literacy rate is generously estimated to be around 28 per cent (43 per cent of men, but only 13 per cent of women), although there hasn't been a proper census in over 30 years.
The nub of the problem in Afghanistan is what everyone calls "capacity,"� a shifty developmental term that refers, more or less, to the ability of a society to shape and control its own institutions. In the Afghan context, capacity refers primarily to the human resources needed to run a state"”people with the basic education and skills to do anything more complicated than simple manual labour. And Afghanistan has virtually no capacity. It isn't just that people are uneducated or illiterate. The more fundamental difficulty, as one official put it, is that we're talking about people who for the most part don't even know the difference between a hammer and a screwdriver.
The human resources problem is the bottleneck that everyone working in Afghanistan says is the biggest obstacle to lasting progress. We can give them all the money we have, offer them the best technical advice, provide them with the best training and equipment, but ultimately, success hinges on the ability of the Afghan people to run their own ship of state.
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