Rory Stewart on U.S. Policy in Afghanistan

Home page photo credit: Valerie Keeler, International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is increasing as President Obama has delivered on a campaign promise to boost the number of American troops there in order to improve security and help rebuild the nation’s ailing infrastructure. Rory Stewart, professor of the practice of human rights and director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, spent several years in Afghanistan as founder and Chief Executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the regeneration of the historic commercial center of Kabul. He is author of the acclaimed book “The Places in Between,” the story of his 6,000 mile journey on foot across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal.

Q: Please discuss the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, some eight years after the fall of the Taliban.

Stewart: Afghanistan has never been so important. The new Obama administration is sending in another almost 30,000 troops, all told. The U.S. probably next year will be spending another hundred billion dollars in the country. And yet, eight years after the fall of the Taliban, we’re still not quite sure what we can achieve in the country.

A balance sheet of our successes and failures would suggest that we’ve done quite well in education, health, and setting up a central bank and ministry of finance. But there has been a real failure to create the coherent structures of government, any rule of law. Basically the situation in southern Afghanistan is dangerous and lawless. There are a lot of bombs going off; there are serious attacks by Taliban insurgents. The human rights situation is very difficult. There’s a great deal of poverty in the center and north of the country. So the question at this stage, eight years on is, are we actually going to be able to win in Afghanistan, to succeed, or even stabilize the country? Or is this situation simply too complex for us to have the kinds of levers to change things?

Q: Are there any encouraging signs of progress in terms of security, economic development, and public sector infrastructure?

Stewart: You can almost divide Afghanistan in two. The center and north of the country are relatively progressive, relatively western-friendly, and in those areas dollars go quite a long way. So there’s been a real improvement, for example, in provision of education and health care in central Afghanistan. In Kabul, where I was a few weeks ago, nearly five million people have access to electricity at the moment. You can take a road from Kabul up to Mazar-e-Sharif where you can drive in about three and a half hours from one end of the country to the other. All of this has happened since the invasion.

On the other hand, down in the south and eastern country, there are many, many problems. The Taliban control many of the rural areas; there are a lot of drugs being grown; a lot of the schools that we build are destroyed shortly after we build them. Even the main highways are not safe.

Q: You have criticized the U.S. policy of boosting its troop presence in Afghanistan. What steps would you recommend that the United States and the international community take to help stabilize the country and improve the lives of its citizens?

Stewart: What the international community needs to do is begin to learn from its mistakes: recognize that there are things we do well, and other kinds of things that for whatever reasons we don’t really have the skills or the wherewithal to deliver. So let’s look at our performance over the last eight years. We are reasonably good at delivering basic infrastructure. And Afghans are asking for it; they’re asking for irrigation, for roads, for electricity. The United States and its allies have the technical skills and the money to deliver those things.

There’s another category of issues, though, which are very important to the country but which we may be unable to do a great deal about. Those are issues to do with what kind of a nation Afghanistan is going to become; whether the Taliban are going to have increasing influence in Southern Afghanistan; what kind of direction Afghan society goes and how its justice system operates; how corruption operates. These are things which are important that we’d like to do something about, but it’s very difficulty for foreigners coming into somebody else’s country to deal with because they’re very closely connected to deep social, political, and economic structures. So, broadly speaking my advice to the international community would be to identify the things that we do well and that Afghans are asking us to do and to concentrate on those, and to recognize that maybe another category of things which, however important, however appealing, we many not be able to make much progress.

Q: How can and should the “war on terror” be conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan in order to maximize the gains and minimize the losses?

Stewart: I think the answer is to try to make the war on terror something that is clearly perceived by the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan – not as a war against Afghanistan or Pakistan, but as something which is targeting a relatively small number of people who are interested in international terrorist attacks against the United States. You can say to Afghans and Pakistanis, “there is this small group who are directly threatening our national security. We are delivering development goods here and, almost in exchange, we would like to be able to neutralize the people who pose a real threat to our national security.”

But you should keep it narrow, because when you begin to broaden it, when you begin to say “we’re also fighting the Taliban, we’re also taking on the war lords, we’re also taking on the drugs trade,” you end up not being perceived as simply going after a few hundred people associated with Osama bin Laden, but attempting to take on hundreds of thousands of people across the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and you begin to be perceived as an occupation.

So “war on terror” insofar as we continue to use that label, should be a pretty narrowly focused counter-terrorism operation. It shouldn’t expand to encompass counter-insurgency or state building.

Generally speaking, Afghanistan and Pakistan are no different from other countries of the world. People want a sense of autonomy, a sense of respect, a sense of communication, and they need, broadly speaking, to solve their own problems.

Afghans and Pakistanis – like Americans, like Europeans – in the end solve their own problems better than outsiders can do for them. They need to take initiative; they need to believe in the project. There are certain kinds of things we can do to facilitate – certain things we can do to provide financial support, providing training and targeted operations – but basically this is a program for Afghans and Pakistanis, this is not a program for the United States.

So: allow more space, more political space for Afghans and Pakistanis to develop a society which reflects their imagination, their political and social structures. Try to do what we can to make sure that they have space and those political structures are more progressive, more liberal, more humane, deliver more prosperity over 20 or 30 years. It’s a very complex issue, and just as if you were dealing with poverty in the United States, it’s something which there’s not quick fixes to and where the things that we can do as a government are relatively limited.

Q. How does the work you’re doing and the work of the Carr Center tie in with our understanding of these issues?

Stewart: One of the things that we’re very excited about is that at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy we are to gather six experts on Afghanistan and Pakistan who will be working with us for almost 18 months, day by day, in real detail about some of the assumptions of our policy, and trying to produce something which is coherent and convincing, defining why we’re there and what we can hope to achieve. I’m looking forward to this process because as someone who’s worked in government I’m aware that all too often you’re in a hurry; you’re rushing to get out a 60-day plan; you’re answering emails; there’s a new political priority that’s emerged. But the patient process of producing a strategy that’s genuinely thoughtful, coherent, that reflects the complexity of Afghanistan itself is something I think the Kennedy School and the Carr Center are very well placed to deliver, and that I’m very proud to work on with them.

Essentially what we’re hoping to do is to describe Afghan society as best as we can. This is a very bewildering situation. The population of the capital city of Kabul has grown from less than a million to more than five million people in the last five years. Millions of refugees have come back from Pakistan and Iran. It’s much too simple to say that this is a tribal society. In fact it is a society where we’ve gone from nearly zero to nearly six million mobile telephone users in the last five years. It’s also a society where perhaps 85 percent of people can’t read and write. One needs to describe that kind of society – a turbulent, modern, ancient state – and then once one has understood it better, describe what a policy would look like that could help support Afghanistan, whose strengths compensate for some of the weaknesses, and make it a more just, more humane society than it is today.

Interviewed by Doug Gavel April 17, 2009.

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Rory Stewart

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