Getting it Right, Eventually

Transitions Online, 2 October

The Hungarian and other new NATO members’ Afghan development projects are often inept, but even so vitally needed.

PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan | The little clinic next to the highway looks promising enough at first, its newly painted red-and-white walls a stark contrast to the general shabbiness of this war-torn and incredibly poor nation. Next to the building a painted sign declares proudly that the clinic is a gift of the Hungarian government to Afghanistan.

The only problem is that the place, ready for months now, stands empty – no doctors, no furniture, and certainly no patients – except for the caretaker, an old man who hasn’t received a salary in two months. He can’t even go to Kabul to complain, he says, because then who would look after the clinic? Or the empty building, rather, pointlessly built for some $60,000 because the Afghan government can’t afford to run it.

The clinic, built by the Hungarian Provincial Reconstruction Team on the Khinjan highway, was one of the projects that I visited in Baghlan province. I tried to gauge how one of the small European countries taking part in the Afghanistan war was dealing with a task many would assume is way above the weight of the new NATO members, lacking in experience as they are in expeditionary warfare and overseas development.

While perhaps not entirely representative in its total lack of success, the empty clinic tells us a lot about the problems NATO countries, and not only the Central and East Europeans, are experiencing here. Paykan Haideri, the president of the provincial council, says he doesn’t understand what the clinic is doing there, miles away from everything. He says if they’d only asked him, he’d have told the military reconstruction team, PRT in local parlance, to build it somewhere else. “Coordination has gotten better, but before we never knew what they were up to,” he says.

CROOKED COPS, INEPT ELITE

A pity, considering that Baghlan is one of the better places in the hellhole Afghanistan has become in the last three years. There is more security than in the war-torn south, although even here things are going sideways. Many districts have become no-go areas where even NATO treads carefully. Armed bandits roam the dirt roads, and there is some Taliban resistance targeting the international troops. The local police control the drug trade. Nongovernmental organizations are moving their headquarters to safer areas as roads have become too dangerous to travel.

Still, agriculture is doing better than in most places, there is even some industry, and the capital, Pul-e-Khumri, is bustling. NATO seems well-accepted partly because the province’s majority Tajiks hate the Taliban. “I am very grateful to the Hungarians. They keep the peace and they’ve even built a clinic,” says Ali Hussein, 43, a shopkeeper. Not everybody likes NATO so much, but it’s only in the Pashtun areas where I met with outright hostility (the Pashtun are the tribal group most closely affiliated with the Taliban).


In spite of this, development is not going too well. This is partly the government’s fault. The Afghan elite is astonishingly inept. Baghlan is on its eighth governor since 2001. “He has done nothing this year despite the fact that there is a drought, food prices are 50 percent up, and half the people are living on less than a dollar a day,” says one Western aid worker who didn’t wish to be named. The massive corruption and the ethnic divisions of the province are paralyzing the government. There are signs that the governor is trying to gain popularity by encouraging anti-Western feelings, an increasing problem after many bungled NATO raids.

Central to the war effort is development: making sure that the desperately poor Afghans don’t turn against the new Western-backed order. But the 215 Hungarian troops charged with getting Baghlan on its feet have no experience in development. They have a little money, some $4 million a year, but there doesn’t seem to be any real strategy. They built a mosque for the police, no doubt to win their support. They also spent $55,000 on an office for the local media. They built a sidewalk although there are no roads, and a kids’ playground although there are hardly any schools. The Khinjan highway clinic stands empty. Most of the projects, often far away from everything, have a very limited reach.

EVERYTHING TAKES FOREVER

The Hungarians’ PRT has only one civilian specialist, with most of the work done by troops. Development workers say that’s a mistake because the locals mistrust those in uniform. The soldiers also rotate too often, every six months. Development specialists in Baghlan say a stronger civilian presence is needed. The team has realized this and plans to hire another worker. But everything has to go through Budapest, where coordination is weak. The outcome of all this is that even the team commander, Lieutenant Colonel Tamas Sandor, admits that the effectiveness of its work leaves a lot to be desired.

This is hardly their fault alone. The entire development strategy for Afghanistan is a mess. Coordination is weak and it is unclear who is ultimately responsible. Many decisions are made in faraway capitals by people who have no idea about the country. To be fair, every little thing helps. “People here are so poor that it’s hard to actually misspend the money. But good will is not enough,” says a Western development specialist who asked not to be named for fear of getting into a conflict with his home government – his nervousness reflecting another problem, that of the obvious mistrust between the uniformed PRTs and civilian aid workers.

Sandor says his people are learning from their mistakes. They are trying to move away from health and education, the direction set by their NATO mandate, and concentrate on infrastructure and employment projects. This shift echoes what the locals – the governor, the council head, the people on the street – tell me: roads, water, jobs, electricity. “Build us one kilometer of road and we’ll be eternally grateful,” says Abdul Jabar Haqbin, the governor. “Everything takes forever,” the Hungarian commander says defensively. “There is little money. And our projects are small. To achieve a breakthrough, you’d need big investments so that the insurgents have no chance turning the people against the government. So that the people can believe they have a future.”

But the Hungarians, and the other new NATO members, are certainly trying. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania each has its own PRT, and the Poles are even fighting – as are the Romanians and soon the Hungarians. Many scoff that they are only doing it to please their new friend, the United States. Perhaps. But the Afghan children, most of whom were denied an education under the previous regime, and who are now filling the schools built by these governments – small contributions though they may be – probably aren’t bothered much.

Eltaf Najafizada contributed to this report.