How can a sustainable, legitimate and effective state be established in Afghanistan? As it moves from a transitional framework to a longer-term development framework, insurgency, opium and popular discontent threaten to undermine progress and further destabilise the country. This paper from the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) argues that while these threats require short-term action, sustainable solutions depend on improved governance, which in turn requires realistic statebuilding goals. Aid dependence, donor-driven assistance, limited state control over resources and budget assistance all present difficulties for statebuilding in Afghanistan.
Statebuilding invlolves a transition from working around the weak state to working with and through it as it strengthens. It requires taking decisions about collective goals and must be led by the recipient society itself to be effective. Statebuilding also requires managing the complex relationship between assistance and long-term measures on one hand, and aid dependency and short-term measures on the other – the ‘statebuilding paradox’. The relative failure to date of governance programmes to strengthen and improve the capacity of the state is in part due to conflicts between short-term political agendas and long-term statebuilding processes.
The relationship between statebuilding and international assistance in Afghanistan is affected by the quantity, delivery and effectiveness of aid:
- Aid quantity and direction has been largely determined outside Afghanistan, limiting the country’s ability to set priorities and weakening accountability and incentives to reform.
- The bulk of assistance has been delivered outside government control, through the External Budget. Channelling more money through the Afghan treasury (the Core Budget) would enable more effective accounting, co-ordination and spending prioritisation.
- Low and uneven government spending has resulted from planning and implementation difficulties, overestimation and aid bottlenecks. Channelling development money through the Core Budget presents the risk of unspent funds.
- Unclear, inefficient and harmful External Budget assistance weakens the state’s capacity to retain qualified personnel and dilutes upwards and downwards accountability.
- Statebuilding assistance has further suffered from early reliance on pillars in security sector reform, slow progress in public administration reforms, inadequate subnational spending and conflicting short-term political and long-term statebuilding agendas.
Whilst the Interim Afghanistan National Development Strategy (I-ANDS) and the Afghanistan Compact represent an important shift toward a comprehensive and strategic approach to security, development and governance, important issues still require attention:
- Strategies should be aligned with a realistic long-term state building agenda incorporating more concern for fiscal sustainability and the interactions between short- and long-term measures.
- Actors should seek an appropriate and aligned balance of Core and External Budget resources for public goods and service provision.
- They should improve efforts to locate, build and transfer human capacity and improve social accountability.
- The Afghan government should prioritise the development of the full ANDS, using the development of sector strategies as an anchor for this process.
- The government should elaborate the sub-national governance strategy and strengthen communication strategies within the state and between the state and citizens.
- Donors should increase Core Budget support, contribute to state capacity development, improve External Budget by identifying the most effective mechanisms and improve reporting. They should also explore ways to increase multi-year commitments, both by examining their own procedures and using multi-lateral channels.
