Alex De Waal
Afghanistan: “a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances”
When Nato concedes a draw in Afghanistan, it will be because of its failure to understand the country’s politics. But a deeper failure will lurk in the background. In the past decade the west has launched a huge experiment to build capable states in the world’s most difficult countries. Troops, technical advisers and aid budgets are the tools of choice. The experiment is said to have worked in East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; now Afghanistan, Congo and Sudan are top of the target list. All are failed or fragile states where patronage is paramount and where the political arena is a marketplace, not a debating chamber.
The problem is that Nato and the UN are terribly bad at patronage politics. Their operations are run from green-zone ghettoes and their representatives are risk averse, obsessed with procedures and rarely interacting with their hosts. No one in Afghanistan gets promoted for bending the rules to fit the reality of patron-client relations and the exchange of favours.
How did we get here? According to the conventional story, countries like Afghanistan are in trouble because they can’t sustain order, manage a budget, or deliver services. So we provide funds to kick-start development, charities to provide services, experts to run departments, and troops to enforce the law. A helpful cocoon emerges in which the state grows stronger. And when this state looks enough like the Czech Republic, we hand over the keys.
In 2005, the UN set up a peacebuilding commission to promote such technocratic state-building, which is especially fashionable in western aid departments. The state-builders normally show up after the peace agreements have been signed, give themselves four to six years to get results, and hold multi-party elections or a referendum on self-determination as a graduation ceremony. At the start it looks feasible and western governments, aware of their treasuries and fickle publics, rarely admit that the process might be much slower.
Yet even in tiny countries such hopes are fatally optimistic. Take East Timor, heralded as one of the UN’s successes. Its 1m people received $565m in support from 2002-05, backed up by Australian troops. But the country was soon back in crisis; in 2008 there was a coup attempt. The model is more unsustainable for larger countries: it would take tens of billions of dollars to similarly support Congo’s 66m people.
Look at statebuilding from another point of view: that of an embattled ruler. To him, all those dollars and foreign troops are a huge boon. The money can buy off some opponents, while foreign soldiers fight the rest. Strong, autonomous government departments, however, are a genuine threat. A chief of staff might launch a sudden coup, or a finance minister may put rival warlords on his payroll. Secret ballots are a problem too: it’s hard to pay off local powerbrokers under the eyes of election monitors. The ruler might speak the language of the rule of law. But the real game is buying loyalty. A well-managed, inclusive patronage system is often the only way of running such countries.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai is a case in point. A more talented politician might have been able to strike better deals with local powerbrokers, so that posts and payoffs were bargained for in backrooms, not with Kalashnikovs and roadside bombs. But skilful management cannot resolve Karzai’s main dilemma: any bargain he strikes is good only so long as his US backers remain in place. Both Karzai and his opponents know that the surge of 40,000 extra troops proposed by US General McChrystal is unsustainable, and that any agreements dependent on battlefield advances will be short-lived at best. Underneath the old model remains: a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances.
Even worse, Nato has crippled Karzai’s ability to bargain properly. Foreign firepower and funds give him the strongest hand in the souk, but western demands to stamp out corruption and defeat the Taliban stop him playing his best cards. And peace established by foreign troops, village by village, will quickly break down once the troops are gone—meanwhile, their very presence sparks disputes.
So the ruler has a fine line to tread. He must be strong enough to be indispensable to his foreign backers, but not so strong that they withdraw. Congo’s Joseph Kabila has played this hand masterfully. Following his disputed election in 2006, he has contrived to get the UN to increase its peacekeeping contingent and hunt down his adversaries. Best of all, the international criminal court has put his most formidable rival in the dock for war crimes. But should the troops withdraw, Congolese provincial leaders who have been underpaid for their loyalty will demand more—at the point of a gun.
Karzai’s best asset is that he knows how his country works, with loyalties transacted on the basis of kinship, faith and cash. The Taliban showed that a government can be run cheaply on the first two alone. The US is handicapped because it has only the third. In the months after 9/11, the Americans dollarised Afghanistan’s patronage system, flying in planeloads of shrink-wrapped $100 bills to pay off warlords, while putting on a fireworks display for the media to pretend that military might, not bribery, defeated the Taliban. It worked. But this hardheaded approach was then abandoned in favour of the illusion that, freed from the aberrant Taliban, Afghanistan would begin a path towards western-style democracy.
Today, it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage. This would mean different priorities, like taking control of the drugs market to deny the Taliban its best source of funds. A new patronage system could eventually be made fairer and more inclusive, perhaps allowing institutions to grow around it slowly. But this means thinking like an Afghan politician, not an international peacebuilder. If the west cannot follow this path, it will join the other superpowers humbled in the Hindu Kush. The war in Afghanistan will become more about salvaging Nato than about building a central Asian Denmark. And should Nato withdraw, others—perhaps China—will set the more modest goal of political stability, and pay hard cash to get it.
Manneken Pis
Rasmussen: polish me a grape
At Nato a wave of nervousness has greeted the arrival of the new secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a man so renowned as a control freak that, during his time as Danish premier, the contents of the prime ministerial fruit bowl became a national joke. When interviewing him journalists noticed how, before eating a grape, Rasmussen would carefully select and then polish it several times on his jacket before popping it in his mouth. Rasmussen’s war on germs extends to cutlery, which he often wipes on a napkin before use—even in the smartest of restaurants. And the new Nato secretary general is said to avoid touching lavatory door handles.
Though Nato’s cleaners will be under greater pressure than ever before, anxiety is highest in the organisation’s press service. Rasmussen was the first Danish political leader to employ a spin doctor and is bringing at least one communications aide with him. He has long thought that Nato needs to sharpen its presentation and was getting involved even in the era of his Dutch predecessor Jaap De Hoop Scheffer (whose regime was so low-key that he won the nickname “De Hoop-less”). Denmark funded the Nato internet television channel natochannel.tv, which Rasmussen launched alongside De Hoop Scheffer.
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Manneken Pis
At Nato a wave of nervousness has greeted the arrival of the new secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a man so renowned as a control freak that, during his time as Danish premier, the contents of the prime ministerial fruit bowl became a national joke. When interviewing him journalists noticed how, before eating a grape, Rasmussen would carefully select and then polish it several times on his jacket before popping it in his mouth. Rasmussen’s war on germs extends to cutlery, which he often wipes on a napkin before use—even in the smartest of restaurants. And the new Nato secretary general is said to avoid touching lavatory door handles.
Though Nato’s cleaners will be under greater pressure than ever before, anxiety is highest in the organisation’s press service. Rasmussen was the first Danish political leader to employ a spin doctor and is bringing at least one communications aide with him. He has long thought that Nato needs to sharpen its presentation and was getting involved even in the era of his Dutch predecessor Jaap De Hoop Scheffer (whose regime was so low-key that he won the nickname “De Hoop-less”). Denmark funded the Nato internet television channel natochannel.tv, which Rasmussen launched alongside De Hoop Scheffer.
It is a fair bet that natochannel.tv, which dispenses images of troops and weaponry in Afghanistan, will start transmitting more pictures of the alliance’s secretary general in commanding poses. As prime minister during his country’s presidency of the EU in 2002, Rasmussen allowed a Danish documentary-maker behind-the-scenes access to private meetings and events. Several politicians emerged from the resulting film looking less than impressive, the leading casualty being Per Stig Møller, the foreign minister, who was shown being summarily overruled by his prime minister during discussions.
Jacques Chirac, then the French president, was also furious after being surprised when the camera crew were allowed access to restricted areas at a summit. One person did, however, appear to be very much in control in the film, with never a hair out of place: Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
ASHTON FIGHTS BACK
With the threat to her job out in the open, Britain’s trade commissioner, Catherine Ashton, is fighting back. As Manneken Pis reported last month, Shriti Vadera, a close ally of Gordon Brown, is a rival for Ashton’s post as commissioner. But Ashton, who proved a wily leader of the House of Lords, is not going to give up without a fight. She has told Gordon Brown that she is not going back to the Lords in a party capacity; it’s either another term as a commissioner or nothing.
Ashton is hoping to chalk up the odd success on the trade dossier and hopes are high that a deal with South Korea, which eluded her predecessor, Peter Mandelson, could finally be struck later in the year. Its fate still hangs in the balance because, while the Germans have dropped their opposition, the Italians and French are not yet on board. But Ashton has taken advantage of the fact that Mandelson, was, to put it politely, not universally popular. Her strategy has been simply to do what didn’t come naturally to Mandelson: be nice to people. She hit it off with Ron Kirk, the US trade representative and the two have solved one longstanding transatlantic dispute (over hormones in US beef) while agreeing to disagree on others (like the Boeing-Airbus case). By contrast Mandelson’s relations with two of the three US counterparts with whom he dealt ranged from phone-slamming (Robert Zoellick) to mutual distrust (Susan Schwab).
More importantly, Ashton gets on with her boss, José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president. Barroso will have a crucial say in her future because he will negotiate with Brown over the portfolio offered to the next British commissioner. If he was amenable to keeping Ashton at trade but wouldn’t offer another candidate such a good post, that would strengthen Ashton’s case considerably. Right now Barroso faces an anxious few weeks because the European parliament has yet to vote on his second term as president. And who better to turn to for help than an expert in parliamentary management with links to the troublemaking centre-left? “Cathy is being very helpful to Barroso,” said one Eurocrat, “and Barroso’s a clannish sort of politician.
Anthony King
Trident submarines: how useful are they?
In his recent piece for Prospect, Anatol Lieven rightly raises the issue of current British defence policy, questioning current procurement programmes and the strategic concept of global intervention primarily with the US and/or Nato which underpins their development. Eurofighter, designed to interdict hostile jets, seems almost laughably superfluous, while the Royal Navy’s carriers–and especially Trident submarines–are of questionable strategic utility.
In order to escape from the current defence predicament, Professor Lieven logically proposes that Britain return to Europe to develop a more regionally focused defence policy. He articulates a vision of defence which inspired the St Malo agreement in 1998 and which many Europeans today would support.
Yet, the logical proposal of reinvigorated European defence co-operation runs in the face of current developments. The St Malo agreement and the European Security and Defence Policy which developed from it have been extremely disappointing. Europeans have been able to conduct few significant interventions even on their own borders. While neutral countries like Ireland and Sweden have been willing to contribute to these ventures, most of the other European nations have been reluctant to contribute. Germany has been very reticent here while France has typically used European missions to assert itself against the US and to further its own interests in Africa. There is very little appetite in Europe for the kind of European initiative which Lieven proposes.
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Jonathan Power
Bruce Riedel: Obama's yes man in Afghanistan?
“We must have an exit strategy”, said President Barack Obama on television yesterday. But what about an entry strategy, or should we say, after seven years of steadily losing the war in Afghanistan ,a re-entry strategy?
In a month’s time Obama will descend on NATO at its Brussels HQ and demand that the Europeans help out.
Well before then, Obama will have on his desk the interagency review of policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan that he has requested.
We should be able to guess its bias, if not every details of its contents. It is being chaired by Bruce Riedel. He is a former CIA officer and a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues.
We know his views (and they are easily accessible on the Brookings website). My first reaction on reading them is why on earth didn’t Obama give the job to his old mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski or to Brent Scowcroft, the wise owl of Republican administrations (but not the last one). Why choose some lower level official who is used to being bossed around and told what to do? Both Brzezinski and Scowcroft have experience in standing close to a president and also, when necessary, standing up to him.
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Jonathan Power
Samuel Huntington in 2004
Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, was harping on an old theme at her Senate confirmation hearing last week. She said her top international principle was to â€strengthen America’s position of global leadership.†This reminds one of her Clinton administration predecessor, Madeleine Albright, who said that â€America is the indispensable nation†and â€We stand tall and hence see further than any other nation.†It suggests that other nations are dispensable and that American indispensability is the source of wisdom. What, then, about Iraq, global warming, Palestine/Israel, the International Criminal Court and financial probity?
â€One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership in the United States”, a high British diplomat told me. â€Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralismâ€. And this was said before George W. Bush came to power. Today, even the instinctively pro American British Conservative Party has sought to step back from American hubris, no vote winner on this side of the pond. Sad to say, even President Barack Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs two years ago that the US â€must lead the world once more.â€
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