The dust hangs heavy over Kandahar. Eight years into the NATO invasion and locals maintain that not much has changed here. Drugs, guns and militancy still flow freely through this semi-autonomous “tribal” belt of desert, dust and sandstone that span the troubled borderlands with neighbouring Pakistan. Its inhabitants—nearly one million strong—are mainly Pashtun with a smattering of Baloch, Brahui, Tajik and Hazara. Today, the capital city of the same name is what some describe as the ‘wild east’, a jihadist Hole-in-the-Wall of 110,000 residents, some of whom, Coalition forces maintain, participate in development projects by day and insurgency by night. A sprawling town of concrete and mud punctuated by the occasional mall and RPG-pocked government building, it is also home to a proliferation of hulking bunker-like mansions distinguished as much by bad taste as the battle-hardened guards that bristle every time anyone strays too close. Concertina wire and kitsch: The transnational aesthetic of those who would enrich themselves with ill-gotten gains.
Building trust where there is none Despite its unprepossessing appearance, it is here that the Coalition and partners are struggling to engage in ‘stabilization’ efforts: a term that is gaining new traction with NATO Forces Commander-in-Chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to resuscitate counterinsurgency (COIN) as a viable alternative to stalled Coalition counter-terrorism efforts. At the center of COIN is the protection of civilians—the theory being that without the support of the broader population, the battle may be won but the war will inevitably be lost.
Building on the lessons learned by France’s disastrous campaign in Algeria, America’s in Viet Nam and the ‘dirty wars’ of the 1980s, COIN in 2009 is a reconstituted version. It aims—among other things—to legitimize local and national governments by enabling them to offer services while training local and national law-enforcement agencies and providing security.
Key to this however, is not only security, but stabilization. Unlike development, which relies on long-term infrastructural and social change, the aim of stabilization is to ‘tip’ local populations into supporting local and national governments through small but significant improvements at the community level. Today USAID is funding thousands of these initiatives through Local Governance and Community Development (LGCD), a program that seeks to instil greater faith in regional and local governments by providing community enhancement to under-served and highly insecure parts of Afghanistan.
Rajan Gill, South Regional Director for LGCD is a large man with an infectious laugh. Because of the ever-present threat of violence, Gill is primarily confined to a compound in the city of Kandahar. Despite security-mandated isolation, he nonetheless, with a staff of 48 Afghans and 12 of international staff, manages hundreds of large and small projects scattered throughout the south. A sound COIN strategy he says, is based on building trust between underserved populations and nascent governments seeking a credible toehold among a war-weary, cynical (and terrified) civilian population.
Stability: one grant at a time “In many of the areas where we work there has been no governance for years,” he says. “Except possibly the very rough, very hard justice meted out by the Taliban. We are here to offer up some alternatives—to look at issues around governance, small infrastructure and other projects in an entirely new light.”
One of the ways this can be accomplished is through the provision of small community stabilization grants or CSGs. These grants, which can be for as little as $USD 1,000 or as much as USD$ 10, 000 are then used by a community to undertake small infrastructure work. This can include paving main thorough fares, building walls, cleaning and lighting bazaars, or renovating and furnishing office buildings.
What makes the CSG system special, is that it is the community itself that decides how to use the monies—usually by convening a village Shura, or council. USAID funds the projects with LGCD staff providing financial support and assisting with technical design, but it is up to villagers to make it all happen: They dig the wells, build the walls, plant the gardens and clear the roads. Grants can also be used for public information purposes such as radio and TV programmes aimed at the 67 percent of Afghans who can neither read nor write.
When LGCD began operating in Kandahar, many of the governance meetings would descend into complete chaos with “no agenda, and everyone yelling and interrupting each other.” Although things have improved Gill maintains that LGCD programmers and indeed, the Coalition as a whole, needs to ‘listen more”. The reasoning is simple: to ensure that Afghans are at the forefront of efforts to stabilize their own country. “You can’t impose your views on another culture but what you can do is propose another way of doing things.”
Change through drama Kandahar Film and Theatre Troupe is endeavouring to do just that. Made up of up to 50 volunteers, it is dedicated to bringing about social change through theater, TV and radio and operates on a shoestring budget in a sparely furnished warehouse on the edge of town.
Director Hikmat Srak puts one in mind of an Afghan Strelnikov. He is young, and his gold-rimmed glasses confer an earnest, alert air. Instead of revolution, he traffics in entertainment, betting it will accomplish what indoctrination can never do.
With a small grant from USAID LGCD, the troupe is now broadcasting half-hour dramas once a week and mounting theatrical performances throughout the province. Its members (between15 to 20 and up to 50 depending on the production) have become expert at gauging the mood of their audience, determining when to push, how hard and when to pull back. “We have a good knowledge of what the people need,” Srak says. “We know how to communicate with our audience about what they like and what they don’t like. In fact, we’ve had to scrap dramas because they were rejected.”
One example was a drama focusing on bribes. Because nothing can happen in Kandahar without ‘gifts’, everyone is complicit in a system that forces even the most upstanding to grease a few palms. Initially, the chosen topic caused some unease among focus group participants.
Rather than abandon the topic altogether, however, Kandahar Theatre adopted a more obtuse approach. “We created a scenario where someone was compelled to take a bribe,” says Srak. “He was poor. He was honest but his family was in a very bad condition. He knows that he is not doing something good but he had no choice.” The segment was a success (audiences grasped the anti-graft message without feeling judged) and other productions—about addiction, corruption and various other issues have also aired to general acclaim.
It is initiatives such as these that, though inexpensive from a funding perspective, can nevertheless pack a serious punch. Although the production values are amateurish (the Theatre Group is self-taught, USAID LGCD provides the equipment but it is up to the principles to learn how to use it) the messaging is sophisticated and perfectly calibrated to its audience.
The writers who put together a play focusing on drug addiction, for example, emphasize that it is a medical condition as opposed to a moral one. They also used the drama as a forum to discuss the issue of poppy cultivation, its link to addiction and social instability and, through the introduction of a mullah (a real one), elaborate on what Islam has to say on the issue.
Putting it out there In the context of a broader counterinsurgency effort, the purpose of community stabilization efforts is also to enhance the legitimacy of the government by ensuring that they play an active part in the design, implementation and management of different development initiatives. Wherever possible, USAID LGCD supports and encourages government officials to play a proactive roll in project implementation. The ultimate objective is to enhance the reach and the capacity of the government and thus to win the confidence and trust of communities so that they work in partnership with official government, rather than the insurgents.
To put it more simply: USAID funds the project; LGCD staff undertake the lengthy consultative process with government officials and community leaders; LGCD staff provide technical support and expertise and the project is then implemented in partnership with government and communities In order to fulfil its COIN objective, LGCD encourages and supports the government to be at the forefront of implementation—with USAID and LGCD staff and resources kept very much in the background.
This can pose special difficulties when justifying programmes to villager elders, a situation that Atif Rahimi, LGCD District Stabilization Officer, says is complicated by the fact that district officials and community leaders are usually illiterate but that years of next to no governance and decades of war have made them unusually suspicious. “Sometimes it is very difficult to make them understand,” he says. “You have to spend more time with them, explain the entire process at each and every stage. They are always asking ‘where is the money coming from? Who is paying for this?” According to Rahimi, it is critical that LGCD staff stress that support is a collaborative effort that emphasizes the role of the Afghan Government working in partnership with international assistance efforts.
Repression: from cradle-to-grave Some of the most sensitive programming, Gill says, involves women. Afghanistan remains one of the most repressive countries on earth in which to be born female.
The United Nations Human Development Report indicators tell a tragic tale: the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, the highest rates of child marriage and among the lowest participation in public life. In other words: a cradle-to-grave existence marked by disadvantage, violence and early death.
Pashtun areas, in particular, are noted for cultural norms that all but relegate females to a form of socially sanctioned house arrest. Even worse are the strictures imposed in the insurgent-dominated regions where many Afghan staff work.
Shakiba Afghan (not her real name) is only one of among a cadre of LGCD national staff who daily risk their lives to travel to insurgent-dominated regions such as Spin Boldak and Arghandab. Her job is to oversee projects that support local women in basic literacy, hygiene and kitchen garden training. Although humble, such projects enable women to escape the confines of home and hearth to learn skills that will assist them to feed and care for their families. They also allow them to bond with other women and help overcome the isolation of their circumscribed existence.
It is an uphill battle. The few women who move noiselessly around the city’s brown streets do so draped in a mobile purdah of light blue or rose-coloured polyester, with only the merest suggestion of a nose or a mouth. Theirs are lives contained by another kind of border—one woven of nylon and threaded with age-old attitudes that conflate honour with invisibility.
According to Afghan, in Kandahar social interdictions against even the most rudimentary of literacy training are so strong that the 200 or so women and girls who have undergone her programme conceal the fact that they are also learning how to read and write.
“These women are very brave,” she says. “They hide their books underneath their burquas because if the insurgents saw them they would kill them.” The situation at home is scarcely better. “Many of the women had big problems from their husbands and fathers who do not want them to study or learn anything”.
Opposition soon turns to approbation says Afghan, once the women’s menfolk note that homes are cleaner, children better nourished and families healthier—due in no small part to hygiene and sanitation training provided by a local nurse.
Literacy training however, remains the one secret that participants are unwilling, or rather, too fearful, to share. Fully 95 percent of Afghanistan’s women can neither read nor write. In Kandahar Province it is one percent.
“Not one of the more than 200 women we’ve trained so far have ever revealed that we were also teaching them how to read,” says Afghan. “I don’t know how we did it but not one has ever told any of their fathers, brothers or sons. They would have been killed”.
High stakes All of this only serves to highlight that in the South, the stakes are high and the pay-offs, potentially fleeting. All but pacified four short years ago, the province is now simmering with insurgency. Canadian NATO forces, who have suffered considerable losses, are still doing so.
However, by empowering local governments with training and infrastructural improvements, and supporting communities with cash-for-work schemes, vocational training and other services, stabilization may yet have a chance. It is for this reason that USAID and LGCD staff have adopted a low-key approach to assisting governments and communities in need.
Nevertheless, stability programming is not without its hiccups—or its hazards. In a conflict zone, any initiative, be it stabilization or otherwise, can be fraught with unintended and often explosive consequences.
In Uruzgan for example, one NATO partner requested that LGCD not undertake a project designed to teach local men basic electronics. Their fear was that students would use their newly-acquired knowledge to construct bombs. Another proposal, to equip schools with laboratory kits went ahead but without the hydrochloric acid. Throughout the south, there have been reports of numerous incidents of ‘acid throwing’ involving school girls. So frequent are these attacks that programmers decided it just wasn’t worth the risk.
In Jalalabad, horrified project officers discovered that the pressure cookers distributed to local women had been converted into improvised explosive devices (IEDS). Those too are now off the list.
Adds Gill. “We’ve been shot at, had grenades tossed into our compound, had our windows and doors blown out twice from nearby bomb blasts”. Indeed, security is so tight and the threat so real, that ex-pat staff need to travel in an armoured vehicle with guards simply to cross the road to the office less than 100 metres away. Just over a year ago, a woman working for an international NGO was snatched on the same patch of pavement just as she was leaving her compound. No one has heard from her since.
But bad as the current situation now is, it has not yet deteriorated, Gill says, to the point where women cannot work, men shave their beards, listen to music, act in radio and television plays or watch TV.
Perhaps the future of Kandahar’s people cannot be summed up in words or in deeds but in a simple act of urban renewal. In the city centre a Ferris wheel, a gift from the Japanese, stands amid a litter-strewn field where eight years ago the Taliban executed anyone who dared question their repressive rule.
Today, children play where blood once flowed.