23.7.14 Challenges and dilemmas of ...
By: Shahmahmood Miakhel
23.07.2014: The following writing is part of my published article which was written in 2009. I read it in a Seminar in India and the title of the paper was:
Challenges and dilemmas of reconstruction and institution-building in Afghanistan: Sustainable Economic Alternatives: social, economic and political factors
............Also, in the last seven years, most of the strategies were written by foreign consultants without proper consultation with professional Afghans. We all know that most of these consultants have tendency of cut and paste ideas taken from various sources, slap them together in a 200, 300 or 400 pages documents, give it to the government and call it "Strategy". Most of these strategies are mechanical transplants of models from developed world with little understanding of realities on the ground in specific countries. In Afghanistan, there were a lot of problems in the design of most programs as well as an absence of clear strategy of implementation. So most of programs, especially civil service reform and police reform, were poorly designed and badly implemented. All these reforms have created job insecurity and became exploited by people who have personal agenda.
One of our colleagues once compared consultancy in Afghanistan to a game of Afghan Buzkashi. When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and find a new horse. But the Aid and donor organizations in Afghanistan, instead of changing horses, set up committee to study the horse; arrange to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses; lower the standards so that dead horses can be included; reclassify the dead horse as living "impaired"; hire outside contractors who claim they can ride the dead horses; harness several dead horses together to increase their speed; provide additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance; perform a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance; declare that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the mission of the organization than do some other horses; rewrite the expected performance requirements for all horses; and-if all else fails- set up a workshop with paid attendants on the subject of riding dead horses in post-conflict settings. This is, of course, a joke, but it's the kind of joke that is mostly true...