Learning from Somaliland: Top Down versus Bottom Up. By Afghanstan University)

At Work In Afghanstan!! Part 1

During my time at CENTCOM, I developed a process for quantitatively comparing every country in the world based on econometric data, surveys, and social indicators. Rather than compete with Brookings, Freedom House, or the Global Peace Index, I used them as sources in my model. In my stability spectrum, Afghanistan was typically the 2nd or 3rd least stable country in the world. The most unstable country in the world was always Somalia. That’s not exactly surprising. What might have been surprising was the relative stability of Somaliland, had it been included in my survey. It wasn’t, because most of my sources don’t consider Somaliland an independent country. This lack of international recognition has sentenced Somaliland to exist just below the surface of international attention, where the international aid community can’t support its marginalized population.

However, there is a theory that this sentence is exactly the protection that is enabling Somaliland to achieve sustainable growth and an emerging polity. On the “illegitimate” border of the most unstable country in the world, Somaliland may be one of if not the most successful emerging democracy. The sentence of ineligibility for foreign aid may be the protection from the international aid community that has enabled the polity to legitimize.

Nicholas Eubank published a compelling case study of Somaliland in Jan 2010 which he updated a couple of months ago. (You can download the papers here:
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1423538  or
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1621374). He builds a case that the lack of international aid was a critical strength in the government connecting with its political base. “Since its secession from Somalia in 1991, the east-African nation of Somaliland has become one of the most democratic governments in eastern Africa. Yet Somaliland has never been recognized by the international community. . . Somaliland’s ineligibility for foreign aid facilitated the development of accountable political institutions and contributed to the willingness of Somalilanders to engage constructively in the state-building process.”

Eubank’s paper supports three arguments that I think can be generalized to Afghanistan. I will summarize all three here and will focus on each as individual blogs. The first lesson is that the international community’s top-down approach does not facilitate a connection between the population and the government. Second, ”free” donor money denies the development of a relationship between the government and the governed based on compromise and cooperation. Finally, slow, deliberate investment is preferable to rapid insertions of funds and as a result, we achieve desired effects faster by spending less money.

I want to discuss all three lessons, but for manageability, I will break them up into three different blogs. First up, a discussion about bottom-up versus top-down nation building.

From the time I began studying Afghanistan, I have been a proponent of bottom-up nation building here. The population has never seen a benefit from the government. The government is perceived to be a consumer of revenue rather than a provider of services. By working bottom-up, local institutions based on the population’s needs and consistent with their values can be resourced. However, the economies of scale of governance will quickly necessitate that villages cooperate to resolve a shared interest: water rights, a larger medical facility, a market, and commonly, security. When threatened by a common enemy, people come together to counter the threat. That theme is common to Afghanistan’s national heritage and our own, as well as to peoples around the world. Through cooperation and consolidation, a common need is addressed. Doing so requires giving up some level of control, so an appreciation for the need for compromise is derived. Rather than have a “foreign” central government tell people that they have to cooperate without providing the motivation for that compromise, the power of a federal system is realized when the people choose to cooperate.

Under the Afghanistan constitution, written and endorsed by Afghans, power derives from the center. Afghans likely wrote this constitution to please NATO or to mirror the emerging country after successful world powers. As an adherent to Western political science, NATO designed a campaign that supported the sovereignty of the Afghanistan government, so regardless of what we wanted to do, we designed our nation building efforts around the central government. This led to a top-down approach. I’m not suggesting that we were forced into this approach against our better judgment. There are arguments for and against a top-down approach. There seem to be a lot more examples of top-down approaches being applied. The Somaliland case study provides a case study in support of a bottom-up approach that may have merit.

Our support of the central government has been consistent with political science theories about the danger of surrogate governance sources that arise when outside actors are seen sponsoring local institutions or directly resolving the population’s needs. We are very sensitive to this concern, and we are also working very hard, with Afghans, to nurture and support those local institutions. Eubank contends that investing in local institutions provides an incentive for the central government to connect with those local institutions. Political actors gravitate to where power emanates. This argument has merit within the context of the parliamentarian election fraud.

The former warlords quickly learned that the power in the emerging system was at the national level, and they put themselves in position to take advantage of that power. I’m not sure how this would have played out differently if that power was decentralized to the extent that they could not conveniently usurp it from a single powerbase. I believe it would have been harder for corrupt actors to control the resources of the state, but that could also lead to fracturing of the state. If a bottom-up approach creates many local power brokers in competition, we could recreate the environment that led to the Civil War following the Soviet withdrawal. Or we may have set the conditions for cooperation among the local power brokers, leading to a more traditional Afghan political process: consolidation of power among local chieftains based on convenience and self-interest.

If our investment in a top-down strategy based on readily available resources was in fact destabilizing, it does not imply inherent failure of Afghanistan or our strategy. It implies the need to adapt and reinforce success along lines of operation focused on empowering local government and creating accountability in the eyes of the population. Those steps have already been moving forward as our evolving strategy focuses resources and energy on district governance. This focus is what necessitated the civilian surge. The civilian surge announced a couple of years ago and still in progress was a catchy moniker for the increased diplomatic resources available, but I do not think the discourse over the past couple of years provided the motivation for the civilian surge. The civilian surge enables the formation of district support teams, made up of State Department, USAID, USDA, and DoD professionals, partnering and working with the district government to empower local governance. In my discussions with normal, average Afghans, I ask them about their perceptions about their government. One of the most commonly cited strengths are their local DDA and the ASOP shuras.

The Subnational Government Strategy tapped into a historical model that appears to effectively be connecting to the population. However, this connection will weaken over time if the shuras are not able to provide service in response to the population’s needs. One of the Battalion Commanders in Nangarhar refers to this as the “opportunity gap.” The shuras have created an opportunity for governance to expand, but if they are not empowered, the opportunity will be lost. The civilian surge and district support teams are trying to fill that opportunity gap so that resources are funneled through the local government and the bottom-up approach is reinforced. Programs like DDP, which I have discussed in previous blogs, provide not only an empowerment of local governance but do so in a way that also reinforces the central government. I remain skeptical that the civilian surge will be given the time needed to demonstrate its benefits, but I think it is the right strategy.

By Freerangmike

Source: Nangarhar University.