In the run-up to Afghanistan’s Conference on Regional Economic Cooperation—a critical ministerial gathering of leaders from twelve countries in Kabul—The Century Foundation and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation convened a high-level roundtable lunch with United Nations diplomats, NGO experts and the press to discuss Afghanistan’s prospects in the post-Bonn era.

The conversation, held on November 30 at the United Nations, was moderated by Ambassador Gunter Pleuger, Germany’s Permanent Representative to the UN, and featured:

• Barnett Rubin, Director of Studies at NYU’s Center for Global Cooperation and advisor to the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan .
• Craig Charney, president of Charney Research, which has conducted the most recent public opinion survey inside Afghanistan;
• Ali Ahmad Jalali, a professor at the National Defense University and, until recently, the Minister of the Interior in the Government of Afghanistan.
  

Carl Robichaud and Micky Hingorani prepared the following report on the conversation. Additional details are available at www.AfghanistanWatch.org.

Ambassador Gunter Pleuger discussed the new Afghanistan Compact, which will be negotiated at a January conference in London, and outlined its three pillars: security, governance, and economic growth. The post-Bonn compact gives the government of Afghanistan ownership of this process, which will include substantive ‘benchmarks’ for Afghanistan and donor countries.

Barnett Rubin outlined the challenges in each of the three areas, and focused on a fourth, cross-cutting area: narcotics.

• Security. Security has deteriorated: “The insurgency has not gone away, it has become more effective. As the coalition has told me, the number of attacks has not increased, but they have become more lethal.” Meanwhile, expenditures on the new Afghan security forces—which will be larger than government revenues for the foreseeable future—are unsustainable.
  
  
• Governance. Strengthening the state—among the weakest governments in the world—is central: “Without an administration, without security institutions, without the judicial institutions, electing political representatives only holds appeal for so long, since the purpose of electing officials is to make them accountable for delivering services such as security, education, and health care.”
  
  
• Economic growth. Afghanistan faces a “five-dimensional Rubick’s cube.” It needs “to achieve a level of economic growth that is sufficient to pull out it out of abject poverty. It has to make the economic growth equitable enough so that it reaches most of the population. It has to make it fast enough to replace the 30–40 percent of the economy that is drugs, which the international community is dedicated to eliminating. It has to do this while trying to balance its external accounts . . . And it has to do this while raising the revenues of the government above 4.6 percent.”
  
  
• Narcotics. A new approach on drugs is necessary: “We have to have a very long-term perspective on the opium economy. It’s fundamentally a problem of security, governance, and development, not a problem of criminal activity that needs to be eradicated and replaced with welfare-like programs. It will involve immense investments that will take years to mature. Thus far I do not see the assimilation by the international community of what that task will actually involve. And hence I see the re-emergence of discussion about things like aerial spraying which is not even technically feasible.”
  
  
• Importing failure. “The existing strategies for drugs have been imported from other countries where they also don’t work very well . . . In Afghanistan, opiates is the only export of the country. It’s 30-40 percent of the entire economy, only 20 percent of it goes to farmers. Therefore when we’re talking about the economic component of eradication, it’s not a few projects to compensate farmers. It is basically creating an alternative productive economy under very difficult conditions.”
  
  
• Narcotics as deal breaker? “Narcotics is the area that could be the deal breaker because, frankly, I can’t see a scenario in which Afghanistan’s narcotics economy will decrease very significantly in the next few years—and it is quite possible that that will then lead to political pressure in various capitals to cut back on assistance to Afghanistan, which I believe would be deeply counterproductive.”
  

Craig Charney unveiled the latest data from his firm’s second poll in Afghanistan, which was conducted this October. (Download the newest data from Charney Research, released December 7, in PDF format here.)

• Voter education had a measurable impact. “The development of a democratic political culture . . . is not just an accident. It reflects the impact of voter education programs sponsored by the international community.” Afghanistan is “media saturated”—with four-fifths listening to the radio regularly and two-fifths watching TV regularly—allowing voter education to make “a measurable difference in people’s attitudes.” For example, those with high exposure to voter education were 25 percentage points likelier to say that Islam and democracy could go together.
  
  
• Freedom of expression is on the rise. Only 1 percent said under the Taliban, most people felt free to express political views in the area where they live.
  
  
• In the 2004 poll, before the presidential elections, that number had climbed to 52 percent.
• In 2005, after the legislative elections, it rose to 76 percent.
  
  
• Political empowerment. Before the 2004 election, Afghans doubted whether voting could change things.
  
  
• In 2004, only 33 percent felt even able to influence government decisions.
• In 2005, after legislative elections, 51 percent felt they could make a difference in what political decisions are made—but only 17 percent said they felt they had a lot of influence.
  
  
• Democratic tolerance is developing. When asked “whether all parties, even unpopular ones, should be allowed to hold meetings in your areas?”
  
  
• In March 2004, only 30 percent of Afghans said all parties should be allowed to meet.
• In October 2005, 54 percent accepted the idea that all parties can meet (and only 38 percent expressed the intolerant view.)
  

Ali Ahmad Jalali, who until last month served as Afghanistan’s Minister of the Interior, argued that a narrow focus on the insurgency was undermining broader efforts to stabilize the country.

• Counterterrorism cannot overshadow all other goals. “Corruption, drug trafficking, crimes related to the drug industry, and warlordism are more damaging to people than the insurgency. Therefore, the international community’s focus on fighting terrorism should not overshadow other threats that face the majority of the population.”
  
  
• Strengthening the Afghan government must be a priority. Jalali noted that only 18 percent of foreign assistance goes through the Afghan government, preventing capacity building and undermining legitimacy. “There’s a lot of support among the people to see a strong central government because of the security problems they face. However, the central government is unable to establish its authority everywhere in the country and deliver services to the people.” This dynamic is forcing the government to “expand authority through tactical methods—co-opting warlords and regional strongmen in the name of stability.”
  
  
• Target the traffickers. “You see two types of people involved in collection, production, and trafficking—those who do it out of greed and those who are doing it out of need. So you have to go first after those who are doing it out of greed.
  
  
• Locally driven development. Currently, “all development planning is top down,” and the central government is incapable of managing this. Development must be shifted toward the districts and provinces which right now, “do not have resources even to do very simple things.”
  

The Diplomatic Community and Press Responds:

• Japanese Ambassador H.E. Toshiro Ozawa asked Dr. Rubin to reconcile his earlier pessimistic comments on narcotics with a recent report issued by the UNODC confirming a reduction in opium production. “Are you suggesting that what’s been done till now was the easy part and what we’re facing from here on are qualitatively different problems which are more difficult?”
  
  Barnett Rubin replied that the UN report showed that the amount of poppy planted had decreased by 21 percent, but that this change was accounted for by a dramatic increase in a single province, Nangahar. There the powerful Arsala clan decided that it made political sense to convince the United States it was doing its part, and implemented a 96 percent decrease in cultivation. This decision was based on promises of massive assistance, which in the end failed to materialize. Whereas people had asked for roads, dams, electric power, and fertilizers, “USAID allocated $71 million to alternative livelihoods in Nangahar which means they gave $71 million dollars to two Washington-based consulting firms . . . and basically what they did was they paid people to dig ditches they didn’t need and paid them $3 a day to do it. I have photographs of these activities, actually. This was not what people thought was coming.” He expected that much of this year’s progress could well disappear next year.
  

• Russia’s representative, Konstantin Dolgov, agreed with previous comments that to tackle the drug problem, demand for opium must be stemmed in Western countries, noting that “price is being established outside the region.” He argued for internationally coordinated drug checkpoints along major routes of drug traffic to stifle the trade.
  

• Journalist Ian Williams, argued that, historically, the war on drugs has not been successful in the long-term. An alternative model is to have the international community regulate poppy production, purchase opium from farmers, and keep narcotics out of the hands of traffickers. Williams reminded panelists that this model has a precedent: Britain. “George Orwell’s father was an opium inspector. He wasn’t waging the war on drugs—he was in quality control!” Mr. Williams asked what the costs of purchasing Afghanistan’s opium from farmers might be.
  
  Ali Jalali responded that paying farmers for their opium would only set a bad precedent, and would lead more farmers into poppy cultivation. A better model is to help those who don’t grow poppy, which creates the right incentives.
  

• Sam Zia-Zarifi of Human Rights Watch focused on the security of the Afghan people. “Insecurity doesn’t mean just the Taliban insurgents but it’s lawlessness to a large extent and we’re waiting to see what the international community really is going to do.” Mr. Zarifi noted that a far lower turnout in the parliamentary elections, compared to the presidential elections, suggested widespread disillusionment with the political process.
  
  Craig Charney agreed that security was a major concern in the eyes of most Afghans, but that when people were asked specifically “how is security in the area you live,” it is “a regionally concentrated problem particularly in the south and in the west—not surprisingly in places where the presence of the state tends to be particularly weak.”
  
  On turnout, Charney noted that when they asked people why they didn’t vote “we did not find evidence of disillusionment or contempt of government. The main reason for not voting people said was, ‘we didn’t find a candidate we could support.’  I think that’s particularly associated with the low turnout in Kabul because of the electoral system there, where people, often of low literacy, were confronted with pages and pages of ballots.”