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In this piece, @MohammadQadamsh and I show how efforts to build the Afghan state are now hurting people more than they are helping.
Twitter is no place for nuance, so please read this piece before you react. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/defund-afghanistan
Twitter is no place for nuance, so please read this piece before you react. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/defund-afghanistan
The COVID-19 crisis has made a bad situation even untenable. In recent weeks, desperate doctors around the country have protested. Some marched outside the IMF office asking that organization to ***rescind*** a $200 million aid package to their country. https://apnews.com/25fcdfc7680670c38a389f31095b060d
Why are doctors protesting aid? Because they know it will be lost to corruption. It will not help people. The citizens of Afghanistan will be saddled with these loans for years to come.
John Sopko @SIGARHQ said recently that the Taliban & other insurgents draw attention to government corruption & use it to “undermine public support for the government, garner recruits to their cause & weaken the government’s bargaining position during future peace negotiations.”
Democracy did not fail in Afghanistan: State-building efforts in Afghanistan after 2001 have failed not because donors tried to impose "Western-style" democracy.
These efforts failed because they resurrected authoritarian institutions from the country’s autocratic past (which were not designed to serve citizens) as the basis for the new state. Donors infused these authoritarian institutions with cash.
Democracy, especially at the local level, was never given a chance.
Afghanistan succeeded in dismantling and disbanding some parts of the state after 2001, but as in Georgia and Ukraine, these efforts were incomplete because they were too discrete and did not take into account other parts of the government. https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-countries-dismantled-their-police-to-start-fresh-it-workedup-to-a-point-11592040601
We believe that defunding the system will not encourage a Taliban takeover but instead prevent it. Pouring money into the current system fosters dysfunction and strengthens insurgent forces.
Just as the "defund" movement is not a call to abolish the police or eliminate all police funding in the United States, we are not calling for donor abandonment of Afghanistan.
Continued government dysfunction has led many Afghans to take ingeniously creative actions to solve their own problems. These are the solutions we should look to in the future.
The people of Afghanistan have suffered too long, as they face daily violence and untold deaths from COVID-19. Spending more money on the current system of governance will not yield better results.
