THE SCHOOLS THE TALIBAN WON'T TORCH....
December 18, 2007
Kevin Drum
The Taliban has been increasingly resurgent in Afghanistan over the past year, but our
problems there go well beyond the military. The Washington Post reported on Monday
that "Afghanistan is so poor and so starved for modern infrastructure, one senior
administration official said, that it could well be 'a longer, if not larger, challenge than
Iraq.'" A day earlier, the New York Times reported that Nicholas Burns, the under
secretary of state for political affairs, "was coordinating another internal assessment of
diplomatic efforts and economic aid — the sorts of 'soft power' assistance beyond combat
force that officials agree are required for success."
In the December issue of the Monthly, Gregory Warner says a big part of the soft-power
problem is simple funding: "According to the RAND Corporation, the American-led
nation-building effort in Afghanistan is the least-financed such effort in sixty years." The
solution, though, isn't just more funding, but funding the right kind of programs:
In a country where almost all the recent news has been bad news, the National Solidarity
Program, or NSP, offers a rare glimmer of hope....The novel thinking behind the National
Solidarity Program is largely the work of Scott Guggenheim, a maverick World Bank
staffer who in the late 1990s pioneered a similar program in Indonesia.
....Guggenheim designed a program that would distribute small grants to villages....Local
leaders were charged with administering the projects and required to take bookkeeping
classes and keep minutes at planning meetings. Billboards above project sites indicated
how money had been spent, encouraging local oversight. "The core elements were
requiring that citizens participate and that there be high levels of transparency about how
money was being transferred and used," one of Guggenheim's former Bank colleagues,
Dennis de Tray, now at the Center for Global Development in Washington, said. "It had
to be auditable."
....Maybe the most surprising characteristic of NSP projects is security related. In a
survey last year of school burnings by the Taliban, Human Rights Watch observed that
schools built by the NSP have less chance of being destroyed by insurgents than schools
built by other aid programs. The reason, as Dennis de Tray explains, relates to the matter
of local ownership. "If you're the Taliban, you feel some comfort in attacking things built
by foreigners," de Tray says. "But you don't want to create animosity among citizens
you're trying to recruit to your side."
The NSP has other benefits as well: village councils that successfully complete projects
can apply for additional grants, and after the fourth or fifth grant cycle, Guggenheim
says, "something like real responsive government started to emerge."
Unfortunately, although other countries have increased their funding of NSP, the United
States has actually decreased its contribution. The result is fewer villages participating,
and fewer of them getting to the stage where the grants start to produce real changes in
the way local governments become more responsible, more closely aligned with the
central government, and less vulnerable to the Taliban. And the savings involved? A tiny
fraction of what we spend on military and counternarcotics efforts.
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