It’s a sad irony that a country on the receiving end of a massive infusion of foreign assistance from countries all over the world, in one of the most ambitious and complex multinational interventions in history, is tied with Burma as the second most corrupt country on Earth, after Somalia, on Transparency International’s latest corruption index. “In most cases, ministers with sometimes only very basic training blindly manage institutions whose missions are vague, whose organization is defective, whose internal procedures are nonexistent, and whose supervisory personnel are chosen based on ethnic and political criteria,” Serge Michailof, former executive director of the French Development Agency, said recently of the Afghan government’s cabinet.
It’s not for lack of resources that the Afghan government is failing in its ability to exercise accountable and effective leadership and to provide basic services for its people. It is, rather, a failure to recognize the essential role of good governance in bringing peace and prosperity to a ravaged nation; and the failure of those holding the purse strings to enforce this recognition in any serious way into policy. Whenever the role of good governance is paid lip service by the international donors financing Afghanistan’s rebuilding, it’s rarely followed up with any robust insistence that the reforms that have been promised by the Afghan government actually be realized.
Time and time again, President Hamid Karzai’s regime has demonstrated its lack of will to seriously combat corruption, to appoint ministers with progressive agendas who will get things done, and to improve the quality and reliability of the services that should by now be accessible to most Afghans, like regular electricity, clean water, good schools and the rule of law. Karzai learned quickly there are few short-term consequences for breaking promises of reform. But even if the international donor community in Afghanistan is willing to tolerate the poor governance that Karzai’s government imposes on the country, Afghans are no longer willing to contend with the broken promises and the lethargic pace of democratic reform and social development.
A discrete rumbling has started among the youth of Afghanistan, as they observe citizen protest movements making serious gains in the Middle East. The role of social media in bringing together those who are fed up with their leaders has not been lost upon the increasingly tech-savvy young people of Afghanistan.
Facebook groups calling for reforms, an end to corruption, or for Karzai to step down are springing up constantly. At the same time, Afghans are making it clear they also reject Taliban ideology. Karzai’s calling the Taliban “our Afghan brothers” has left a deep wound for many disillusioned Afghans offended by the official wooing of the men who have murdered their fellow citizens. A new group, Anti-Taliban Movement Afghanistan, had 7,500 members until its website was hacked and all the members’ names deleted. The group administrators believe the Afghan government hacked the site. It quickly relaunched, with more than 6,000 members rejoining within 24 hours.
Afghanistan’s fairly open media has been covering events in Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia and elsewhere. Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of the Islamic political party and former mujahedin faction Jamiat-e Islami Afghanistan, recently expressed his anxiety of the potential power of the “Facebook and Internet kids” if “religious leaders fail to play a leadership role in the society.”
Indeed, it may be the “Internet kids” who trigger the fall of a regime that is failing its people and growing ever closer to the Taliban, or at least trying to. These “kids” are embodying the idea of citizenship and taking up the right to demand the accountability that was promised to them. Omar Ahmad Parwani, one of the founders of the Anti-Taliban group, told me they created the force to demonstrate the youth’s discontent with the government’s efforts to negotiate with the Taliban and to counter the idea that Afghans “don’t deserve democratic government.”
He adds, “We want to oppose being sacrificed for Karzai’s irrational decisions. We want to oppose having tribal political systems. We want to oppose being killed politically for big powers’ wishes. We want to oppose the U.S. not keeping their promises made to Afghanistan’s people. We want to oppose being once again left to neighbouring countries’ hands. We don’t want the world to make a decision so carelessly to leave us alone. We want to oppose losing all we have achieved in the last 10 years. We want to fight for our future.”
The best chance there may be for that future could be for the country’s young generation to stop waiting for Karzai to reform himself or for the international community to some day get serious about ceasing their tolerance of his regime’s antics.
It may mean taking their cyberprotests to the streets. In Afghanistan, good citizenship has evolved before good statehood, and it may be the citizens who end up the first true architects of democracy in their country.
--------------------
This article first appeared on Calgary Herald and is published here with kind permission of Lauryn Oates.
Lauryn Oates is a Canadian aid worker managing education projects in Afghanistan and has been advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan since 1996.