Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World. Christina Lamb
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The international community preferred to build schools for children, which made nice photographs back home, rather than funding unsexy adult programmes to train a civil service. Yet there was one resource staring them in the face. In those early days hundreds of Afghan-Americans like Jawad were coming back to their country, eager to help. ‘The international community never came up with a viable plan of mobilising the expat community,’ he said. ‘They were ready. All they needed was housing and a decent salary of $2,000 to $4,000 per month. International consultants were getting that a day.’
Instead, contracts were awarded to American consultancies like Bearing Point, or Adam Smith from the UK, to bring in their own people to run ministries and government departments. The Afghans themselves had little say. ‘The quality of internationals was extremely poor,’ complains Jawad. ‘I had an adviser to my office assigned through USAID, and one day I asked him to draft three template letters in English to reply to congratulatory letters to the President, and requests we kept getting for pictures and flags. All it needed to say was “Thank you, but we don’t have any.” This adviser spent two days on this, and then I had to go and correct it – and it wasn’t even my language. In the end I said, “You’re fired.”’ Jawad then received an angry call from the USAID office to say they had spent $60–70,000 on hiring this man, so he could not fire him. ‘I don’t care,’ replied Jawad. ‘I don’t have room for him in my office – send him to Dubai or somewhere. So much money was wasted.’
In the bazaars between the carpet merchants and burqa sellers and stalls draped with second-hand clothes it was common to see men sitting with satellite phones and calculators on which they would tap away. This was Afghanistan’s banking system – hawala – an informal yet highly efficient way to transfer money in an entirely cash economy. I used it myself when I was running low on cash – I would hand over a cheque from my UK bank account and be magically presented with bricks of afghanis.
The hawala system was often used by terrorist networks, as it was hard to trace, and was thus frowned upon by international agencies. Aid agencies and embassies bringing in millions of dollars were having to physically fly it in in suitcases. There were three different currencies in circulation, and the IMF suggested switching to dollars. Karzai refused, knowing this would not go down well with Afghans.
Nobody had a clue how much it would cost to rebuild Afghanistan, but one thing was clear – its financial system would have to be built from scratch. In this the country was lucky. Ashraf Ghani, a brilliant economist and anthropologist who had studied with Khalilzad at the American University in Beirut in 1968, had worked for years at the World Bank, and was eager to help. ‘The President had asked me five times to be his Interior Minister, but I believed that a functioning public finance system was the key to getting government right. That’s Islamic tradition. Umar, the second Caliph, established a public purse with enormous commitment to accountability and transparency.’
At fifty-eight, Ghani had lost much of his stomach to cancer, and could not eat proper meals, instead nibbling like a bird throughout the day. Not knowing how much time he had left, all he wanted to do was to help, and as quickly as possible. He arrived with Clare Lockhart, a fiercely bright British barrister who had worked with him at the World Bank. They found the Finance Ministry had no equipment, the central heating had not worked for more than twenty years, and there were no phones or lighting. ‘People were literally in the dark and the offices bare, as most of the furniture had disappeared,’ he recalled. Ghani went unpaid, as did many of his staff: ‘We used to joke we were the largest voluntary organisation in Afghanistan.’ They worked sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. Like Jawad, they quickly discovered that the biggest problem was finding competent staff. ‘A limit was set of $50 a month for government employees, yet the UN and other international agencies were paying salaries twenty times as much. The net result was an exodus, with teachers and engineers becoming drivers, translators and guards for aid agencies, as they could earn more money. The international community actually led to the destruction of the government. In my view the international community actually worked against us. It took away our best people, and it dealt with and financed drug dealers and warlords.’
We journalists were equally guilty. My own interpreter, Fraidoon, was a gynaecologist, but earned more in a day with me than in a month working in the hospital. But if I hadn’t hired him, one of my colleagues would have. They were all using doctors or medical students. I tried to justify it, telling myself that the money would enable him to gain extra training, and I was happy when he did eventually end up working in a clinic in Herat.
‘Without human capital, financial capital is useless,’ Ghani would argue as he tried to persuade donors to create a school of public administration. ‘Billions of dollars have been spent in Afghanistan, but not one donor was willing to put up the $120 million needed. I cajoled, begged, threatened, but they wouldn’t give me.’
The government’s ability to raise revenue was hindered by corruption. ‘Too many people made a decision to prefer personal enrichment to public service,’ Ghani said sadly. ‘For someone to pay $1 in taxes they had to pay $8 in bribes, and waste a week of their life getting twenty signatures. Customs revenues were all disappearing, as provinces which had access to transit routes were taking the revenue without any legal authority. We had a payroll system where 25 per cent of salaries disappeared within ministries before they were paid, and no one had a clue how many employees there were.’ Fahim’s Ministry of Defence alone claimed to have 400,000 soldiers and officers. Ghani refused to give it any money any at all till Fahim agreed to reduce the number on the payroll to 100,000, then to reduce it every month on a sliding scale if accurate figures couldn’t be produced. By the time Ghani left office the number on the MoD payroll was 8,000.
There were other successes. A new currency was produced after Ghani used his connections to call Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who arranged a design and didn’t charge a cent. Twenty-eight billion new afghani notes were printed in Germany and Britain, and distributed with the rate fixed at fifty afghanis to the dollar.
Afghanistan had no functioning telephone system, but soon everyone seemed to be carrying a mobile. Ghani asked for assistance from Tony Blair, who sent a team of telecommunications experts for six months to draw up laws and issue licences for two networks. Within a short time these new phone companies were the country’s biggest taxpayers.
There was success too in health, with child mortality reduced by 15 per cent, though one in four children still died by the age of five, and Afghanistan remained the most dangerous place on earth to give birth.
Ghani became Karzai’s de facto Prime Minister. But his intolerance for corruption, combined with his abrasive manner, won him few friends. ‘It’s a miracle I’m alive,’ he would say. ‘By all odds I should be dead.’ He wasn’t referring to his precarious health. ‘President Karzai used to say there’s a long line of people who want to shoot me.’
His experience as Finance Minister left him exasperated with the international community. There was no coordinator, so he would have to waste time repeating things in numerous meetings with different countries or agencies which would often be replicating or undermining each other. Just in dealing with the Americans, there was the Pentagon, the CIA, Khalilzad, the Embassy and USAID, each of which often had a different agenda.
Like Jawad in the Presidency, Ghani frequently lost patience with his foreign advisers. ‘Technical assistance had become an unregulated industry,’ he complained. ‘Some things we needed help with, like the design of currency and drafting telecommunications laws. But certain American firms were paid by the number of people they put on the ground; so, for example, privatisation of public enterprises was not my priority, but one day I suddenly found an adviser on privatisation on my staff. There were others who didn’t know anything, and who we had to teach. They were being paid thousands of dollars, and they became part of the problem.’
One only had to go to Kabul airport to see a classic example of the aid community helping itself rather than Afghans. The scariest part of going to Afghanistan was flying in from Dubai on the state airline Ariana. Its planes were in such bad condition that they were banned from most places on earth. Even the model plane in the sales