OVER THE EDGE danuary 30, 2008 | For somebody trying to navigate all these opinions, then, what advice would you give them? : The one thing you can do is go to the web- site, and look at the program, and look at the data that’s there. -Are you talking about the CIDA website or the Senlis? Go to both. Go to the World Bank website. Go to the government of Afghanistan website, because they’re very good website. Gather your own facts, and be careful to differentiate between opinions and fact. When you make critical comments about a third world’s level of anything, make sure that you understand the context in which you’re criticizing, because you “People in Afghanistan want the need to have that big pic- ture in order to be able to same things you or I want. They want their kids fed, versity of Kabul with this educated. They want economic de- where be coherent. You wouldn’t want to compare the Uni- university, for instance. Your personal views Afghanistan, then.. What would you say are the big- gest challenges and how can those challenges be met, and more positively, what are the sibel opportunities? The biggest challenges are balancing the need for security with the development pro- cess. Development is not fast. Sustainable development is a slow process. You need con- sistent security, and you need the development of the Afghan national army and the police to actually go hand-in-hand so they can take over responsibility for their own conflicts. And the third thing would be governance. Structures need to be given space to develop. You must have security and development going on in order for the government structures to be able to move. When you're talking government, are you talking bureaucracy, or are you talking the executive branches? No, I’m talking about, for example, com- _ munity development councils that are being built so that people can make their own de- cisions about how their communities will be developed. So they’re just local levels? Sub-national governments. But equally so, making sure the parliament works, making sure that the election process is able to func- tion. As you know, the election for the pres- ident is 2009-- very close. So they need to do the registers for the elections. They need to do all this pre-work. There’s a huge amount of things to do; they all present challenges. I think having a coherent picture of what needs to be done and when is really important but I don’t think you can separate the critical im- portance of the security sector from the. de- velopment process. Some people, including yourself-- correct me if I’m wrong-- have said there is a problem with corruption in government. How wide- spread is this corruption, and do you feel it is something that is fixable without a complete overhaul of the way governance is being done right now? Well, I don’t think there are any magic bul- lets. And I think in Canada we’re very quick to talk about corruption in Afghanistan. I would question whether we can do that so blatantly when we have politicians of our own in the newspapers every day who really are not playing by the rules. I think that there are people in Afghanistan who don’t want to change to the democratic process as smoothly as we would like, but I think we maybe use the word “corruption” a little too loosely. I don’t think there’s any easy fixes, but I think of velopment, they want health care. They just want a normal life” we need to understand better the rules of their game before we start saying “corruption.” An example I would use is the barter sys- tem-- some cultures use barter. The rules are loose, right? I don’t think we actually under- stand clearly enough how that system works. There's been a lot of talk about timelines, when the troops will pull out. Best-case scen- ario, what do you think the earliest is that Afghanistan would be a country that, say, I could visit for a vacation? Depends how risk-averse you are. It’s in- teresting, because General Hillier got his knuckles rapped for saying “ten years.” But the development of Afghanistan is going to take a long time-- —_ genera- tions. Thirty, forty years. When you say “how long?” clothed, and I don’t know from you’re starting, what’s your baseline, and what your vision is-- what makes it OK? When is it OK? You could go now as a tourist, but Canada wouldn’t cover you because you’re probably on a blue pass- port and they would advise against travelling. But people do travel to Afghanistan now, as tourists. One of the people that would be an example of this is Rory Stewart. He’s quite a charac- ter, and if you’re interested you should go to the Turquoise Mountain website (eds note: www.turquoisemountain.org), because that’s one of our projects, too. That project is de- veloping the old city of Kabul. It’s dug out all the garbage, it’s started to rebuild some of the shops, some of the schools, and they’re training people in the old traditional skills-- woodcarving, and figures, you know. And this is CIDA-sponsored? CIDA sponsors along with several other donors. But Rory Stewart is the author of sev- eral books. He’s a young man like yourself, and he works there everyday in downtown Kabul, and he’s very relaxed. He would tell you to go right now. At what point do you think Canada would recommend you could go? No idea, really. One of the slogans for the government-- and this may not have anything to do with you- - but one of the slogans is “Protecting Can- adians, Rebuilding Afghanistan?” How much do those two really go hand-in-hand? They do. As long as the Taliban flourishes, and al-Qaeda is training in those areas, and we know that to be true, then we’re at risk. Bhutto’s death, actually, tells us how much it’s resented that the U.S. is influencing Pak- istan politics, which is actually protecting the Taliban camps which allow for the insurgents to train and multiply. My own belief is that we have a problem there, and I do believe that if we can stabilize Afghanistan through a very basic program of development. People in Af- ghanistan want the same things you or I want. They want their kids educated-- well, fed first, clothed, and educated. They want economic development, they want health care. They just want a normal life, and they want to be left alone to live that normal life. And if we can help them get there through stable govern- ment and good services, it will go to help in stabilizing that region. Can we do it without the security? No. Be- cause currently there are too many Taliban, still troublesome. For your average person who may want to help out with Afghanistan, but not in a military capacity, is there any programs you know of? You could be in touch with NGO’s, like CARE Canada, who work with CARE inter- national, like Argacon, like MIDA-- there are several. You could be asking them that question, “What can I do?” You can apply to CIDA, to see what opportunities there are for students, because they do have a student pro- gram or an intern program. But they wouldn’t place interns in Kandahar or Kabul right now, because it’s too dangerous. One of my goals is to do some institutional linkage and try to get universities with Kabul University or Kanadahar University and try to get that kind of energy flowing between insti- tutions. Are you going to be talking to UNBC aa- ministration about this sort of thing? I’m going to be asking if anyone’s interest- _ ed in that sort of thing. Institutional linkages are usually looked upon as money-making entities, and this wouldn’t be a money-mak- ing entity. Is it frustrating when you see support for Canadian involvement in Afghanistan is around 50%, sort of hovering around there? I feel sort of disappointed that people don’t know what’s going on. I think we’ve done an incredibly poor job of providing the informa- tion out to the general public. The news media are totally captivated with the military might- - the tanks and the coffins are far more sensa- tional than anything I can drum up with a new school or kids getting education. They’ ve told me quite bluntly, “What you do is not very sexy so we don’t report it.” In my own view, realistically speaking, as sad as every lost soldier, under one hundred in six or seven years is pretty phenomenal rec- ord for a military record. Do you think that we've lost our and conflict-resolution is also very useful. I tend to put the other person first. That’s a simple rule. When you're working in multicultural teams, making sure that people have the con- textual information that they need to be able to work together is an important thing. You work very differently, of course, work- ing with Afghan men and women than you do with Canadian men and women, but the gen- eral rules of communication remain the same. You’re respectful, and you’re considerate, basically, of their opinions and their beliefs. Were there any particular projects you felt very close to? The education ones, because of my back- ground. I was very pleased when we decided to put money into the education programs. The Ministry of Education has got a national strategy that was developed with the Ministry of Education in UNESCO, and that strategy -for Afghanistan is a nice, holistic picture of what education in Afghanistan should like. And Canada has put $60 million in there over the next four years. This is really a great place to put our money. My own belief is that you’re not going to get security in Afghan- istan until you get all the kids in school and you’ve got educated people. The literacy rates are incredibly low right now. I had a friend years ago who said, “Shut down all the fancy programs and build primary schools and put kids in school across the world, and the prob- lems will be minimized.” And I still kind of lean that way. Talking development in general, in the world today you're seeing some programs like microfinance that are hugely success- ful, and the UN has said we are actually on schedule for eliminating extreme poverty. At the same time you're seeing the breakdown of semi-stable countries like Pak- understanding of “Afgt gnan people aye W&Prin, istan and Kenya that were almost what it means to be militarily in- volved? Our acceptance, yes. I think we’ve lost our acceptance that if our military are in- volved in belligerent interaction we should expect that if we’re going to be shooting at people they’re going to be shooting back, and so we should expect that we will lose people. Sad as that is, I think it’s part of the action. We are in there because we volunteered to go in. We said, “We'll take Kandahar.” General Hillier said, “We7ll go into Kandahar.” The Germans said, “We will not fight.” They have more troops there than we do, they have all kinds of money in there for training. We could have taken that route, we chose not to. I feel we can’t complain about what we did, in fact, get into with our eyes wide open. And what about pulling out in 2009? I think one of the misconceptions is the end of our commitment, at the moment, is 2009. We’re not in there on our own. We’re in there as part of NATO. What people lose sight of is we made a commitment for a period of time, and within the big NATO picture, 39 other countries have a responsibility there. It actually isn’t Canada’s problem, it’s NATO’s problem, I think the media don’t understand how that all fits together. During my presenta- tion I try to explain this. What sort of skills do you need to bring to have a job like your own? My master’s in education is in administra- tion, but my second area was counselling in adult education, and I did a lot of counselling training and I think that’s very helpful. You always come from a calm place when you’re working, it doesn’t matter who you’re work- ing with. The training I’ve had in mediation friendly, have great senses of humour, work very hard.” examples for their regions. So where are we going with this? One of the misconceptions is that development is a linear process, and of course it’s not. When you offer democracy, you offer choice. Look at Zimbabwe. That was a very success- ful country, now it’s not. How do you control democracies when they don’t do quite what you think they should do. I have no idea. I think sometimes we are fooled into think- ing things are calm, because we don’t actually know what’s going on. We don’t do enough digging. Biggest misconceptions that you would like to clear up about a. Afghanistan, and b. Can- ada’s role in Afghanistan? Well, I think we are making a difference in Afghanistan, and I don’t think Canadians have the information they need to make a judgement. What was the other question? Misconception about Afghanistan? That Afghanistan people are harsh people-- they’re corrupted, they bomb people, they’re suicide bombers, they’re not honest people. I - think that’s the biggest misconception. Afghan people are warm, friendly, have great senses of humour, work very hard for almost noth- ing because the salaries, for the most part, are very bad unless you work for an international organization. The Afghan people are worth saving from this mess, and I think the mis- conception that they are corrupt and not good people is really too bad. For more information on CIDA’ projects in Afghanistan, visit http:/ / www. acdi-cida.gc.ca/afghan- istan-e.