Daljit Dhaliwal:
How much was pledged?
Mark Malloch Brown:
Well, it was about $4 or $5 billion. And over some years. And it's going to take, you know, a lot more than that, say, over the next decade to get Afghanistan to where I think we all want to see it. A stable society with a functioning
economy, and kids in school, and parents in regular work.
Daljit Dhaliwal:
I mean we've seen a shift in development over the past 20, 40 years, and it's become a lot more important now to foster democratic institutions. How would you characterize that shift, and why do you think it's happened?
Mark Malloch Brown:
Well, it is a dramatic shift. In the case of my organization, the U.N. Development Program, when I took it over three years ago, I declared that I was going to make the promotion of
democratic governance a number one priority as an organization, because I believed and believe so profoundly that it is the software of successful development. You can build bridges, you can dig
wells, or put up school houses. But unless a people are committed to democratic institutions, which keep their governments accountable for the education they provide, or the way they manage the public infrastructure of a country, you will never get the development results you want.
Democracy provides accountability and transparency. And those are critical to successful development.
But when I set this out as my stall, if you like, that this is what UNDP is going to be about in the future, there was a huge backlash from many governments who said "This is completely inappropriate. It's interfering in the internal
affairs of our country." Now a short three years later, 60 percent of our program resources, between $600- and $800 million last year, went on democratic governments. And 140 countries around the world asked our support in this area.
So it has gone like a firestorm across development, this recognition of how important it is. And, you know, we go back to a very great Indian economist, Amartya Sen, who won the
Noble Prize for Economics several years ago, and who is a great guru to UNDP, to me, and all my colleagues.
He observed, in the observation that many think won him his Nobel, that there had not been a famine in India since democracy was established there after the Second World War. Because when
people start to go hungry, they can make a fuss. They can call up their elected politician, the local member of Parliament and demand that
something is done about it. Whereas, you know, in this same period of time, over the last 50 years, we had a famine in China, in many ways a much more efficiently run economy than India's.
But nevertheless, a famine that cost 30 million lives, compared to India's record of not a life lost to famine in this period. Or North Korea, where two million people were lost just a few years ago in a famine. In each case, poor people, as they started to get very hungry, had no political means available to them
to demand and agitate the help from government. So we feel very, very profoundly that democracy, not necessarily American style democracy, but democracy in the sense of government and institutions being responsible to their citizens is an absolute bedrock relationship for successful development of a country.
Daljit Dhaliwal:
In terms of Afghanistan's democratic and political institutions, how successful have they been and if they're not seen as successful in the eyes of the donor nations that have promised this money, is there a danger that Afghanistan could just get dumped on the heap again?
Mark Malloch Brown:
Well, you know, first these are very early days. To ask whether institutions of democracy are a success after a few months, you know, is, in a sense, a breathless question because establishing these institutions takes years, if not decades. You know, America one of the greatest democracies ever, a little bit like the democracy in Britain, or the version of democracy in Ancient Greece, took a long time for the institutions to really build up public legitimacy for the culture of democracy to be established.
But having said that, on early results, Afghanistan's doing quite well. It's Loya Jirga process, which assembled representative leaders from around the country in Kabul where
they debated the country's future, and set up a constitutional convention and elected a government, confirmed the leadership of Mr. Karzai for a further two years. These were good, strong, appropriate outcomes and ones which have increased the legitimacy of Mr. Karzai and his government a long way. But perhaps even more
significantly is you don't need a vote in Afghanistan to know what's on people's minds. I mean, in my case, just walking through the street of Kabul last December before Mr. Karzai's government had even emerged from the negotiations in Germany that the U.N. was sponsoring for establishing an interim administration. You stopped and asked men, women as they started to come out on the streets again, and kids what they wanted.
And, you know, it was like a great sort of moving festival of a focus group. And the answers came through very clearly. The kids, little boys out on the street, wanted education. Not just for themselves but for their sisters who were not yet back on the streets, let alone in school. And the government,
with the support from UNICEF and other donors, when the March school year began, got more than two million kids in school. The second thing they demanded was law and order on the streets. Not so much the big warlord question of the divisions and fragmentation of the country but simple policing arrangements on the streets. So it was safe to go out and about. There, a bit more
of a mixed success. Reports of women still being attacked for being out. But nevertheless, community by community, street by street, law and order is starting to be established and there's a major program of police training underway by the Germans, and my organization,
UNDP. Then people were complaining about the famine, and a lot of food has gotten into the country, and a lot of seeds now that the drought is broken to make sure that next year's food crop is better. So if democracy is all about responding to people's priorities, then again, I think it's been quite a good start for this government.
Daljit Dhaliwal:
One of the issues where the U.N. has been quite effective was in raising funds to pay the salaries of government workers so that the government could function normally. Were you in a position to translate that to some of the more controversial areas, like whether drugs were actually being marketed and trafficked?
Mark Malloch Brown:
Well, frankly, only at the margin. I mean we did pay police salaries and costs for the training of police officers. But our difficulty was no objection to paying the salaries of those involved
in these activities. Far from it because we recognize how intrinsic it is to the successful stabilization and development of Afghanistan.
Our difficulty was other than that. It was that we felt enormously important in these early months of this operation that no donor money went missing. There is such a predisposition among donor public opinion, in the U.S. particularly, think the worst of foreign aid, that "It's money down a rat-hole," as a congressman once famously said. So the trust we feel to make sure that the monies we take from the American taxpayers and others can be fully accounted for
and that we know where it's going meant that we insisted on seeing a payroll, when we made transfers for paying salaries. And in the more distant parts of the country, which were not fully under the control of the central authorities in Kabul, this proved a real problem because those in
power in those parts of the country just wouldn't share payroll data with the center. So it was much less successful than we hoped in distant areas.
Daljit Dhaliwal:
OK, we know that there's a huge problem with drugs in Afghanistan. But there's also a problem with the narco societies of Central Asia, where the drugs are actually passing through. The U.S. now has a newfound role and clout in that region. How should it be using that more effectively so that we don't end up getting more mini-Afghanistans?
Mark Malloch Brown:
Well, you know, this is a region which . . . generally Central Asia has a development crisis. The governments don't meet a very high standard of democratic participation in general. They still have strong-man rule. They persisted in running their economies in a way which is not restructured or modernized, so that they have not enjoyed high rates of economic growth. Those which have had oil, or the promise of oil, have thought to live off that. Others have lived off other sources of income, even including the narcotics traffic.
So this is a very unpromising area for good advice about development to be accepted. When you combine that with a growing dependence of the political economy, on the income thrown off by narcotic traffic, you've got a tough problem.
And in a perverse way, the fact that the US needs these countries now, as bases, means that in some ways the US influence is less, not more. Because in the past there was much more of a big stick argument. "Either reform your economies, stop the drug trafficking, or we're not going to help you." Now with bases there, there's a requirement to help anyway. So the U.S. has got to be very careful about this, and make sure that, in its anxiety to agree to new security arrangements with these countries, it doesn't sell out, on the vital economic reform agenda, and indeed anti-narcotics agenda, which is so critical to those countries' future.
Daljit Dhaliwal:
So do you think then that the U.S. has to make very difficult choices, that it has to choose either between the war no terror, or the war against drugs?
Mark Malloch Brown:
No, because they are, as I said before, twins of each other. But you've just got to make sure that you don't come up with a set of policies, and
security commitments on the other hand, on the terrorism side, which undermine your efforts on the narcotics side. You can't have one-handed policy making. You can't have the defense department's interest prevailing over those of the state department, and other parts of the U.S. government, who are more interested in the narcotics issue. So you need balance and trade off between these two objectives, and a sophisticated three dimensional strategy for engagement with these countries, that recognizes that just throwing military aid at them, and turning a blind eye to these other problems, not just narcotics, but economic reform as well, and democratic reform. That if you ignore those
problems, you will actually exacerbate exactly the sources of instability and long term vulnerability, in the region that has caused you to intervene in the first place.
|
