Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security.
An Agreement Grows in Bonn
Food started to flow to hungry Afghans in November, if in limited supply. In December, more than 115,000 tons of food, enough to feed 6 million refugees for 2 months, arrived in Afghanistan. This was the largest amount of food delivered to any country since the 1980s and one of the largest since the Berlin Airlift. The pounding poverty and tribal feuding continued. But by late January, the Afghans were no longer starving, as aircraft delivered food, dry clothing, medicine, and other supplies. President Bush declared that feeding the displaced people of Afghanistan would be his top priority in Afghanistan. It was.
The victors in the Afghan war inherited a thoroughly failed state, which they determined rebuild to keep the Taliban at bay. The most important of the early, post-Taliban, international documents was the Bonn Agreement, which created and legitimized the Afghan government; the basic legal structure, particularly the constitution; the Supreme Court; and the economy. Agreements were hammered out in Bonn in November 2001 among four main Afghan factions. Signed in December 2001, it created the Afghan Interim Authority (AIA) whose chairman, Hamid Karzai, took office on December 22, 2001.
It also pledged to hold elections, reorganize the armed forces and security and intelligence organizations, and legitimize the role of the United Nations and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as administrators of security, humanitarian, and reconstruction aid in Afghanistan. An Interim Authority would rule for 6 months, after which a Loya Jirga, a deliberative body of elders would convene to elect national-level representatives.
The Bonn delegates chose Hamid Karzai because he was trusted by Americans, was a Pashtun, and had political and administrative experience as a clan chief for the Polpolzai-Durrani clan, which produced Afghan kings for 200 years. Karzai had strong family connections to the U.S. He was studying political science in India when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. His family fled to major U.S. cities and opened Afghan restaurants. During the anti-Soviet war, Karzai soon moved to Pakistan to support the mujahedeen.
In Bonn, Karzai’s main rival, the veteran statesman Burhanuddin Rabbani, was not found suitable by the American and German governments. The Bonn Agreement did not satisfy all signatories or resolve all the nettling issues. But it did provide a basic peace agreement and a blueprint for building the then-tenuous peace into an enduring one. The donors would craft a blueprint for development in general sectors- generating economic growth; building an army, civil service, police services, communication, education, and health systems. The Taliban could challenge all these goals.
To Build an Economy
Economists at the World Bank determined that merely balancing the economy was insufficient for Afghanistan’s long-term prospects. That approach would keep the country at relatively primitive levels of human development. An impoverished Afghanistan would be hostage to the Taliban’s resurgence. But developing Afghanistan would create stakeholders and stability. There would be a trickle-down effect across other sectors: the quality of civil service would improve if civil servants were paid higher wages and better trained; security would grow as the number of stakeholders in economic stability increased; and there would be greater capacity for health care and secular-oriented education. This reasoning is the foundation of contemporary human development theory and counterintelligence doctrine.
Bringing young men into the workforce would give them status and provide enough income to afford to marry. A married man would be less likely to join an insurgency because he would have family obligations. In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan’s economic growth spurred other human development sectors. It could happen again in an Afghanistan rid of the Taliban.
Some economists were guardedly optimistic, provided sufficient seed money was allocated to begin reconstruction and development projects in earnest. Afghanistan had, by Third World standards, pre-war success in developing key infrastructure projects, such as electric power and gas pipelines. The new government needed to repatriate the educated and talented who had fled the country during the Taliban period. The return of human capital in the post-Taliban era, particularly engineers, businessmen, and computer technicians, was seen as essential for sustained economic development. But they needed to be protected against the Taliban.
Building in the Villages and in the Provinces
In 2001 and 2002, pro-government donors to Afghanistan’s future were overwhelmed with the reconstruction and development demands. They determined to move quickly to outflank the incipient Taliban threat through building sustained, broad-sector economic growth. Beginning with handfuls of developmental specialists with a formidable military bodyguard, the provincial reconstruction team (PRT) became the engine of local economic growth and village stability.
PRTs were natural instruments for maintaining a light military “footprint" to guard against the Taliban while protecting developmental experts. The first phases of the conflict removed the Taliban and al Qaeda from power; the next phase focused on stabilizing the Karzai Regime and developing the country. By early 2002, the U.S. Army deployed the PRT’s precursor, the Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells, as small outposts to assess reconstruction and developmental needs. They were soon nicknamed “Chiclets,” a creative, if not precise, acronym, and comprised 10-15 soldiers, generally with civil affairs backgrounds. Soldiers worked with NGOs in the field.
Local Afghans had been contemptuous of many civilian aid workers in the early post-Taliban period, whom they saw as mollycoddled, excessively bureaucratic, and often lackadaisical. Many also stayed cloistered in safe compounds. In contrast, many Afghans in the Bamiyan Province respected the risk-taking Chiclet-5, whose members were actively and personally engaged with Afghans and could deliver on promises to protect them from the Taliban. The title of these teams was changed again in November 2002.
The first of the newly named PRTs was deployed to Gardez in November 2002. The province was considered a permissive environment for development. The team included staff from several U.S. agencies with interests in developing Afghanistan and in securing peace there. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) was a major player. Its development specialists served on the front lines of Afghanistan’s development efforts. A dean at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) underscored the need to serve in dangerous, contested territory in Afghanistan. “That (the developmental danger zone) is where the reality is. The Ronald Reagan Building (the headquarters of the AID) is Brigadoon.”
PRTs were also intended as temporary tools to provide stability and economic optimism. After the developmental and stabilization fundamentals were achieved, the PRT would be dismantled to allow traditional, indigenous development efforts. According to the plan, PRTs would coordinate the reconstruction process, identify and prioritize local projects, conduct village assessments, and coordinate with regional commanders. The Taliban grew to hate the PRTs, which signaled to Kabul that the PRTs were winning.
