The Challenges to Nation-Building

in Afghanistan continues......

International factors as superpower influence and pressure often delays nation and state building in the Second and Third Worlds. Nation building and state consolidation in many transitional states have been delayed or even arrested by both domestic and international factors and it was also likely that Afghanistan would be one of those.

It needs to be understood that the international response to Afghanistan was initiated as a “knee-jerk reaction” by external actors to the sequence of events that followed 11 September 2001. After the Cold War, Afghanistan was effectively neglected by much of the international community since 1992, and the UN efforts of assistance for Afghanistan remained consistently under-funded.

However, two weeks after the dismissal of the Taleban, a UN/World Bank/Asian Development Bank- sponsored consultation was held at Islamabad (27-29 November 2001) followed by a major inter governmental meeting on Afghan reconstruction held in Tokyo in January 2002. Barakat observes that “all relevant UN agencies and INGOs/NGOs were engaged in a scramble to submit plans, budgets and proposals, based on desk studies and inadequate assessment missions, fearful of being marginalized by the assumed and imposed urgency of the process.”

Therefore, the sectoral approach of the UN shows serious evidence of fragmentation and contradiction. For example, as Barakat says, Food Assistance (relief aid) and Food Security (agricultural and rural economic recovery) are regarded as separate ‘sectors’ despite the long

history of misdirected food aid seriously damaging post-war agricultural recovery.

These two sector plans similarly make no connection with other sectors such as Mine Clearance and Employment that have significant repercussions for the recovery of agricultural land and livelihoods.

Thus, the success of the entire reconstruction project was to depend on what the assistance community would focus on and whether they would concentrate on what was actually needed rather than on what is familiar.

To be continued....