Sylvia's Journal

Axel, Steve and I went to a lecture by our ex colleague Paul F who shared the findings of his research into the barely examined assumption that development projects will stabilize Afghanistan. It is the basis for policy decisions with enormous consequences.

This was not the first investigation into ‘aid effectiveness’ that I had heard about but this one included the military. Not surprisingly, given that aid was all thrown together into one basket, some of it was appreciated and some of it was useless.

Some of the very large development projects are actually contributing to the destabilization and undermining of the central government because of the opportunities for large scale fraud and corruption that they offer. The amounts of money that are sloshing around in these projects is obscene given that your average Afghan farmer (not a poppy farmer) makes about 300 dollars a year.

The competition that is generated to get a chunk of the pie sometimes turns deadly because settling of accounts is easy here where you can buy your way in and out of anything, including murder and justice.

The military, even in a relatively safe and stable province like Balkh, continues to be an irritant to the general population: the convoys that mess up already congested traffic and jeopardizes anyone in close proximity (we can attest to this from our experience in Kabul), the ignorance about cultural norms, language, the rapid turnover and lack of institutional memory and the easy money that is available to buy the peace here and there with all the perverse incentives that it sets up.

AFP reports in our local newspaper that US Special Forces blast heavy metal, country and rock music from an armored vehicle wired up to speakers that are so powerful that the sound can be heard two kilometers away whenever insurgents open fire. Somehow the military has convinced itself that his will force the hapless locals to choose between the Taliban and the Americans.

What are they thinking? The only people whose hearts and minds are won by the music are the American soldiers themselves who had a blast (pardon the pun) putting the play list together; everyone else is covering their ears and running for cover hating these heathen Americans more with every song.

What was the most worrisome information I got from the lecture was the size of the pot of money that is available to the military to ‘win hearts and minds.’ The Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) has increased its budget from 0 to 1.6 billion dollars in 7 years, leaving all the other so-called development partners way behind in the dust. The distortion that this money influx creates is grotesque.

I had always wondered about what people were thinking about this ‘winning hearts and minds,’ once it was done. What then? Could you lose hearts and minds easily after winning them? One researcher who looked into this found, no surprise, that you cannot stockpile goodwill. When the money dries up, people get upset again – there goes your hard-won heart and mind. Oops.