Let's Listen to Afghanistan's Civil Society

With all the blogging and tweeting about troop levels and strategy after Obama's announcement that yes, the the US will be sending 30,000 more troops, I wish a few more words could be spared for the issue of governance --that is, beyond the exceedingly tired and empty snarking along the lines of heh heh, guys, that Afghan government sure is corrupt!

Not. Helpful.

There is a broad consensus --from the White House to the Pentagon to Kabul to the blogosphere and Twitterverse-- that Afghanistan's future hinges on more than just the achievement of military goals, but commentators and policy-makers are still too hazy on details of the "other stuff," and Afghan civil society voices are strangely absent from most forward-looking Afghanistan discourse in the US and Europe.

There's an obvious problem with this.

It is Afghans who will live and die by the decisions made over the next few years, and especially over the critical next 12 months. Their opinions should matter to us, and we should not only listen to, but seek out, their priorities and concerns. It's not like Afghan civil society doesn't have these.

A coalition of fifteen humanitarian, human rights and civic organizations, comprising fourteen Afghan NGOs and Oxfam, addressed a letter to the Afghan government in October, outlining civil society’s key recommendations for president Hamid Karzai's second term in office.

Though aimed at the Afghan government, the document should serve to inform decisions by the international community as well.

In the area of governance, specifically, the NGO coalition’s key recommendations are:

Vetting. The NGOs recommend that the government assess the effectiveness of current vetting procedures and mechanisms and seriously implement vetting of political appointees to government positions.

Police Reform: the use of external review mechanisms, including parliamentary review; better training generally and continuation of the professionalization process; recruitment of more women; steps to recruit a more ethnically balanced force; and refraining from deploying police officers for offensive counterinsurgency operations that could undermine their ability to deliver local security.

Judicial Reform: more support for judicial reform at sub-national levels; external review of the judicial system by parliament and other actors; more emphasis on enforcement of gender equity laws; training of commonly-used informal providers of justice in national legal codes; and expansion and monitoring of the appeals system.

Aid Transparency and Coordination. In this area, the NGO coalition recommends the Afghan government exert greater pressure on donors to provide timely information about aid activities, including those undertaken by Provincial Reconstruction Teams, to Afghan institutions and organizations. It also recommends that the government press donors to devote more funding to long term programming aligned with the Afghan National Development Strategy, focusing on meeting key benchmarks and alleviating regional imbalances in aid distribution.

[Photo: Women protest gender-based violence in Kabul. Fardin Waezi (UNAMA)]