It and other audits of the Canadian International Development Agency’s huge involvement in Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan depict a well-meaning drive for results the government could boast about — a push that faced “intractable” security problems, political pressures and the “vaguely envisaged” challenge of building a new nation.
The reports drafted for CIDA by two outside consultants seem written to avoid offending federal officials, and do actually praise many of the agency’s achievements. But the diplomatic phrasing cannot hide fundamental concerns about Canada’s ambitious development program as it unfolded.
Nipa Banerjee, who headed the agency’s Afghanistan operation from 2003 to 2006, said some of the comments reflect what she knows about Canadian projects in Kandahar.
“All the projects have failed. None of them have been successful,” said Ms. Banerjee, now a professor in the University of Ottawa’s school of international development. “I think we went into Kandahar to increase our international profile … rather than thinking about the interests of the people of Kandahar. It was too much politicized and militarized and securitized, and as a result we ended up with failure.”
Despite the hard work, courage and sacrifices of civilian and military personnel, Canada’s development efforts in Kandahar province have proven a “total” waste, she argued. She still visits Afghanistan about four times a year to advise government ministries.
One of the reviews obtained by the National Post under access-to-information legislation notes that a key goal of Canada’s development program was to bolster the capacity of Afghans to improve their own lot and carry on rebuilding long after foreign nations had left. If the aim is to have “Afghan girls and boys actually learning in functional schools,” for instance, there needs to be local school committees to monitor results, not just a drive to erect buildings, it said.
But the Kandahar action plan that guided Canada’s priority projects for the restive, crumbling province did little to ensure locals could and would take part, said the document.
“The impression is of a major planning effort, meticulously documented, but divorced from reality,” said the consultants. “Artificially maintaining forward progress on a few indicators so that there is something positive to report (eg more training, more equipment, more schools built) is much like pushing a rope, and may be actually counterproductive if it ignores deeper institutional problems.”
The three reports from 2008 to 2009 appear to be the last produced by the “ongoing review of the CIDA Afghanistan program” but have remained under wraps until now. In fact, the agency initially denied an access-to-information request for them, filed in August, 2011, and only released a heavily redacted version of the documents this month after the Post complained to the federal Information Commissioner.
The agency was unable to respond to questions about the reviews by deadline on Friday. But in a report to Parliament this March, the government said that despite the challenges, Canada had played a “vital” role in rebuilding Afghanistan and made “important progress.”
“At every turn, our soldiers and civilian professionals in Afghanistan showed the highest level of dedication to the challenges they faced,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a foreword to the report. “Their immeasurable moral commitment to this mission has improved the lives of the Afghan people. They have made Canada and Canadians proud.”
Of 44 development goals this country set in 2008, 33 have been met, it said. Those include building 52 schools and training 3,000 teachers in Kandahar, repairing the province’s Dahla Dam and Arghandab irrigation system so that an extra 30,000 hectares more land could soon be irrigated, and improving the rule of law in Kandahar, said the report.
Ms. Banerjee said her sources tell a different story. All three of Canada’s main priority projects in Kandahar have been a bust, or of limited success, she charged. The plan to refurbish the Dahla irrigation dam in the north of Kandahar province never was finished, leaving farmers’ fields almost as dry as before, she said. The U.S. Corps of Engineers has stated it will take over and repair the dam, the Canadians having fixed many of the irrigation canals south of it. Many of the schools built with Canadian money appear in disrepair, unused or under-used, she said. And the program to vaccinate children for polio was actually carried out by UNICEF with Canadian funding, and has nevertheless failed to erase Kandahar city’s status as “the world polio capital.”
Prof. Banerjee oversaw the CIDA program in Afghanistan — doling out $100-million a year with no staff to help her — until Canada’s decision in 2006 to take over the military and development responsibility for Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. Canada had a choice between it and Herat, a much more peaceful and prosperous province in the west of Afghanistan, she said.
Prof. Banerjee admits that she recommended moving into Kandahar, feeling that it had far greater needs and, at the time, did not seem particularly unsafe. She said she now realizes the insurgency had nevertheless been building strength and, in retrospect, believes Kandahar was the wrong province for Canada, its relatively small military unable to curb the mounting violence.
In the first half of the 2000s, Canada’s contribution to Afghanistan was mostly in the form of contributions to programs run by the Afghan government, filtered through the World Bank, and most have been a success, she said.
As Canada took over responsibility for Kandahar, though, the push was to devote at least half its development money to the province and, encouraged by the 2008 Manley report to the Harper government, pursue Canadian-initiated, “showing the flag” projects, noted one of the reviews.
Each of the documents notes that the smattering of civilian officials who arrived in the country to implement the programs encountered an increasingly bloody insurgency.
Stabilizing and rebuilding Kandahar is not like “laying the railroad across Canadian prairies,” said the April, 2009, report, noting that insurgents had turned many of the areas targeted for development into conflict zones that were “strongly, even violently antiethical” to the national government and its foreign backers.
“This sets up an intractable development dilemma,” said a 2008 report. “The monitoring of progress and performance — key to credibility in Afghanistan and accountability in Canada — is literally death defying.”
What is more, the Taliban’s “visceral” understanding of the local society and politics leave the national government and its foreign backers at a “profound” disadvantage, said the November, 2009, report.
“Insurgents are living among the people as a fish in the sea [in Chairman Mao’s famous image], while the government and its international supporters are at best treading water,” the document said. “Is the Canadian mission doing enough to understand the context in which it works and the actors with whom it is engaged?”
One of the reports notes that being innovative and flexible is “absolutely essential” to prevailing in a counterinsurgency operation. The author concludes in another document, though, that the Canadian effort fell “far short” of the creativity shown by other donor agencies working in Afghanistan.
“CIDA is not an innovative organization,” the report stated bluntly, adding that a culture of “this is the way we do things” was part of the “genetic code” of the Afghanistan task force, the broader Canadian government group that headed the development push.
Ultimately, even determining if Canada was making a difference would be a challenge, suggested the February, 2008, report. Development work in Afghanistan centres around “state building,” but precisely measuring the progress toward that nebulous goal is all but impossible, the consultant said.
“It is crucial to understand that there is a built-in disconnect between … the donors’ appetite for hard evidence that their money is producing the intended results and, on the other hand, the vagueness of state building, characterized by false starts, dead ends and trial-and-error innovation.”
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Tom Blackwell
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