CIAO DATE: 08/04

Minimal Investments, Minimal Results: The Failure of Security Policy in Afghanistan

Abstract

This briefing paper challenges policy makers to reconsider the flawed security policies and inadequate resources for addressing a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan at a critical juncture in the country’s political development.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 2003 declaration that the international community “will not walk away from” Afghanistan missed the real question: When will the international community really walk into Afghanistan, and make the necessary commitments and investments that will give the Afghan people a reasonable chance at building a peaceful and stable country?

The March 2004 Berlin Conference report, Securing Afghanistan’s Future, diplomatically understated this point by saying that “staying too close to minimal effort for too long will adversely affect expectations and commitments of the different segments of Afghan society.” Nowhere is this more true than in the security sector where the minimal investments of the international community, despite the repeated calls by President Karzai, the UN, NGOs and the Afghan people to do more, has resulted in a security situation that is deteriorating daily, and markedly worse than it was at the start of the Bonn process in January 2002.

ISAF commander Lieutenant General Rick Hillier has noted that there is a limited period of time, or a finite “security window,” when Afghans can be expected to support or even tolerate the continued presence of international military forces without seeing visible benefits from that presence. At the level of the individual Afghan citizen, where a local commander or police officer arbitrarily jails a villager or forces a family’s daughter into an unwanted marriage, where a corrupt local official extorts an unlawful tax, or where two families engage in a violent dispute over land or water rights, to date no one—Afghan or international—is likely to play a visible or effective role to redress the situation.

Full text (PDF, 22 pages, 792.2 KB)