Afghan NGOs: The Angels are in the Details

Today's Afghan NGO conference - "An Alternative View: Afghan Perspectives on Development and Security" - was filled with brilliant, capable, and powerful minds proposing broad directions. But the effort lacked boldness, clarity, and tangibility.

Overwhelmed as I was by a painful deja vu (this conference was almost identical to about five previous events and about a dozen academic journal special issues), part of me was dreaming of releasing a cage full of jaguars and bats just to get people out of their academic routine and focus on persuading the policy-makers who will be meeting on Thursday. Imagine the pandemonium!

There were indeed highlights. Walking from Soho to Canada House to Trafalgar Square with Una Moore, who now writes for UN Dispatch, was of course an energetic review of all things Afghanistan. Once at the event, Verag Kaufer and Ed Pomfret of Oxfam were very helpful in getting us situated.

First off, Una and I ran right into Karim Khoja, the CEO of the Roshan communications company and Chair of Harekat, and Suleman Fatimie, the CEO of Harekat, both of whom were very eager to portray their huge efforts as testament to Afghan indigenous ingenuity. And their case of the #5151 telephone hotline via which people can file complaints about corruption of bureaucratic hurdles was grand.

We ran into Ben Jackson, the UK Director of Crisis Action, and had a good talk; also Arezo Qanih, Programme Officer for the Educational Training Centre for Poor Women & Girls of Afghanistan; many others, too. We ultimately de-briefed with Muhammad Sabir Siddiqi, the founder of Nebras ("Candle"), an NGO that's part of an effort to network Afghan policy change experts.

After turning curmudgeonly over the lack of specifics and lack of new information, I turned to Siddiqi for a de-brief. "What's the point?" I asked him, inspired by some of his questions during a session.

The conference process has become kind of a mass production for Afghan NGOs, he agreed. Generally, Westerners come in with bold but not always deep rhetoric, while Afghan leaders in these kinds of forums play it super-safe, listing broadly appealing directions. I asked him to clarify some specific recommendations following the broad points of the conference.

From his point of view, security and military strategy is quite different. The insurgency, for example, could really be broken down into sections, each requiring a very different approach not only from security forces but from a distinctly national civil society meant to support the population as a whole. Some insurgents were true Taliban, despising the West and liberal values, but there were plenty of other, less volatile insurgent groups fighting because of imbalances in policy and aid, for food and protection, or fighting between each other over tribal differences.

The most critical and timely recommendation he made, which I agree with, was that international donors and NATO had best be very careful with the progress of using aid as part of counter-insurgency. Attention here: Often programs have shifted aid projects to focus on frontline Taliban-threatened areas at the cost of leaving less aid for loyal non-frontline areas. Locals who have been loyal and peaceful, Siddiqi claims, have been angered by this trend, feeling punished for not being insurgents. Siddiqi worries this could turn peaceful areas out of loyalty.

For a list of speakers at the event, go here, and we'll have more details to follow in additional posts.

Photo credit: AfghanKabul (Farah Province, Afghanistan)