How not to give aid

[thewalrus]

Afghanistan: How not to give aid
Published: Wednesday, July 25, 2012, 11:50 PM Updated: Thursday, July 26, 2012, 4:48 AM
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The way Thor Halvorssen sees it, trying to spend aid money in Afghanistan “is like giving booze and car keys to a teenager.”

Halvorssen is president of the Human Rights Foundation, and he’s skeptical, even scornful, of trying to make progress on human-rights issues in Afghanistan. On that, Halvorssen is far from alone.

“For Afghanistan at the moment, I’d have to say the picture is very pessimistic,” said James Hoge, chairman of the board for Human Rights Watch.

Human-rights and foreign-aid officers have been working intensely in Afghanistan, spending tens of billions of dollars, for more than 10 years. So, can Afghanistan be considered a laboratory of sorts to see what human-rights work can actually accomplish? It depends on whom you ask.

Some view Afghanistan as a special case. It’s like “trying to do development on an outpost on the moon,” said Karl Eikenberry, former U.S. ambassador there. Halvorsson said, “They’re still stuck in the 14th century. It’s just such a depressing thing.”

But the same is true in Somalia, Cambodia, Sudan and several other places where human-rights groups work. Heather Barr, Human Rights Watch’s representative in Afghanistan, said the country “is in many ways a perfect case study of how not to give aid.”

In Parwan Province a few weeks ago, a woman accused of adultery crouched in the dirt as a friend handed her husband an AK-47 assault rifle. He shot her multiple times, continuing to fire even after she collapsed, dead, as about 150 men stood on a nearby hillside, cheering. He then posted a video of the repulsive event for the world to see. The Afghan government did nothing. But then the video went viral, and government officials were forced to say something: The Taliban did it, they said — even though the video proved that was not so.

Javid Ahmad, an Afghan writer as well as a former aid worker and diplomat, figuratively shakes his head over the furor the woman’s death caused.

“She got attention because she got a tape,” he said. “But a lot of things like that are happening all the time but are basically undocumented, so people don’t know about it. It’s ubiquitous.”

Ten years after the first Western human-rights workers arrived, “honor killings happen on a day-to-day basis,” Ahmad asserted. “It’s gruesome. It’s really, really bad.” As for those Western workers, “I’m not sure the U.S. or Western footprint can help that at all. It’s not going away.” Ahmad is now with the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington.

The world has spent $55 billion in nonmilitary aid on Afghanistan since 2002. More than half came from the U.S. It’s impossible to know exactly what percentage was dedicated to human-rights work because so much of it is for cross-purposes. Is building schools for girls who had none before human-rights work?

In any case, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said in his most recent quarterly report that, when security for aid workers is figured in, the total nonmilitary funds Washington has appropriated since 2002 “is approximately $100 billion.”

What has all that spending accomplished? “The short answer is not much,” said Masood Farivar, a senior Afghan journalist. “Undoubtedly some of the work” carried out by Western agencies “has had a positive impact on people’s lives. But this has been the exception, not the rule.”

This spring, for example, Human Rights Watch published a damning report on the status of women. It quoted numerous victims, like one 15-year-old girl who took refuge with a family that drugged her and forced her into prostitution. Finally, the girl was thrown into jail.

“Ten years after the fall of Taliban rule, abuses against women and girls are widespread and redress limited or non-existent,” the report said. When Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch’s executive director, confronted Afghan officials with the report’s findings, he said the government defended itself by saying with a shrug: “That’s what’s always been done.”

Barr wrote the report and a week later, she said, the government, apparently embarrassed, did issue a directive saying girls should not be punished, even killed, “for running away to get marred.” She acknowledged, though, it’s impossible to know if anyone paid attention to that.

Last week, Human Rights Watch urged President Hamid Karzai to commute the death sentence of an Afghan soldier convicted of killing five French soldiers, noting that despite “10 years of donor assistance, the justice system remains weak and compromised.”

“The prison system is a nightmare,” Hoge said.

The problems run deeper than the sad status of women and a legal system that ignores human-rights laws passed under pressure from Washington.

Young boys are victims, too. For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, ages roughly 9 to 15, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun men in southern provinces are “bacha bazi,” the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.

But when Afghan men began making licentious approaches to young American soldiers a few years ago, the military found it so disconcerting that it hired a social scientist, AnnaMaria Cardinalli, to examine why this was happening. Her report, “Pashtun Sexuality,” startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked — and repulsed.

Cardinalli found “a longstanding cultural tradition in which boys are appreciated for physical beauty and apprenticed to older men for their sexual initiation,” her report said. “The fallout of this pattern of behavior over generations has a profound impact on Pashtun society and culture.”

Her report got a lot attention when it was published in 2010. But The Washington Post reported in April that the U.S. Embassy and human-rights workers say the practice is, nonetheless, “on the rise” today.

There’s no single reason for these manifest human-rights abuses. Islam is often the excuse for abusing women. But Islam strictly forbids homosexuality.

Eikenberry and others place part of the blame on the foundations of the modern state, settled during the Bonn Conference in 2002, when Afghan leaders, along with American and other Western leaders, settled on the country’s post-Taliban form of government.

“The state that was constructed in 2002 wasn’t in accord with realities on the ground,” Eikenberry said. The participants settled on a unitary national government, even though “Afghanistan has never had a strong unitary state. That was an error of the international community and an error of the Afghans.”

Even now, 10 years later, Hoge said, “the government remains all but invisible in much of the countryside.” The provincial and local governments the West has tried to strengthen, he added, “have not responded very well. There’s a government vacuum.”

So who’s to keep Afghan men from abusing women and children, sabotaging justice initiatives and committing other atrocities? Human-rights workers?

“Locals see foreign NGOs and human-rights organizations” with suspicion, Farivar said. “They view them as another arm of the American-led occupation pursuing their own vested interests.”

As Hoge sees it from New York, government officials in Kabul “haven’t responded very well to our reports.” And Ahmad believes that, “when you look at the actual outcome, there wasn’t much done for the Afghan people.”

In Tokyo this month, American and other world leaders pledged $16 billion more in nonmilitary aid to be spent through 2015, the year after Western forces are supposed to leave. In their formal declaration, the conferees said they wanted to emphasize “the importance of the delivery of assistance through adhering to the principles of aid effectiveness, that they cannot continue ‘business as usual’ and must move from promise to practice.”

No one seems optimistic about that after a decade of failure.

“I’m very skeptical,” Ahmad said, “about how millions of more dollars are going to help” what he calls his country’s “donor-drunk economy.”

For human-rights workers, Halversson said, “everything is impacted by the culture of the place where you are working.” The combination of endemic problems in Afghanistan “can lead to a colossal failure. Rule of law and civil society are completely suffocated.”

If he were called upon to administer the new $16 billion aid program just approved in Tokyo, Halvorssen said, “the first thing I would do is resign.”

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times.