At the 2010 Lisbon summit NATO leaders agreed to a transition process
for Afghanistan.
The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) are to take the lead in conducting
security operations by the end of 2014.
The clock is ticking: persistent capability gaps in the ANSF remain, but
Western leaders are keen to prove to the public that transatlantic commitments
towards Afghanistan,
at least in their current constellation, are limited. International engagement
over the past decade has shown that there is no military solution to the
conflict in Afghanistan;
and that Afghans need to be in the lead of taking responsibility for their
security. The decision in favor of
transition reflects these realizations.
But, current
approaches to training the ANSF omit a key component in the transition
process. A sustainable political
solution is possible only if an increasing emphasis is placed on accountability
- and on governance. Both are needed to
ensure that the Afghan government and its institutions work towards stability
and in the interest of the Afghan people beyond 2014. The challenges to
establishing good governance and effective civilian control over the ANSF are
well documented. They include corruption, factionalism, weak oversight
mechanisms, political interference, and a central government that lacks
legitimacy and reach beyond the capital, Kabul. The concurrent focus on reconciliation as
part of a broader political transition strategy in Afghanistan makes the challenge of
governance all the more urgent.
What can NATO
and the international community do to make the transition sustainable? For one, NATO has to step up its commitment
to training the ANSF and to professionalize the Afghan National Army (ANA) as
well as the Afghan National Police (ANP).
Challenges facing reform efforts include conflicting loyalties, high
rates of attrition and a general lack of professionalism - and reinforce concerns
over sustainability. An exclusive focus on training, however, risks privileging
quantity over quality and short-term over long-term efforts. The ANP, for instance, should be an
instrument of the rule of law in the short and long term. But, current training
efforts almost exclusively focus on the role of the police in
counter-insurgency. This signals that the relationship between the security and
civilian functions to be taken on by the Afghan police has to be
re-conceptualized.
On the part of
NATO, the near exclusive focus on security also highlights the need for
increasing engagement with other international actors that engage in civilian
reconstruction. This includes the UN, but also the EU. To be sure, NATO took on
what were initially conceived as civilian tasks because of (civilian) shortfalls
in police training. This is
understandable. Still, civilian contributions remain crucial to ensure the
long-term sustainability of transition. It is time that NATO and its partners
re-conceptualize and implement a civil-military, long-term and short-term,
division of labor.
In order to do
so, NATO should continue to work with its partners to ensure coherence of
efforts when it comes to training and governance, and the civilian and military
tasks of the ANP in particular. Some
progress has been made. Cooperation with EUPOL Afghanistan, the EU police
mission in Afghanistan,
has improved, and the NATO training mission increasingly includes aspects of
civilian policing in its curriculum. But
more needs to be done to incorporate rule of law functions in the training but
also broader reconstruction efforts. For
instance, reforming the justice sector has been largely neglected - in terms of
training judges, strengthening judicial institutions, and reinforcing the links
between the police and justice sectors.
Thus, there is an
urgent need to go beyond training. International military engagement can create
security space for political solutions to take hold. But this rests upon the
assumption that the governance structures in place can absorb these processes
-in Afghanistan
they cannot. Weak political institutions reinforce the need for broader
political engagement to strengthen, or indeed restore, the legitimacy of Afghan
institutions. Bringing about a
sustainable transition requires the international community to focus on
governance, political institutions and the role played by civil society. This calls for a conceptual engagement with a
role for the ANA and ANP that goes beyond the present focus on counterinsurgency
for starters - and places an emphasis on legitimacy, not force. Beyond
oversight mechanisms, incorporating a political dimension in the current
approach towards transition also means focusing on local acceptance and
legitimacy to encourage Afghan buy-in.
Recalibrating
the civil-military balance and aligning positions of the various actors engaged
in aspects of reconstruction will assist in this process. It will enable the
international community to set up incentive structures and apply conditionality
for the Afghan government to take political reform more seriously. 2014 is a
narrow deadline. It is about ANSF taking the lead, but does not necessarily
signal the end of international engagement. Given the political challenges
outlined above as well as suggestions for how to tackle them, NATO should take
into account to a greater extent civilian capabilities and implementation
practices. Beyond 2014, Afghanistan
and the international community need a civilian and a political strategy to
ensure the sustainability of transition. But for that to happen, the planning
and implementation of such a strategy has to start - now.
Eva Gross is a Senior Research Fellow, at the
Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University Brussels).
This article was submitted for the atlantic-community.org's
competition: "Empowering Women in International Relations." It coincides
with the 10th Anniversary of UN resolution 1325 calling for an
increased influence of women in all aspects of peace and security. The
contest is sponsored by the U.S. Mission to NATO and the NATO Public
Diplomacy Division.
You can read more submissions from the competition here.
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