Security Sector Reform
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Case Study: SSR in Afghanistan

This month’s case study includes four different outlooks on SSR in Afghanistan, providing an in-depth analysis of the situation along with ongoing activities of the European Union, the European Commission and DCAF in the country.


Dilemmas and Challenges in Afghanistan’s Security Sector Reform

Despite military operations and robust political engagement during 2007, Afghanistan continues to face serious, interrelated challenges from insecurity, corruption, and narcotics. SSR across five pillars – military, police, justice, DDR, and counter-narcotics – is a core strategy of international and national stabilisation efforts and longer-term reconstruction. Yet, from the outset, SSR efforts have faced numerous dilemmas.

Since international reengagement in Afghanistan post-9/11, there has been tension between the twin goals of establishing a state capable of maintaining order and resisting terrorism, on the one hand, and of democratic governance, accountability, and respect for human rights on the other. Reliance by the US-led Coalition Forces on factional militias strengthened warlords opposed to the emergence of a strong central state, and ostracised a majority of the population. Political compromises by President Karzai and his international supporters were then needed to ensure that factional leaders stayed within the political process initiated by the Bonn Agreement.

These compromises obstructed DDR and SSR alike. Although Afghans identified DDR as the number one priority for their personal security, the Bonn Agreement deferred the details of disarmament; nearly two years passed until it commenced. In the interim, factional commanders deepened patronage networks and solidified control over subnational administration, as well as the licit and illicit economy.

Consequently, today there are few effective or legitimate governmental institutions through which to deliver security to the population. Citizen engagement with the state is frequently marked by corrupt and predatory officials. Faced with the ongoing insurgency, international emphasis has been on operational capacity, rather than civilian oversight. Many of the parliamentarians elected in 2005 are factional leaders, posing a paradox for accountability. With minimal legitimate state presence in most of rural Afghanistan, local communities rely on customary systems. This reality has slowly prompted more national attention to hybrid justice models incorporating formal state and informal institutions.

Different concepts of “security” among donors also drive contradictory approaches, of which policing is paradigmatic. A European Union police mission, EUPOL, deployed in June 2006. But Afghan recruits and international trainers have been in short supply, security guarantees for provincially-deployed trainers have been held up, and the mission commander resigned three months into his appointment. Meanwhile, the use by the US of military personnel for police training as part of its US$2.5 billion reform package has raised concerns about militarisation of the police.

Related, there is a fundamental tension between Afghanistan’s security needs and what it can afford. Although sustainability cannot come at the expense of security, neither can the government afford to maintain its security forces at their present size without the international community; support it cannot count on indefinitely.

There is increasing recognition by both the Government of Afghanistan and the international community that security and rule of law cannot be achieved by military means alone. It remains to be seen whether the SSR processes underway will yield tangible results able to positively alter realities on the ground. Yet, without a more holistic, long-term SSR strategy, the current short-term, ad hoc approach is unlikely to yield either.

Written by Jake Sherman, Project Coordinator for SSR at the Center on International Cooperation.

Reformations of State: Building Security, Law and Order and Justice Institutions in Afghanistan

Since its inception the reformation of Afghanistan’s security, law and order and justice system has been a highly challenging endeavour, made even more complex by the porous and poorly demarcated border that divides Afghanistan from Pakistan and inter-ethnic rivalry between factions loyal to northern and southern constituencies. Following 9/11 the international community moved swiftly to bolster national stability, with Operation Enduring Freedom alongside NATO and ISAF operations totalling between US$12-15 billion each year constituting a substantial strain on the purse strings of international tax payers.

The favoured approach of the international community was to structure investments around five pillars, with the US taking the lead in building the Afghan National Army (ANA), Germany in re-building the National Police (ANP), Italy leading on the Justice sector, the UK on Counter Narcotics and Japan covering DDR. Coordination was to be provided through various forums including the National Security Council. However, many of the early structural adjustment decisions – sectoral spending prioritisation, staffing establishments, pay and grading structures etc – were established without recourse to the fiscal capacity of the newly incumbent state. The 2006 World Bank PFM review of the security sector highlighted that current security sector spending equalled nearly 600% of government revenues. In the meantime staffing levels for the ANP have increased to 80,000 and pay and grading levels are mow nearly at parity with the ANA.

The costs of security provision remain substantial, and in spite of gains made in building the core competencies of both the ANA and ANP, insecurity continues to spiral in the south and parts of the north. With justice system spending equalling only around 2-3% of total SSR spending to date, the investment focus on the international community has been heavily biased towards the army and police. Furthermore, the burgeoning narcotics industry now valued at US$3 billion each year, which constitutes almost 40% of official GDP, combined with the failure of the Counter Narcotics programme to disburse funds through the Counter Narcotics Trust Fund (CNTF) (US$2-3 million only over a period of two years) makes the current situation rather precarious to say the very least.

The lessons are many. There is no integrated security, law and order justice systems policy and strategy framework, and the prioritisation of spending across the budget framework does not wholly reflect the thrust of the national threat assessment. Substantial off-budget spending by donors continues to undermine fiscal sustainability and budget transparency. Political support for counter narcotics, a sine qua non for success, remains wholly lacking. The growing security sector wage bill when viewed against the background of weak revenues constitutes a political and security risk in its own right. Lack of public administration and civil service reforms within the justice system undermines the entire justice system. Implementing the OECD IF-SSR, among other measures, would allow many of the above issues to be more systematically addressed.

Written by Dr. Peter Middlebrook. Formally a World Bank economist, he coordinated the US$27 billion Securing Afghanistan’s Future exercise, was the lead writer on the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS), and is the managing director of Middlebrook & Miller LLC.

European Union engagement in Afghanistan and lessons learnt

The European Commission (EC) is addressing many of the issues of security and rule of law in Afghanistan. First and foremost is support to the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the justice sector for which €200 million has been allocated for 2007-10.

The ANP through the Law and Order Trust Fund (LOTFA) has already received EC funding of €135 million from 2002-6 and a further €70 million is planned for 2007-8. This has paid for police salaries, but such contribution has not been without conditionality. It is crucial that necessary reforms of the ANP and the Ministry of Interior proceed. In this respect, the new EU police mission (EUPOL) under the ESDP will provide an important operational complement to the EC financial support. EUPOL will be training and mentoring Afghan police in the provinces and will be fully operational by spring 2008 with up to 190 police trainers.

Linked to the police is the whole question of justice. Perhaps a mistake all donors made to date in Afghanistan is to separate our efforts in the police, prosecutorial and justice sectors. There has to be a more holistic approach which is what the EU is striving toward through all its programmes in the rule of law sector. The EC has embarked on a new justice programme in 2007; it aims to set in place the institutional reform framework for the judiciary and prosecution service, covering pay and grading, recruitment systems and disciplinary procedures for all judges and prosecutors. Approximately 50% of judges in Afghanistan have any form of degree – be that in secular or Sharia law – and systems of recruitment need to be addressed. Without new systems in place in the judiciary – covering recruitment, remuneration and accountability – corruption and incompetence cannot be tackled and the culture of impunity will continue.

EC programmes are also covering regional security issues, in particular border management. New border posts have been or are being built at the Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan borders, with a €3 million training programme on the Afghan-Iran. Customs facilities and border guard posts are being installed both to control the flow of illicit goods – crucially narcotics – and increase much-needed customs duties for the Afghan government budget. In all, €20 million is programmed to assist the Afghan Customs Department up to 2010.

In conclusion, the emphasis of the future EC assistance programme will be to increasingly focus on building up governance and the rule of law at the provincial level. Whilst it has been accepted that it was necessary to build up central government functions in the first phase of reconstruction post 2001, there is now a growing awareness that the fragile Afghan state can only be successfully addressed by targeting resources at the provincial and district levels, especially in terms of getting government working and rule of law functioning. As such, future EC assistance, whilst continuing to support police and justice national level reforms, will also seek to project greater engagement of these processes at the provincial level.

For further information, please contact Paul Turner in DG External Relations at the European Commission.

DCAF Activities in Afghanistan 2007-8

In late October 2007, on a mandate from the Swiss Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sports (DDPS), a team from The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) undertook a fact-finding mission on justice and SSR status and needs in Afghanistan. The team met with civil society representatives, parliamentarians from across the political spectrum, representatives of security sector agencies and international organisations.

Since the team’s visit, requests for assistance on democratic oversight capacity building issues have been received from the Afghan National Assembly and Ministry of Defence. Civil society representatives in human rights monitoring, gender and SSR issues have also confirmed interest in cooperation.

As a result, DCAF is seeking funding for parliamentary and civil society capacity building programmes on democratic security sector oversight, as well as defence institution building, for implementation from March 2008 onwards. The capacity building efforts will be complementary to those already underway under UN and ISAF auspices, while at the same time addressing national ownership issues which have been overlooked to date. The programme’s core focus will be to address the problems that democratic institutions, the security sector and civil society organisations face in promoting human rights observance and building transparency and accountability into their nascent security architecture.

DCAF will also publish a study on Afghanistan’s Democratic Security Sector Governance Status and Needs in July 2008.

For more information please contact Eden Cole, Deputy Head, Operations NIS, DCAF.

GFN-SSR Document Library

The Document Library contains links to and summaries of articles related to SSR. A number of these focus on SSR in Afghanistan. These can be accessed by visiting the Document Library and selecting ‘Afghanistan’ in the country field. A few of the Afghan-specific articles are listed below:

  • Afghanistan Five Years Later: The Return of the Taliban
  • All Along the Watch Tower: Bringing Peace to the Afghanistan Pakistan Border
  • An Assessment of Sub-National Governance in Afghanistan
  • Cops or Robbers? The Struggle to Reform the Afghan National Police
  • From Soldier to Civilian: Disarmament Demobilisation Reintegration in Afghanistan
  • Peace Building and State-Building in Afghanistan: constructing sovereignty for whose security?
  • Security sector reform in Afghanistan: The slide towards expediency
  • The Role and Functions of Religious Civil Society in Afghanistan: Case Studies from Sayedabad and Kunduz

SSR organisations in Afghanistan

A lot of organisations, both local and international, NGO and governmental, are currently working in SSR in Afghanistan. Below is a short list of some of these, however, it is by no means comprehensive. A more detailed list is available in the GFN-SSR Organisations Directory.

Category: Regional Guides