Afghanistan has seen massive inflow of humanitarian aid over the past one decade. Tens of billions of dollars have entered Afghanistan and have been spent on developmental projects across a wide spectrum of sectors including health, education, infrastructure and military. One accompanying feature of this enormous inflow of humanitarian dollars has been the kind of dependence and addiction that it has brought about partly exacerbated by the weakness and absence of governmental and public administration apparatus.
Important sectors such as health, rural development and infrastructure are almost entirely dependent and addicted to humanitarian funds flow from outside Afghanistan. No one can ignore the significant improvements in the areas of health, rural development and infrastructure development over the past one decade.
But there are essentially two sets of problems with these gains: first, they have been made possible by the work of hundreds of international and national non-governmental organizations through bypassing the government of Afghanistan at the central and local levels.
The second problem is that if these improvements are to be sustainable and expand further, significant humanitarian donor-funded money should continue to be poured into the country at a time when this foreign-funded windfall is fast dwindling. So, essentially, what we have been witnessing has been an unsustainable ballooning of a parallel state at the expense of weakening and marginalization of the real state and its institutions particularly at the local level.
The minister of Public Health of the government of Afghanistan has been warning about an abrupt decline in the funding for the country's public health sector. The significant achievements made in the areas of public health as well as up to 70% of the current level and scale of operations and service delivery is funded by the donors and the international community.
The minister has been warning that a significant decline in donor funding would catapult the public health sector into a crisis meaning much of the gains would be wiped out. From now on, the foreign donors ranging from international organizations such the U.N. and the World Health Organization to individual countries such as the U.S. and Japan are expected to increasingly focus on the sustainability aspects of the projects currently funded by them.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has launched a drive to push the multitude of electronic and print media organizations funded by it towards sustainability. However, poor coordination and a pervasive and rampant culture of taking for granted the easy donor money are some of the factors that are likely to prevent this drive from being successful. Across a wider spectrum of donor-funded sectors including health and rural development we are going to see signs of crisis gradually appearing.
While this is a snapshot of the grim state of affairs on the non-governmental front, the government too is deeply mired in a state of morass. What is further complicating matters is a widespread sense of irresponsibility and the casual attitude of the country's public administration system towards the imperative of shouldering an increasing volume of responsibilities from the non-governmental sector.
The government, the decision-makers and public administrators behave as if the inflated and unsustainable non-governmental sector is here to stay indefinitely while the fact is that it should strive towards shouldering increasing responsibility in the face of dwindling commitment by donors and the looming 2014 deadline.
The government, of course, needs to be awakened to the gravity of the situation and pushed towards shouldering increasing responsibility for service delivery and undertaking of developmental projects at the local level across Afghanistan's districts and provinces.
The local scene across Afghanistan's districts and villages are dominated by NGOs and INGOs delivering much of the developmental projects and service delivery. Governmental institutions remain weak and suffer from lack of coordination at the local (district and village) level.
This is partly because in this heavily centralized governance system the planning takes place at the central level (in Kabul's ministries) and the ground realities of local areas and their needs are largely neglected. The ministries in the central government formulate developmental and service delivery planning largely based on Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) and in response to its generalized prescriptions rather than the needs on the ground.
This one-size-fits-all approach has proved to be largely deficient. As it has become well known, the capacity of central government and its provincial agents in delivering services and development is very limited. For the fiscal year 1390, they were able to spend not more than 40% of the development budget.
Lack of coordination among various ministries at the district and provincial level is another major problem. The overall situation is worsened by the fact that the representative bodies at these levels such as the provincial and district councils remain largely symbolic. They are powerless in the face of a heavily centralized executive apparatus that fiercely guards what it perceives as its own turf and that refuses to cede ground to non-executive although legally sanctioned citizen bodies.
The ministries in Afghanistan, whether at the central or local level, have little integration, coordination and cooperation horizontally. For example, at the provincial and district levels, the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development has very little cooperation and coordination with the Ministry of Public Works although the areas of responsibility of the two have significant overlap.
This example provides a glimpse into the reality of local-level public administration in Afghanistan of today. The policy and operational inertia that characterizes Afghanistan's public administration system would be very difficult to overcome without substantive political will being mustered at the national level and by the country's political leadership.
More than ever, the need for the overhaul of Afghanistan's public administration system is taking on acute urgency. At a time when the capacity and willingness of the international community is dwindling and the attention of the government of Afghanistan is consumed by a myriad of political and military challenges, it is difficult to see how this sector can command the attention and resources that it so desperately deserves. The costs of inaction and neglect will prove to be disastrous for Afghanistan in the long run.