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In Afghanistan, the UN Can Do the Nation Building

By Barbara Crossette

Dec. 16 -- The United States has a new policy on Afghanistan, and the United Nations will soon have a new top envoy in Kabul. This is an optimum time to join forces to give the Afghans at least a shot at stability. If Americans do not want to commit resources to nation building, the UN does. That’s what its work is all about.

The UN has a wealth of experience and knowledge to offer Afghanistan, where it has been a presence to one degree or another through more than a quarter-century of political upheaval, a Soviet invasion and civil war among the “holy warriors” who drove out the Russians and then turned on each other. A range of UN agencies worked with the Taliban before 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion.

It hasn’t been easy, or even rewarding, work. But the best UN people have, over the years, organized food production and distribution, health care and disease prevention, schools, jobs for women, the building of government institutions and processes and provided expertise in narcotics control. The UN has an institutional grasp of the cast of characters and the culture. It is also prepared for the long haul, which NATO is not.

Catherine Bertini, executive director of the World Food Program in the late 1990s, said in an interview that her agency had been working in Afghanistan for 20 years when the Taliban took over Kabul almost without a shot in 1996, to the relief of many Afghans, and her agency had to adapt.

“I remember the first time they put out their one-piece-of-paper sheet – I don’t remember the title, but it was rules for women and girls,” she said. “Somebody had faxed us [in Rome] a copy and it said girls couldn’t go to school and women couldn’t work, and women couldn’t go outside the house without a blood male relative. We thought it was just some goofy joke -- and all of a sudden it became reality.”

For the next five years, the program’s staff in Afghanistan maneuvered the thicket of rules and threats. The UN never gave the Taliban the country’s General Assembly seat, which allowed agencies some space to resist what was technically an illegitimate regime, Bertini said. But the danger of programs being shut down always existed because, illegitimate or not, the Taliban ran the country. The World Food Program turned its attention to the vital bread supply and used it as a bargaining tool.

The UN’s Work, Embattled

UN staff in Kabul mourn colleagues killed in an attack on a guesthouse in October. Five UN workers died altogether.  UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein.

“Establishing bakeries,” Bertini said, “was done by Afghan women staff, who went to the Taliban in seven major cities and said, Sir, because women can’t go out of the house, widows are just going to shrivel up and die at home and you can’t let that happen. We’ll set up these bakeries run by women and WFP will provide all the support for it. And they all said, Yes. It was just fabulous. Those bakeries were really life savers.”

The World Food Program was on the verge of conducting a census of the poor after threatening to close bakeries if it was denied permission to do the census, when the US invasion halted operations.

Not only local politics but also Security Council politics and public opinion in the US, among other nations, hounded the UN’s work and still does. Carol Bellamy, a former US Peace Corps director who was executive director of Unicef before and after the US invasion, remembered getting calls from Americans after 9/11 demanding to know how she could even think of continuing her polio immunization campaign among Afghans.

“Well, because you don’t want them to get polio,” was her response, she said in an interview. “It was a hard place to work in. It was just really hard.” And now, she added, the threat against humanitarian aid workers has made the job worse. “The most critical thing in development is developing trust. But it’s harder now.”

“The UN, by virtue of being the UN, has had to engage with some pretty terrible characters around the world,” Bellamy said, “but you still had to do that, whether it was the DPRK [North Korea] or the Taliban or the rebels in eastern Congo. You could think what you thought, but you had to make sure people were eating, or people were sleeping, or kids weren’t dying.”

Negotiating Cultures on a Tightrope

Translating international concerns into the tenets of local cultures has become a UN skill. Bernard Frahi, a former French police director who is deputy chief of operations for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said that when he was working with the Taliban in the late 1990s, he had to convince them that opium cultivation for the production of heroin was a sin in Islam. For a year, poppy production collapsed. But the UN, strapped by sanctions, could offer no other income generation in return.

In Afghanistan, as in Cambodia earlier and Timor-Leste more recently, the UN has tended to opt for a “light footprint” politically, allowing neophyte governments to stumble through their own institutional development. It is a controversial policy, with many critics.

The debate over the extent of UN political power fed the clash between Kai Eide, a Norwegian and the UN’s top representative in Kabul this year, and his American deputy, Peter Galbraith. Facing obvious fraud in Afghan elections, Eide wanted to let new Afghan institutions deal with the crisis; Galbraith wanted tougher UN action against abuses, essentially seizing the initiative from the government. Galbraith was dismissed by the UN; Eide announced he will not renew his contract, which expires in March. A new opportunity opens on both sides.

A stronger partnership between the US and the UN, which President Obama has signaled he would like to see -- not only in Afghanistan -- would certainly improve the UN’s effectiveness and reputation and set the stage for future collaboration elsewhere.

A Legacy of Errors

A lot of history needs to be worked through, however. Washington made some disastrous mistakes in Afghanistan in the last 20 years. It turned its back on the country after Soviet forces withdrew in 1989. When the Taliban first emerged in the mid-1990s to put an end to the ensuing violence, the US refused to deal with the group as it strangled the country with sanctions, thus heaping on many more hardships for Afghans.

The field was left open to Al Qaeda. Then, after 9/11, the Americans chose as their allies the very brutal warlords of the Northern Alliance, whom the Taliban had displaced. The warlords – known, not incidentally, for their abuses of women -- got Kabul back.

US policy officials forced the hapless Hamid Karzai into this environment. As a handpicked president, Karzai lacked a militia or a power base, says Lakhdar Brahimi, a former top UN envoy in Afghanistan who ran the 2001 Bonn conference, which devised the current government system. Brahimi, stunned by Washington’s embrace of the Northern Alliance, wanted to involve some moderate Taliban in the Bonn talks. He was roundly vetoed by Washington.

With a new international conference on the future of Afghanistan looming in January, Americans are, ironically, looking for “moderates” among a much more violent resurgent Taliban. And the warlords are still there.

This week in London the Guardian newspaper said that Prime Minister Gordon Brown may be preparing to use the January conference to propose that two senior coordinators be installed in Kabul, one from the UN and the other from NATO. Many in the UN might chafe at being teamed up with a Western military alliance, but it would be a step in the right direction for more coordination between civilian experts and the people who will have to protect them and the Afghan civilians the UN is there to help.

To respond to this article, send your comments to publications@unausa.org.

Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.

Keywords:

Afghanistan and United States, Afghanistan and United Nations, Lakhdar Brahimi, Carol Bellamy, Hamid Karzai, Northern Alliance, Taliban, Bernard Frahi, Al Qaeda, Obama, Kai Eide, Peter Galbraith, World Food Program, Catherine Bertini