By Hugh Williamson
Financial Times, 31 January 2007
The international body established to co-ordinate Afghanistan’s reconstruction effort marked its one-year anniversary on Wednesday by admitting it was struggling to make progress in the face of rising violence, waste and poor administration.
Meeting in Berlin, seven Afghan government ministers and diplomats from 22 countries stressed in a communiqué the “clear need for better connection and cohesion between reconstruction efforts with the necessary security assistance”.
Afghanistan’s Joint Co-ordination and Monitoring Board (JCMB) was set up in January last year to monitor a five-year roadmap drawn up in London to rebuild the country’s war-shattered infrastructure in the wake of successful elections.
The Afghan government admitted in a report presented in Berlin that both donors and Kabul had “jointly underestimated the depth of our challenges and the length of time required [to meet them]”.
The resurgence of the Taliban in 2006 – the worst year of violence since the US-led defeat of the Islamic extremists in 2001 – had also significantly set back reconstruction efforts, diplomats and Afghan officials admitted.
Worse still, the slow speed of reconstruction was spurring support for the insurgency among ordinary Afghans. Thomas Ruttig, an Afghanistan analyst in Berlin and former EU official in Kabul said slow progress with reconstruction meant “we have managed to lose the trust of a large share of the population, making, for some, the Taliban an alternative again”.
Another problem remains how much control the fledgling Afghan government has over international aid money used in the rebuilding effort. Diplomats concede the Afghan government should take more responsibility for rebuilding economic and political institutions – but admitted that Kabul often lacked the capacity and human resources to do so.
Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU foreign affairs commissioner admitted to the FT that donors continued to duplicate their aid efforts and work in parallel.
“Many donors are wasteful and do not co-ordinate with us”, in spite of the JCMB’s efforts said Amin Farhang, Afghan trade minister.
International donors have pledged about $20bn (€15.4bn, £10.2bn) for civil reconstruction between 2002 and 2010, but only a small portion of this has been spent by Afghan authorities with the rest handled by individual donors and aid agencies.
The reconstruction effort has also been crimped by a shortage of funds, with the US unveiling last week an additional two-year $10.6bn aid package including $2bn for reconstruction, in a move described by European diplomats as a US change of course.
Additional reporting by Sabine Muscat in Berlin and Daniel Dombey in London
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Citation: Hugh Williamson. "Afghan rebuilding hit by ‘violence and waste’," Financial Times, 31 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c87a9eb0-b14d-11db-b901-0000779e2340.html
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