About the Report

This report focuses on both the U.S. military’s localized 

governance, reconstruction, and development projects and U.S. 

civilian stabilization programming in Afghanistan from 2009 

through 2012. Based on interviews with nearly sixty Afghan 

and international respondents in Kabul, Kandahar, Nangarhar, 

and Washington, this report finds that the surge has not met 

its transformative objectives due to three U.S. assumptions 

that proved unrealistic. It also examines lessons from the U.S. 

surge’s impacts on local governance that can be applied toward 

Afghanistan’s upcoming transition. 

About the Author

Frances Z. Brown is a 2011–12 International Affairs Fellow with 

the Council on Foreign Relations and an Afghanistan Fellow at 

the United States Institute of Peace. She has worked in and on 

Afghanistan since 2004, and her previous jobs included roles 

with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit and the 

United States Agency for International Development. She holds 

an MA from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International 

Studies and a BA from Yale University. The views in this report 

are solely her own and do not reflect the views of the 

U.S. government.

2301 Constitution Ave., NW • Washington, DC 20037 • 202.457.1700 • fax 202.429.6063

Special Report 316 September 2012

© 2012 by the United States Institute of Peace. 

All rights reserved.

Contents

Background: Civilian Surge and Renewed Military

Focus on District Governance 3

Assumption One: Governance and Development

Timelines Would Mirror Security Progress 5

Assumption Two: Bottom-Up Progress Would Be

Reinforced by Top-Down Processes 8

Assumption Three: “Lack of Government” as the

Problem to Be Addressed 12

Conclusions and Recommendations 15

Frances Z. Brown

The U.S. Surge and 

Afghan Local Governance 

Lessons for Transition

Summary

•	 The U.S. military and civilian surge into Afghanistan starting in late 2009 aimed to stabilize 

the country through interconnected security, governance, and development initiatives.

•	 Despite policymakers’ claims that their goals for Afghan governance were “modest,” the 

surge’s stated objectives amounted to a transformation of the subnational governance 

landscape.

•	 Three years later, the surge has attained localized progress, but it has not achieved the 

strategic, sustainable “game change” in Afghan subnational governance it sought.

•	 The surge has not met these objectives because its success depended upon three initial U.S. 

assumptions that proved unrealistic. 

•	 First, surge policy assumed that governance progress would accrue as quickly as security 

progress, with more governance-focused resources compensating for less time. 

•	 Second, surge policy assumed that “bottom-up” progress in local governance would be 

reinforced by “top-down” Afghan government structures and reforms.

•	 Third, surge policy assumed that “absence of governance” was a key universal driver for 

the insurgency, whereas in some areas, presence of government became a fueling factor.

•	 Once the surge was in motion, other miscalculations emerged: the confusion of discrete 

successes with replicable progress, the mistaking of individuals’ improvements with institution building, the confusion of “local” with “simple,” and the overreliance on technological 

solutions to address problems that were fundamentally political in nature. 

•	 As the surge draws down, the U.S-Afghan Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement represents a promising opportunity for longer-term strategic planning.

•	 As the international community moves to transition, it should exert its remaining leverage 

to impact select systemic issues—such as by resolving district council makeup, improving 

United States Institute of Peace www.usip.org

SPECIAL REPORT
2 

line ministries’ recurring services, and bolstering provincial administrations—rather than 

tactical-level ones.

•	 The international community should also prioritize a few key, attainable efforts, such as 

providing training that is consistent with current Afghan government functions, while 

avoiding creating additional structures. 

•	 Finally, all the usual Afghan local governance recommendations still apply: resolving 

Afghanistan’s subnational challenges requires long-term commitment and systematic 

execution. 

In 2009, Barack Obama’s inauguration ushered in a renewed, bolstered U.S. engagement in 

Afghanistan. Upon completion of an interagency Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review during 

the first weeks of his administration, President Obama in March 2009 announced the United 

States’ intensified military and civilian strategy. The overriding American objective remained 

“to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their 

return to either country in the future;”1 in support of this, the United States would strive to 

“promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government.”2

As the Obama administration articulated its Afghanistan objectives, it emphasized its focus 

on local Afghan government institutions. After widespread acknowledgment that the international community had concentrated its assistance too heavily on Kabul in the years after 

the 2001 Bonn Agreement, the new U.S. approach intensified a recently increased focus on 

provinces and districts, “where most Afghans encounter their government.”3 Following years 

of largely fruitless hopes for trickle-down governance from Kabul-level aid, the United States 

now aimed to connect local-level governance structures to national ones “from the bottom 

up.”4 A new military and civilian stabilization strategy endeavored to build governance and 

development in regions of the country recently “cleared” from a security perspective—largely 

in Regional Commands South and East. For the first time, U.S. personnel and resources would 

flow directly into the district level in some of Afghanistan’s most volatile areas.

Over three years after President Obama’s initial strategy announcement, and as the international community shifts to “transition” mode, what lasting impacts has the surge had on 

Afghan subnational governance? Examining both the U.S. military’s localized “governance, 

reconstruction, and development” projects and civilian “stabilization” programming, this 

report argues that the U.S. surge aimed to profoundly transform Afghanistan’s subnational 

governance landscape by establishing technical, accountable, and responsive local government.5 Drawing from over sixty interviews with international and Afghan observers and 

officials involved in these efforts, mainly based at the local level, this report finds that the 

surge’s impact has fallen short of this transformative intent because stabilization plans were 

based upon three unrealistic assumptions:

•	 U.S. policy overestimated the speed and extent to which specific types of intervention would 

make progress—assuming that the speed with which the counterinsurgency effort “amassed 

security effects” would be mirrored by the speed with which it “amassed governance effects.”

•	 U.S. policy assumed that this marginal progress from the “bottom up” would be reinforced 

and consolidated by “top-down” national-level institutions—when, instead, centralized 

Afghan government interests systematically obstructed these advances.

•	 U.S. policy assumed that “lack of governance” was a universal driver of the insurgency, for 

which bolstering government was the cure—yet in some areas, presence of government 

became a fueling factor.

To truly achieve the transformational effects articulated before the U.S. surge would 

require a wholesale shift of Afghanistan’s subnational incentive structures—a shift that could 

only be enabled by a mobilization of the Afghan government at the central level and altered 

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily 

reflect the views of the United States Institute of Peace, 

which does not advocate specific policy positions.

To request permission to photocopy or reprint materials, 

e-mail: permissions@usip.org.

About the Institute

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, 

nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress. 

Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent conflicts, 

promote postconflict peacebuilding, and increase conflict 

management tools, capacity, and intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by empowering others with 

knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by its direct 

involvement in conflict zones around the globe.

Board of Directors

J. Robinson West (Chair), Chairman, PFC Energy •

George E. Moose (Vice Chair), Adjunct Professor of Practice,

The George Washington University • Judy Ansley, Former 

Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security 

Adviser under President George W. Bush • Eric Edelman,

Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, Johns Hopkins 

School of Advanced International Studies • Kerry Kennedy, 

President, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human 

Rights • Ikram U. Khan, President, Quality Care Consultants, 

LLC • Stephen D. Krasner, Graham H. Stuart Professor of 

International Relations, Stanford University • John A. 

Lancaster, Former Executive Director of the National Council 

on Independent Living • Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor, 

George Mason School of Law • Judy Van Rest, Executive Vice 

President, International Republican Institute • Nancy Zirkin,

Executive Vice President, Leadership Conference on Civil and 

Human Rights

Members Ex Officio

Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for 

Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor • James N. Miller, 

Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy •

Gregg F. Martin, Major General, U.S. Army; President, 

National Defense University • Richard H. Solomon, 

President, United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting) 
 3

power dynamics at the periphery. Despite public proclamations, the Kabul-based government’s fundamental interests in the realm of subnational governance were to maintain the 

status quo. As the United States views its Afghan engagement going forward, the lesson of 

the surge is that there is no exogenous, localized technical solution to a centralized politicalwill problem—and more broadly, that a state-building project in which the interests of the 

international community do not align with the Afghan government will fall short.

Background: Civilian Surge and Renewed Military Focus on 

District Governance

As President Obama took office in early 2009, his administration’s new Afghanistan strategy 

acknowledged that the international community’s largely “top-down,” heavily centralized 

approach to governance assistance in the years following 2001 must be complemented by 

localized approaches more appropriate to Afghanistan’s decentralized social makeup and 

history. After years of attempting to strengthen governance reforms from above, the United 

States would now attempt to bolster the Afghan state “from the bottom up.”

Though the surge’s primary military objective was to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, the 

dramatic increase of U.S. troops and civilians marked this renewed focus on Afghan governance. President Obama authorized an additional 47,000 military personnel within his first 

year,6 mainly deployed to southern and eastern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, after the Obama 

administration launched the “civilian surge” or “civilian uplift” over the next year, representatives from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Departments of 

State, Justice, and Agriculture roughly tripled the total U.S. government civilian presence 

in Afghanistan from 300 to 1,000,7 overseeing additional thousands of contracted civilian 

implementing partners.

Once on the ground, both military and civilian personnel were increasingly deployed to 

local levels with a governance mandate. At the provincial level, American-led Provincial 

Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which previously hosted one or two U.S. State Department or 

USAID officers, now became hubs of many more civilian personnel. And while U.S. civilians 

had previously not been based at the level of Afghanistan’s 401 districts,8 over the course 

of 2009 and 2010 civil-military District Support Teams (DSTs) sprang up. Meanwhile, U.S. 

military leaders, newly galvanized by counterinsurgency doctrine that underscored linkages 

between development and security, formally tasked increasing proportions of their troops to 

improve “governance, reconstruction, and development” through Commanders’ Emergency 

Response Program (CERP) funds.

The Surge’s Transformative Goals: U.S. Communication

Once deployed at the local level under the broad heading of “stabilization,” what were all 

these U.S. military and civilian personnel aiming to achieve? As befits the murky world 

of U.S. interagency planning, no one unclassified document definitively represents the 

U.S. intent for the surge. Still, certain themes emerge from the proliferation of American 

“strategies” and “plans.” The State Department’s “Afghanistan Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy” noted that U.S. officials were to “increase our focus” on subnational institutions and officials with the “goal of making local government more visible, accountable, 

and capable.”9 The U.S. Government’s “Joint Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan,” 

coauthored by U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry and International Security Assistance Force 

(ISAF) commander General Stanley McChrystal in August 2009, echoes that “from the bottom up” the U.S. effort should cultivate “increasingly responsive, capable, and accountable 

governance at all levels, reinforcing . . . connection and legitimacy.”10 
4 

In public communications, President Obama underscored that his administration’s goals 

for Afghan governance were feasible and measured, in pointed contrast to the Bush administration’s overly lofty goals for Iraq: “I reject . . . [a] decades-long nation-building project.”11

His defense secretary, Robert Gates, emphasized that “we need to have modest, realistic 

goals. If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over 

there, we will lose.”12

But although policymakers stressed their goals’ attainability, upon closer examination, 

the surge’s stated goals implied a programming agenda attempting to fundamentally transform Afghan subnational governance. At first brush a focus on “local governance” may have 

appeared simple and feasible, but when viewed in aggregate, the surge actually aspired to 

a far more robust effort in state-building than publicly acknowledged. America’s new focus 

centered on district-level administrations, among Afghanistan’s smallest formal units; the 

notion of transforming these administrations into “accountable, capable, and visible” ones 

actually signified a dramatic shift from the historic baseline. 

In particular, the American goal to improve district governments’ “accountability” to the 

local population contrasted with existing incentive structures on the ground. Consistent 

with Afghanistan’s long history of highly centralized formal executive authority, Afghanistan’s district governors or woleswals are not elected; instead, they are appointed by the 

Kabul-based Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG). These officials’ job security thus runs directly upward to Kabul. District governors traditionally represented a nexus 

of a “government of relationships” that pervaded Afghanistan’s subnational structure.13

Many observers have argued that their appointment through IDLG serves as a vehicle to 

enact the interests of the Afghan president.14

In contrast, the surge’s programs envisioned a form of local legitimacy deriving from service delivery through line ministries, representation, and formal accountability structures. 

This tension between the notion of technical reform and Afghanistan’s more fluid “government of relationships” has marked the international community’s efforts in Afghanistan for 

years. However, the surge heightened this tension by increasing the resources at stake and 

pressure to quickly demonstrate results.

Finally, the sheer scale of U.S. stabilization policy’s stated goals was ambitiously transformative. Though U.S. policymakers never claimed that all 401 districts were to be altered at 

once, even focusing on the ISAF-designated 94 key terrain districts and 44 area of interest 

districts represents an enormous undertaking.15 Several documents discussed remaking an 

even more decentralized level of Afghan subnational landscape, “communities,” which the 

Afghan government currently numbers at 31,700 nationwide, and other documents wanted 

to tackle “villages.”16

Stabilization’s Transformative Goals: Afghan Communication

If the U.S. surge aimed to fundamentally alter Afghan local governance, the Afghan government’s own official Sub-National Governance Policy (SNGP) claimed to share this transformative ambition. Finalized in March 2010, the 415-page document’s stated objectives 

and responsibilities for the state’s provincial, district, village, municipal, and ministerial 

components spectacularly exceeded Afghan precedents. At once internally contradictory 

and internally redundant, the SNGP’s prescriptions for government initiatives—ranging from 

the “Human Rights Based Approach in Sub-National Governance” to “Community Scorecard 

Accountability,” from the “Right to Information Act” to “Customer Service Orientation in 

Public Service”17—bordered on the fantastical (and suggested a heavy donor influence in 

preparation and audience). 

At the district level, the SNGP stipulated a transformational shift to a technical, systematic entity that echoed the U.S. vision of “accountable, visible, and capable” local 

The surge’s stated goals 

implied a programming agenda 

attempting to fundamentally 

transform Afghan subnational 

governance. 
 5

government. First, on accountability, the SNGP stated that constitutionally mandated, 

directly elected, representative district councils would provide a direct accountability 

link to the people. The district councils would hold the (still–appointed) district governor 

accountable through “oversight” and “monitoring and evaluation,” formulating a District 

Development Plan, and requiring monthly testimony from the district governor. Line ministry representatives were to be “accountable to the district council and district governor,” 

albeit with limited enforcement mechanisms.18

The SNGP also echoed the American vision of “capable” local governance by ordering an 

extremely robust list of district-provided services: “These services include Justice, Security, 

Safe passage of people and goods on Public Roads, Water and Sanitation, Health and Nutrition, Education, Electricity, Roads, Local Transportation, Infrastructure, Agriculture and 

Irrigation, Natural Resource Management, Land Registration, Social Protection, Identity 

Card, Private Sector Development, Civic Services such as Solid Waste Management, Traffic 

Management, Street Lighting, Recreational Facilities.”19 (The SNGP even envisions a district 

that will deliver Millennium Development Goals by 2020.) Finally, the SNGP shared with its 

American counterparts the vision of “visible” government, stating the importance of filling 

“tashkeels” (official civil servant slots) locally. 

Assumption One: Governance and Development Timelines Would 

Mirror Security Progress

Although the surge yielded some distinct progress within discrete municipalities, communities, and districts, Afghan subnational governance has not shown the strategic transformation between 2009 and 2012 envisioned by U.S. and Afghan policymakers. Of course, the 

sheer, extraordinary ambition of the stated goals of the joint Afghan-American subnational 

stabilization project largely explains why implementation fell short. But more specifically, 

the surge has not met its strategic objectives because it rested on three key assumptions 

that proved unrealistic.

First, American plans overestimated the speed with which specific types of governance 

intervention would yield wider progress. 

Steeped in the Amazon-bestselling The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field 

Manual published in late 2006, American military and civilian officers overwhelmingly 

embraced governance and development efforts as crucial to the counterinsurgency campaign in southern and eastern Afghanistan from late 2009 onward. The military troop 

surge would clear insurgent areas of “anti-government elements,” and then joint military 

and civilian efforts would “hold and build” through governance and development programs 

increasingly spearheaded by the actual Afghan government.

However, high-level plans often seemed to assume that these timelines for establishing 

effective governance and development would mirror (or closely approach) the speed of the 

security operations—that, in military parlance, “governance effects” would “amass” at the 

same rate at which“security effects amassed.” They overestimated the speed with which, 

and extent to which, specific governance programs would yield wider progress and often 

incorrectly assumed that more governance and development-focused personnel and money 

could compensate for less time. 

Speed to Establish Legitimate Government Representatives

As one example of this first unrealistic assumption, U.S. plans often hoped that timelines for 

establishing legitimate, locally supported government officials would approach the speed of 

the security operations. The early-2010 Marjah operation in Helmand was billed as a model 
6 

of the new, fully integrated counterinsurgency strategy: in preparation for a massive clearing operation that would drive out a huge Taliban cohort from the district, NATO and Afghan 

officials gathered Afghan administrators and an Afghan governor ready to “move into Marjah 

the moment the shooting stops.”20 ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal’s famous 

claim that “we’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in” to Marjah was only the most 

high-profile example of this driving assumption that local officials could be almost literally carted in and take root.21 The eventual outcome of the Marjah operation—the district 

governor “rolled in” to take charge, who had lived outside of Afghanistan for the previous 

15 years, failed to instantly sprout legitimacy or gain local support22 (and was revealed to 

be convicted for manslaughter in Germany)—is instructive. He was rolled right out of Marjah 

four months later in the same proverbial box in which he came.23

Even apart from the high-profile Marjah example, several other local surge efforts overestimated the speed with which local district governors would become locally viewed as 

“legitimate.” Stabilization programming assumed that the insurgency stemmed from a lack 

of community connection with government officials, so attempted to rectify this gap by 

facilitating “linkages” between formal subnational officials (usually district governors) and 

remote communities. Common programs involved transporting district or provincial governors, usually by U.S. military lift or ground movement, to an outlying area to meet with 

constituents who had never seen a governor before. The official would hold a shura (council) 

or cut a ribbon and make strides toward gaining community support.

While these district governor visits to outlying constituents accomplished their mission 

of introducing the two groups for the first time, several locally based Americans and Afghans 

noted it was unlikely that these generally one-time endeavors could germinate lasting connections between an official and his population. Others worried that when certain district 

governors only seemed to arrive by American military helicopter, their local authenticity 

suffered; many observed that a key question was whether, when American lift was no longer 

available, the governor would choose and be able to perpetuate these visits.

Local support could not be fostered overnight, yet the scale of actually facilitating 

repeated contacts between communities and district governors would have been staggering. Roughly 13,000 to 14,000 villages fall within ISAF’s 94 key terrain districts and 44 area 

of interest districts.24 The time and resources required to introduce all of those communities 

outside the district center to a district governor—much less facilitate follow-up visits—

raised serious questions of feasibility.

The surge’s hopes that external programming could help establish local government 

representatives’ legitimacy stemmed partially from beliefs about the effects of the 

National Solidarity Programme (NSP), a World Bank–designed, donor-funded communitydriven development program launched in 2003. Against the famously challenging Afghan 

landscape, NSP achieved notable successes: a large-scale randomized field experiment 

demonstrated it had indeed yielded positive impact in improving citizens’ attitude toward 

their government, as well as other positive effects.25 As the new U.S. surge focused on 

connecting local government officials to their population, policymakers and think tanks 

endorsed expanding U.S. aid to NSP but also supported “programs like it.”26 Several ISAF 

stabilization initiatives incorporated “NSP-like” elements into their design in hopes of yielding NSP’s positive impacts.

However, transposing the NSP model into a stabilization context in hopes of bolstering 

local government officials’ legitimacy rested on some flawed assumptions. First, NSP demonstrated positive effects in the randomized field experiment only in more stable areas of 

Afghanistan; the program showed negligible positive impacts in more highly insecure areas 

on which the surge focused.27 Second, NSP’s ideal timeframe is around two and a half years 

from initial facilitating partner contact through the implementation of one project.28 The 

Transposing the NSP model into 

a stabilization context in hopes 

of bolstering local government 

officials’ legitimacy rested on 

some flawed assumptions.
 7

program requires a meticulous consultative process to gain community buy-in, determine 

a representative Community Development Council, settle upon a project, and oversee 

completion; it is this lengthy process, more than the single project that resulted from it, 

that seems most to convince NSP’s participants of the program’s legitimacy.29 Stabilization 

programs—mandated to show results in a matter of weeks or months—simply did not afford 

the opportunity to gain this level of deep, widespread community buy-in. As a consequence, 

accelerated programs attempting to emulate NSP’s success in building support for districtlevel officials fell short of their transformative intent. 

Speed to Establish Vertical Line Ministry Linkages for Service Delivery 

High-level officials often referred to the surge’s goals for service delivery as “connecting the 

bottom up to the top down”—a shift from years of Kabul-driven line ministry reform. The 

“bottom-up approach” implied that if communities were empowered to organize and articulate priorities, they could “reach up” to their district-level line ministry representatives, who 

would in turn be empowered to “reach up” to the provincial level, and so on—and at some 

level, someone would be empowered and galvanized to respond. After an area had been 

“cleared,” rather than continue to fruitlessly wait for trickle-down development, the surge 

would prompt grassroots mobilization for demand-driven service delivery. U.S. stabilization 

programs sought to meet these locally articulated service delivery requests on an interim 

basis while these vertical linkages up the line ministry chains developed.

Unfortunately, establishing these line ministry vertical linkages took much longer than 

the “bottom-up” model suggested and much longer than the military process that cleared 

contested areas and demanded immediate “hold and build.” From 2009 onward, the international community and the Ministry of Finance made progress in increasingly incorporating 

provincially identified priorities in the budget process.30 However, the fact that at first this 

was only a pilot project, combined with the realities of the Afghan budget cycle, and the 

slowness of the public procurement process, meant that national line ministry budgets are 

still in their nascent stages of reflecting provincial priorities. Incorporating district-level 

priorities into ministry budgets is inconsistent with ministerial systems and, despite general 

discussions, had never been seriously pursued.

Conversations around service delivery highlight a chasm between the views of locally 

based personnel (ISAF military, ISAF civilian, and Afghan) on one side, and Kabul-based 

individuals (ISAF and Afghan) on the other, on a realistic timeframe and process for how 

“bottom up” was actually to meet “top down.” Locally based personnel believed their role 

was to encourage local groups to mobilize and submit their service delivery requests through 

district representatives, creating a demand for services at a level well beyond the Afghan 

historic precedent, and in so doing, inflating the role of the district governor in service 

delivery well beyond his traditional job. This process often increased communities’ trust in 

their government officials in the short run—because in the short run, these district officials could count upon American money and muscle to actually fulfill these service delivery 

requests. However, in the long run, this process dramatically increased demand for services 

while improvements in the recurring supply side—the “top down” of service delivery—were 

measured in budgeting cycles and years. 

While these misunderstandings provide yet another example of Afghanistan’s centuriesold divide between Kabul and outlying rural areas, the result was frustration from both ends 

of the bottom-top spectrum. 

Speed to Identify and Rectify “Sources of Instability”

From late 2009 onward, U.S. military and civilian leadership (largely) articulated a new direction 

for surge programming: CERP funds and civilian stabilization money should not aim to endlessly 

Conversations around service 

delivery highlight a chasm 

between the views of locally 

based personnel and Kabulbased individuals on a realistic 

process for how “bottom up” 

was actually to meet 

“top down.” 
8 

provide for the economic needs of Afghans in hopes of winning over “hearts and minds” but 

instead should prioritize interventions targeting the “sources of instability.”31 Shifting emphasis 

to addressing the drivers of conflict—usually political factors rather than economic ones—mirrored recommendations from research into best practice in Afghanistan aid.32

However, organizational factors and stabilization’s accelerated time frame impeded 

execution of this improved approach. First, robust, accurate analysis of local actors was 

hard to get. With some exceptions, military and civilian personnel turnover was high.33 

Located “behind the wire,” Americans’ insights into local politics and dynamics were often 

conditioned by the views of local staff, local interpreters, and the few “key leaders” or community members willing to engage with international actors. Even with the much-touted 

layers of intelligence reform and intelligence personnel surge, many Americans worried 

their efforts to understand complex local conditions—often with backstories reaching back 

generations—made slow headway compared with their tours’ length. With opportunities 

for triangulation limited, American CERP and civilian projects ran the risk of inadvertently 

triggering unintended consequences. 

Second, even with accurate identification of sources of instability, actually delivering 

governance and development programs that ameliorated these factors faced deep obstacles. 

Almost every stabilization project required some combination of capable engineers, domestic supply procurement, international supply procurement, financial transfers, distributional 

logistics, cooperative weather, cooperative-enough security, military transportation, local 

transportation, local leader engagement, and local community engagement. This constellation of factors did not often align, meaning that even small stabilization projects intended 

to help the local Afghan government officials quickly respond to their population’s grievances were often slower than hoped in implementation. 

Discrete Governance Successes Would Quickly Spread, “Ink Blot” Style 

Finally, U.S. policymakers hoped that the surge would prompt governance and development 

to extend like an “ink blot,” in parallel to an increasingly large footprint of militarily secured 

territory. Communities would travel to the district center to request services, and when 

district officials—enabled by foreign muscle or money—met these needs, neighboring 

communities would envy the services received and go to the district center as well. 

Afghan and U.S. observers cited many examples of this approach’s success throughout 

Regional Commands South and East. However, several Americans noted that the progress of 

facilitating this ink blot approach was extremely labor intensive, halting, and fully dependent on the right local counterparts. Rather than the “ink blot” gathering momentum of 

its own, with Afghan government officials increasing service delivery to ever-wider swaths 

of a district’s population as Americans stepped aside, the approach continued to require 

significant U.S. resources and engagement. For this approach to achieve a strategically 

transformative impact would likely require decades at this level of expenditure—if it would 

have worked at all. 

Assumption Two: Bottom-Up Progress Would Be Reinforced by 

Top-Down Processes

Another cluster of reasons the U.S. surge has fallen short of its transformative governance 

goal stems from the assumption that any marginal “bottom-up” progress in encouraging 

local Afghan officials’ accountability would be reinforced by the top levels of Afghan government incentivizing and reinforcing this improvement. In reality, attempts to increase 

local officials’ downward accountability threatened Kabul’s heavily centralized patronage 

system to ensure that district-level administrators maintained allegiance to the capital. In 
 9

the realm of three local governance priorities—increased accountability and responsiveness 

of local district governors, increased accountability and authority of district councils, and 

increased local authority over budgetary decision making—local “bottom-up” progress 

was not matched by central-level structural reforms. Though Kabul’s communications lent 

rhetorical support to notions of decentralizing governance to increase local accountability, 

overall progress of the “bottom-up” endeavor was hindered by a lack of political will (or 

abundance of political obstruction) on top. 

Local Accountability Clashed with Centralized Interests: The Role of District Governor

The surge deployed legions of civilians and uniformed personnel at the district level to 

encourage district governors to become more accountable to a broader spectrum of their 

population. By continual mentoring of the district governor, and by conditioning inputs of 

aid, U.S. officials pressed their counterpart district governor to respond to his constituents’ 

requests registered at the district center, and to provide projects more equitably throughout 

the district. 

These U.S.-induced incentive shifts for district governors altered the short-term behavior 

of many local officials, whom U.S. observers reported as more apt to endorse projects more 

evenly throughout their district and respond to their population. However, the practice did 

not shift very real accountability structures already in place for the district governor. Historically, Kabul has always used the post of the district governor to extend the “government of 

relationships” to the local level.34 Whatever the conditions on the foreign-aid flow of the 

day, district governors remained appointees whose job security depended on Kabul rather 

than on being popularly elected. 

How was this conundrum to be resolved? U.S. policy was unclear. Some military and 

civilian leadership acknowledged that district governors’ behavior shifts might be short term 

when incentivized solely by U.S. money but hoped that in the long term, other factors would 

compel governors to be more sustainably accountable to their populace. One possibility: 

after U.S. mentoring of a particular governor for long enough, he would see the intrinsic 

benefits of his increased accountability to his entire population and continue this behavior 

on his own. In essence, it was hoped that Afghan officials would take on a very (idealized) 

American sense of “public service” rather than revert to emphasis on survival or tribal affiliation. Of course, governors’ frequent reshuffling (or assassination) made long-term mentoring unlikely. To achieve any kind of nationally transformative impact, this approach would 

have depended on a tremendous amount of American personnel and time—if it would have 

worked at all.

Another hope—even more vaguely understood by those serving at the local levels—was 

that top-down systems were being reformed and would eventually shift all district governors’ 

incentives to make them locally accountable. Directly electing district governors would 

deviate significantly from Afghan precedent and encounter myriad logistical and political 

hurdles. A more realistic approach to making district governors more accountable to their 

population was to empower and formalize elected district councils as a check on the governors, an idea discussed in the next section. 

A final American hope for improving district governor accountability—or at least responsiveness and performance—rested on the Afghan government’s formally announced move 

toward merit-based appointments. Instating a formal, merit-based system would increase 

the overall professionalism of the district governor corps, select for technical qualifications 

rather than waseta (connections), and institute a culture of “customer service,” in the exact 

words of the SNGP.35

However, despite much rhetorical support, Kabul-based actors made limited headway 

on reforming this system as American officials hoped. At time of writing, the Independent 
10 

Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission and IDLG reported that, after a long 

halt, the merit-based process for district governor appointments was moving ahead,36 with 

a formalized solicitation, recruitment, and exam process and codified minimum requirements 

for a district.37 This process still faces the long-standing challenge of appropriately defining “merit” for the role of district governor,38 though the exam process involves technical 

competencies, set educational requirements, and a personal interview.39 Moreover, though 

this initiative was too new to fully evaluate, it had already been delayed significantly for 

political reasons, and early evidence suggests that in the final decisions on appointments, a 

murky web of decision makers within the Presidential Palace and IDLG still make the calls. 

As Martine van Biljert has noted before on the issue of reforming subnational appointments, 

new formal procedures “do not necessarily change the rules of the game, but rather provide 

a different vocabulary for power struggles.”40

Whatever the official language or formal procedures, the Kabul-based executive’s de 

facto authority over district governors seems unlikely to shift in the near term. With the 

IDLG increasingly viewed as a tool for the Kabul government’s centralizing impulses,41 and 

as an actor that reportedly played the role of political mobilization machine for President 

Hamid Karzai’s reelection in 2009,42 the IDLG and by extension the Presidential Palace will 

likely see little incentive to loosen their hold on appointments during the advent of the 

2014 presidential election.

Local Accountability Clashed with Centralized Interests: 

District Representative Councils

U.S. “bottom-up” efforts to encourage local accountability and authority also collided with 

the Kabul-based patronage system in the realm of district-based representative councils. 

The Afghan Constitution calls for elected district-level structures, intended to provide a 

check on the executive power of the district governor and to be directly accountable to the 

population. However, although the SNGP called for these elections to occur in 2010, they 

have been postponed indefinitely due to constraints including disputes over district-level 

boundaries and logistical and financial obstacles.43

In the absence of formalized, elected district councils, the international community and 

Afghan government created several ad hoc structures in attempts to fill the gap. Since 2002, 

with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) support, the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development’s National Area Based Development Program (NABDP) empowered District Development Assemblies (DDAs) in 382 districts;44 starting in 2010, with USAID support, 

the IDLG promoted the Afghan Social Outreach Program that created 115 District Community 

Councils (commonly known as “ASOP shuras”) in key stabilization districts.45 In addition, the 

international community sponsored or encouraged many additional “shuras” (consultative 

councils) in various districts, including “security shuras,” “education shuras,” “women’s shuras,” 

“agriculture shuras,” and “peace shuras,” among others.46 The stated goal for these myriad district groups was generally to respond to local populations’ concerns, monitor the performance 

of line ministry representatives, and monitor the performance of the district governor.47

Considerable American resources were spent in building the capacity of these various 

district bodies to do their duties. ASOP included a formal training component, and districtbased American personnel reported devoting substantial time and effort encouraging 

these bodies to be more transparent in their operations and systematic in their response to 

popular requests. 

But despite all this effort, these myriad councils had no legal authority to enforce their 

supposed mandate to hold district governors (much less line ministry employees) accountable. These councils lacked “teeth” for two principal reasons. First, the Subnational Governance Policy remained just a “policy”; most of its various statutes—including its portions 

Whatever the official language 

or formal procedures, the Kabulbased executive’s de facto 

authority over district governors 

seems unlikely to shift in the 

near term. 
 11

on the district councils’ authority and elections—had not been promulgated and enacted 

as law. In addition, the sheer number of local-level district councils added up to a confusing district-level landscape that was prone to manipulation. District-level Afghan and U.S. 

observers reported that the multiplicity of district councils provided an opening for local 

actors to “go shopping” for a sympathetic district body and diluted any ability for a coherent district council to “represent the people’s interests.” Others believed that the largest 

nationwide shuras—the DCCs and DAAs—were proxies for their Kabul-level sponsors (IDLG 

and MRRD respectively) in their competition for resources. 

If the multiple district councils actually undermined local-level accountability, and if lack of 

formalized powers for these district councils hobbled their effectiveness, the keys to reforming 

these weaknesses lay not in focusing on “bottom-up” processes, but in two key “top-down” 

initiatives: first, rationalizing competing district councils, and second, formalizing district 

councils’ authorities. Here, Kabul-based Afghan authorities demonstrated little progress. Holding district-level elections was deemed unfeasible by the IEC and IDLG until at least 2014.48

At time of writing, under considerable pressure from the international community, Cabinetlevel officials were reportedly discussing ideas for rationalizing the councils—ideas included 

expansion of the formal authorities of DDAs, resuscitation of some form of ASOP shuras, and 

a makeshift, non-IEC election, which most argued would be technically unconstitutional.49

Even if elected district structures had been resolved, how effective could they be without 

reform of relevant laws? The experience of the (elected) provincial councils is instructive. 

Analysts note that without any power of the purse, “Rather than developing a system of 

representation that can truly bring a bottom-up dimension to provincial-level planning, it 

may be that the PCs remain mainly an instrument of potential and actual patronage.”50

Kabul-based Afghan government officials showed little progress in the task of formalizing 

district council authorities. The IDLG variously reported that district council authorities 

were clarified either in the district council law or the local administration law (IDLG communications are contradictory on this point), which would likely need to be discussed with 

the Ministry of Justice, before submission to Parliament, debate, approval, and enactment.51

The process would likely require a minimum of twelve months from start until enactment. 

Observers suggested that formalizing district councils’ authorities would leave Kabul-based 

actors with much to lose: either DDAs or DCCs would be marginalized and with them the 

influence of their sponsor ministry, or district governors’ powers would be checked and with 

them the IDLG’s local mobilization machine.

Whatever the complex reasons behind the lack of district council progress, the American 

surge’s tireless efforts to build these bodies’ capacity for “good governance” could not alter 

the basic truth that they had limited actual authority, and there was little top-down appetite for them to increase it.

Local Accountability Clashed with Centralized Interests: Fiscal Issues

Finally, the surge rested on the hope that localized improvements in budgeting skills and 

processes would be met with top-down reforms to give more budgeting authority to provincial, and eventually district, levels of government. Training of district and provincial 

officials to prioritize local resource requests would be met with increasing levels of fiscal 

decentralization or fiscal deconcentration,52 so that local spending would reflect these local 

priorities. Though specific approaches varied from region to region, many U.S. officials 

expended significant effort trying to train local officials on budgetary prioritization. 

These efforts faced three fundamental challenges. For one, public administration and 

finance experts disagree on the degree to which fiscal decentralization even should occur 

in Afghanistan.53 Second, even if there had been widespread agreement on fiscal decentralization as the way forward, budgetary reforms largely did not happen, and realistically 
12 

could not have happened, during the life of the surge. Third, many training efforts were misplaced—they focused on executive offices of provincial governors and district governors, 

whereas Afghanistan’s budget delivers services through line ministries. 

At time of writing, a promising, but still nascent, provincial budget pilot was just getting under way with strong U.S. support.54 The program provided training for provincial 

line ministry representatives to insert local priority requests into the budgets prepared by 

their parent ministries. How much the ultimate annual budgets would reflect these priorities was still an open question, and the pilot itself was limited to only five key ministries. 

Thus, though progress was being made, fiscal decentralization did not achieve any sort of 

long-term, sweeping transformation during the life of the surge. 

In summary, in the realm of three priorities for local governance—increased accountability and responsiveness of local district governors, increased accountability and authority of 

district councils, and increased local authority over budgetary decisions—local progress was 

not matched by central-level structural reforms. Without the Kabul-based Afghan government’s 

buy-in, the surge could not achieve the fundamental subnational transformation envisioned.

Assumption Three: “Lack of Government” as the Problem to 

Be Addressed

As a final operating assumption, the American surge policy derived from the premise that 

the Afghan struggle was a counterinsurgency in which a “contest for governance” was being 

waged between the Afghan government on one side and antigovernment elements on the 

other. On the local level, this analysis implied that the insurgency stemmed from a lack of 

government reach into rural areas; if government could be connected with these outlying 

communities and deliver services, the insurgency would abate. A primary purpose of stabilization programming was thus to “extend the reach of government” into the country’s most 

remote, contested areas in order to help the government gain legitimacy.55

This analysis largely rang true for urban and peri-urban regions affected by the surge 

effort, but, consistent with Afghanistan’s deep rural-urban divide, did not universally apply 

to remote areas. In municipalities such as Kandahar City and its surrounding districts, residents showed great appetite for government delivery of services, especially electricity.56

But particularly in remote areas of Regional Command East, many Afghan and American 

observers suggested that the local insurgency was not driven by “lack of government,” but 

the intrusion of the Afghan government, viewed as extortive and foreign. The presence of 

ISAF troops facilitating this extended Afghan government reach represented a further causus belli for historically independent areas that wanted above all to be left alone. Stabilization programs attempted to win popular support by providing services, but from the start, 

these initiatives were just atoning for the fact that outsiders—Western and Afghan alike—

had shown up in the first place. Some ISAF respondents described areas stuck in a stage 

of “permanent clear,” fueled by local protest of outside intervention. Afghan and American 

respondents alike noted that many areas simply did not want to invite the complications of 

outsider intrusion: “If you have lunch in the woods, the wolves will come.”57

More broadly, there is genuine debate whether “more service delivery” is truly the appropriate prescription for the most contested areas of Afghanistan targeted by the surge.58 

Improved security is the number one “service” desired by the Afghan population, often 

followed closely by improved justice and decreased corruption.59 But the surge’s governance 

and development programs did not aim to directly improve the security situation. These 

initiatives did not assist or oversee Afghan security forces, which have the most immediate 

effect on security, and community-driven development programs such as NSP (upon which 

many of the surge’s projects were modeled) have not been shown to decrease local security 

Particularly in remote areas 

of Regional Command East, 

observers suggested that the 

local insurgency was not driven 

by “lack of government,” but 

the intrusion of the Afghan 

government, viewed as 

extortive and foreign.
 13

incidents in areas already experiencing a high level of violence.60 The surge’s development 

and governance initiatives also did not directly aim at the formal or informal justice sectors, 

leaving this realm to ongoing broader international community efforts. USAID’s efforts here 

yielded some successes in the informal justice sector, but as one analyst noted, many of the 

broader international efforts ran up against cultural barriers: “We’ve approached ‘justice’ as 

a subset of the ‘rule of law’ sector, neither of which make sense to rural Afghans, since the 

rule of law as we describe and ‘projectize’ it is alien to them, whereas justice is primordial. 

Unfortunately, for the most part the formal government is not associated with the provision 

of justice.”61

Beyond a local desire for security and justice, many other international offerings of 

“service delivery” found themselves abutting preexisting Afghan arrangements to locally 

manage everything from karez cleaning to equitable water distribution to dispute resolution. 

Other service delivery offerings targeted local requests that were never before expressed, 

thus creating, as noted earlier, newly inflated expectations or unsustainable demands. 

Meanwhile, the insertion or elevation of local government officials to administer these 

programs often facilitated corruption and extortion, further alienating the local community. 

If, as some analysts argue, in Afghanistan, legitimacy derives from nationalism and Islam,62 

other research adds that “the attempt to create legitimacy through service delivery and 

governance is both alien and problematic, as they imply expectations for tangible action.”63

Explaining Why 

In some ways, the stabilization’s lessons from 2009 to 2012 merely reaffirm criticisms of 

the surge effort—from observers both inside and outside of the U.S. government—from the 

start: the stated ambitions for radically altering Afghan subnational governance were inappropriate for the time allotted and unsuited to an externally driven effort. 

But if the surge reinforced lessons already learned about the challenges of state building and counterinsurgency, why did military and civilian leadership endorse it as feasible? 

Why did the strategy still unfold as it did? A cluster of explanations reside at the top level 

of Washington, DC, in early 2009. Getting the “good war” in Afghanistan right was a top 

campaign priority of the incoming Obama administration. Many argued that the United 

States had not fully resourced its Afghanistan effort since its diversion into Iraq in 2003. In 

addition, the successful surge leading to (or coinciding with) “turnaround” in Iraq boosted 

American confidence. Combined with the fervor surrounding the Counterinsurgency Field 

Manual, the Iraq experience fed optimism that with proper civilian and military resources, 

there was no limit to what American brain and brawn could accomplish in Afghanistan. 

Finally, while many civilian and military officials, both high- and low-ranking, worried quietly from the start that the stated goals were highly ambitious in the time allowed, realities 

of support on Capitol Hill and in the American electorate meant that asking for more time 

simply was not an option. So the collective effort charged in with gusto, resources, and 

hopes for the best. 

Once the high-level policy was set in motion, this Washington-generated optimism was 

perpetuated inside Afghanistan and the United States through a few key ways:

•	 Confusion of discrete successes with replicable progress. As clearing operations moved across 

Regional Command South, previously volatile districts such as Helmand’s Nawa demonstrated greatly improved security and governance and were repeatedly cited as “proofs of 

concept” that the surge could succeed more broadly. In reality, conditions in these showcase districts would be nearly impossible to replicate or sustain on a broader level because 

they relied upon vast American inputs, upon a homogenous dominant tribe that decided to 

accept American largesse, and upon the decision-making calculus of its particular district 

governor.64 Though there was no evidence this outcome was generalizable throughout 
14 

all of Afghanistan’s 401 districts without similarly lavish funding and similarly conducive 

local conditions, Nawa and a handful of other districts became “model districts,” visited 

frequently by VIPs who took away the lesson that if stabilization could work there, it would 

work everywhere. As these VIPs repeated this observation to other VIPs—many of whom 

had visited the same “representative” district—an echo chamber effect emerged. 

•	 Confusion of individuals’ progress with institution building. Despite a stated commitment 

to building Afghan institutions, the mechanics of the U.S. mode of mentoring and aid 

distribution focused on a few key individuals (often district governors, who in many cases 

had three or four U.S. “counterparts” deployed at the district level). When these individuals demonstrated great strides, it was tempting to conflate this progress with headway in 

the institution of district governor. The unremitting stream of VIP visitors compounded this 

dynamic: impressed by these individuals, they would report back to Kabul and Washington 

that Afghan local governance was blooming. Particularly in a country in which district governors are regularly reshuffled or assassinated, tracking individuals’ growth was a deceptive 

metric for measuring overall institutional progress.

•	 Confusion of “local” with “simple.” The wide post-2009 embrace of “local, bottom-up” solutions in governance achieved a key insight in acknowledging Afghanistan’s fundamentally 

decentralized politics and insurgency.65 However, those translating this insight into programming often inferred that locally based governance programs would therefore be simple 

to implement and develop almost organically. Conversations around “local shuras” exemplified this trend: high-level policymakers and Washington’s vigorous think tank chattering 

class advocated a broad strategy of entering villages to find “the shura” of legitimate local 

elders to ensure local ownership of projects. Those who had actually lived at the village 

level in Afghanistan noted that understanding murky village power structures is challenging on a seven- or twelve-month tour and risks unintentionally empowering malign actors. 

(The author’s informal data collection suggests a direct correlation between a particular 

official’s distance from the local level and how easy he believed it would be to cultivate 

sustainable, equitable “local solutions.”) 

•	 Military predominance in interagency planning. Despite the joint civil-military nature of 

the Afghanistan campaign, the sheer numbers of military representatives compared with 

civilians meant that civilians could not be seated at every relevant decision-making table. 

Governance and development initiatives often experienced pressure to “keep up” with 

predetermined military objectives on a military timeline. On the national level, military 

leadership designated key terrain districts in the insurgency’s most volatile heartland; many 

civilian leaders agreed to focus here even though they were not necessarily where governance and development efforts would be most effective. On the local level, the frenetic 

“battle rhythm” at many forward operating bases meant civilians were under pressure to 

prove their own value to their military hosts, so they may have acquiesced to unrealistic 

governance and development expectations. 

•	 Belief in the power of technological and technical solutions. The American surge attempted 

to address many problems that were fundamentally human capital, political, or sociological 

ones with technological or technical solutions. To make up for lack of knowledge of local 

tribal structures, for example, policymakers placed faith in the diagramming wizardry of 

Human Terrain Teams or the elaborate new infrastructure of intelligence outposts—though 

none of these technologies compensated for the fact that American engagement with actual 

Afghans was limited to their interpreter cohort, highly constrained ventures outside their 

bases, and the few “key leaders” who would choose to meet with them. The focus on a 

computerized recruitment process for district governors is another example: did an electronic 

tracking system alter the Presidential Palace’s ultimate weight in personnel decisions? 

In a country in which district 

governors are regularly 

reshuffled or assassinated, 

tracking individuals’ growth 

was a deceptive metric for 

measuring overall 

institutional progress.
 15

Conclusions and Recommendations

The surge’s governance and development initiatives yielded localized, discrete progress in 

many areas, but three years in, policymakers’ goals to sustainably transform subnational 

governance nationwide have not been met. U.S. stabilization efforts essentially aspired to 

wholesale state building from the bottom up, transposing a decades-long process onto a 

months-long timetable. As many suspected from the start, American (and Afghan) stated 

goals for dramatically altering Afghan subnational governance were unrealistic for the time 

allotted and the tools available. As the surge continued, it became clear that one key 

ingredient—Afghan political will—was not malleable “from the bottom up.” Any localized 

progress made, when not reinforced by structural changes to the Afghan government, is 

unlikely to be sustained after ISAF’s drawdown.

While never explicitly stated, the surge may have represented a conscious U.S. effort to 

diversify its Afghan counterparts away from the Kabul executive and therefore increase its 

leverage in seeking reform. By cultivating direct interactions with other, more local partners 

rather than continuing to depend heavily on America’s troubled relationship with President 

Karzai, the surge may have sought to alter the U.S.-Afghan leverage dynamics. If the surge 

indeed aimed to turn local governance into a “game changer” that would enable or even 

force reform, then another of its lessons was to underscore, yet again, the durability of the 

Afghan executive’s power.

Policy Recommendations for Transition

As the United States’ surge gives way to drawdown, its recently signed Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan represents positive signs of a longer-term commitment to 

consolidate progress. Still, as the international community moves into the era of transition, 

it should remain mindful of the stabilization period’s primary warning: there is no technical, 

localized solution to a problem of centralized political will and power accumulation. In a 

resource-constrained environment, the international community should focus its dwindling 

governance-related leverage on issues it can hope to affect and its assistance on challenges 

that are manageable in scale. Recommendations to the international community:

•	 Exert leverage to impact select systemic, rather than tactical-level, problems. 

° Focus on key structural issues with district councils. In the short term, exert leverage 

to rationalize district councils; in the medium term, after the 2014 election, focus 

on formalizing district boundaries as a first step toward elected bodies. Focus 

parliamentary leverage on passing feasible laws based upon the Subnational 

Governance Policy Implementation Plan to formalize reasonable district council 

authorities.

° Focus on key structural issues with ministries’ recurring service delivery. Expand the 

provincial budgeting pilot as anticipated, and focus leverage on expanding the 

degree to which provincial budget requests are reflected in ministries’ budgetary 

responses.

•	 In a resource-constrained era, prioritize assistance to a few key efforts.

° Avoid providing training and assistance that is out of step with actual Afghan 

government functions. If the international community continues to pour resources 

into training myriad district councils, it will raise local expectations without 

improving these groups’ authority to represent the population. If district governors 

continue to be elevated in the role of providing service delivery, local expectations 

will again raise and risk posttransition deflation. Focus on structural issues 

surrounding these entities first.

As the surge continued, it 

became clear that one key 

ingredient—Afghan political 

will—was not malleable “from 

the bottom up.”
16 

° Focus at the province level. Work to ensure that each of the 34 provinces is in 

passable shape, rather than attempting district-level reform.

° Pilot new processes in easier, rather than harder, cases. New systems for budgeting, 

representative governance, or other issues will inevitably encounter unforeseen 

obstacles; these should be worked through first in easier provinces or ministries. 

Civilian leadership may need to provide top cover when these priorities differ from 

the military’s emphasis.

° Enforce a moratorium on ad hoc solutions and new parallel structures. The Afghan 

government is complicated enough without the proliferation of new international 

community working groups, liaisons, and initiatives. Improve structures that 

already exist rather than create new ones. 

•	 All the usual Afghanistan governance recommendations still apply. Assessments of 

Afghan subnational governance traditionally produce recommendations that, if they were 

truly to be implemented, would require radical organizational shifts on the part of the 

international community. “Deeper local knowledge and robust local buy-in” would require 

significantly longer—by several-fold—tours in-country. “Less short-sighted programmatic 

planning” would require reliable multiyear funding appropriations and profound contracting 

reform. To meaningfully “improve coordination” would require subsuming donor nations’ 

priorities to an international consensus and identifying a way to enforce it—a near impossibility. And finally, a “robust long-term commitment to Afghanistan” would need to be 

measured in decades—and despite Strategic Partnership status, committing to programmatic details in any such arrangement would clash with the U.S. electoral calendar. Given 

the United States’ political, economic, and bureaucratic realities, expecting such radical 

organizational shifts is wholly unrealistic. Expectations for what U.S. assistance can truly 

achieve should be calibrated accordingly.
 17

Notes

The author thanks Bill Byrd, Paul Fishstein, Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Scott Smith, and Andrew Wilder for their feedback, 

and Shahmahmood Miakhel, Tim Luccaro, Atta Nasib, Hodei Sultan, Stephanie Flamenbaum, and other anonymous 

Kabul- and Kandahar-based colleagues for their assistance. 

1. President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” (speech, 

White House, Washington, DC, March 27, 2009). 

2. U.S. Government, “Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan,” August 10, 2009.

3. Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy,” February 24, 2010, ii.

4. Ibid., 3.

5. This paper focuses on U.S. military and civilian surge programming because the United States was by far the 

largest actor overall in Regional Commands East, South, and Southwest, and because the vast majority of 

interviewees came from or commented upon U.S.-specific programs. Other ISAF partner nations such as the 

United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia were active in RC-E, RC-S, and RC-SW and undertook 

some similar activities.

6. Including 17,000 authorized in February 2009, and 30,000 announced in December 2009. An additional 7,000 

were sent in other installments. See the graphic published by the Washington Post, “Afghanistan War Strategy 

during the Surge,” June 22, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/national/afghanistan-war-strategy-during-thesurge/2012/06/22/gJQAd6eEwV_graphic.html.

7. Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy,” 3. 

8. The number of Afghanistan’s “official” districts is disputed. The Ministry of Interior officially recognized 398 

districts in 2005; subsequently, three further districts (including Marjah), were reportedly created to bring the 

total to 401. The MRRD cites 402.

9. Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional 

Stabilization Strategy,” 7.

10. U.S. Government, “Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan,” ii and 8.

11. President Barack Obama, “Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan” (speech, U.S. 

Military Academy, West Point, West Point, New York, December 1, 2009).

12. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in testimony to Senate Armed Services Committee, January 27, 2009.

13. Hamish Nixon, “Sub-national State Building in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, April 

2008, 24.

14. See Martine van Bijlert, “Between Discipline and Description: Policies Surrounding Senior Subnational 

Appointments,” Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, May 2009; also see Hamish Nixon, “The Subnational 

Governance Challenge and the Independent Directorate of Local Governance,” in Snapshots of an Intervention, 

e-book, ed. Van Bijlert and Kouvo (Afghan Analysts Network, 2012).

15. See U.S. Department of Defense, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan and United 

States Plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces,” April 2011, 37.

16. Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD), “NSP Operations Manual Version Six,” 2012, 7; U.S. 

Government, “Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan”, 35.

17. Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG), “Sub-national Governance Policy,” 39.

18. Ibid., p. 133 and 135. Presidential decree No. 2113, March 17, 2010, formally changed district governor to a 

civil service position; according to the SNGP, “Their recruitment of the will take place based on merit-based, 

competitive and transparent procedures and mechanisms that will be developed by the IARCSC and IDLG.” 

19. Ibid., 139. 

20. Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Offensive is the New War Model,” New York Times, February 12, 2010.

21. Ibid.

22. Frank James, “US General Still upbeat Despite Marjah, Afghanistan Government Shift,” NPR, July 12, 2010.

23. Jean McKenzie, “The Enteqal Seven (3): Lashkargah—Southern Poster Child for Transition,” Afghanistan Analysts 

Network Blog, May 27, 2011, www.aan-afghanistan.org/index.asp?id=1750.

24. Just over one-third of Afghanistan’s districts are Key Terrain Districts or Area of Interest Districts. Because better 

data is unavailable, this rough estimate is based upon one-third of the total 40,000 government-recognized 

“villages.”

25. Andrew Beath, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov, “Winning Hearts and Minds through Development: Evidence 

from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan” (working paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Political Science 

Department, April 13, 2012), 1.

26. See, for example, John A. Nagl, “A Better War in Afghanistan,” Joint Forces Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2010): 38; see 

also John A. Nagl, Andrew Exum, and Ahmed A. Humayun, “A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The National 

Solidarity Program,” Center for a New American Security Policy Brief, March 16, 2009.

27. Beath et al., “Winning Hearts and Minds through Development,” 1.

28. MRRD, “NSP Operations,” 25.

29. Nixon, “Sub-national State Building in Afghanistan,” 37–47. 

30. Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Ministry of Finance, “Provincial Budgeting Policy Brief,” October 9, 2011.

31. U.S. Government, “Integrated Civil-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan, Revision 1,” February 

2011, 31. 

32. Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, “Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining the Relationship between Aid and 

Security in Afghanistan,” Feinstein International Center, January 2012, 68.

33. Military tours ranged from six to twelve months. Civilians largely served a minimum of twelve months, but 

frequently moved to multiple sites during their tour.
18 

34. Nixon, “Sub-national State Building in Afghanistan,” 24.

35. IDLG, “Implementation of the SNGP: Progress and Prioritization” (unpublished working paper, November 2011), 

39.

36. Ibid., 51. The IDLG notes that 70 district governors had been appointed on a merit basis through the competitive 

process, and that the merit-based process was put on hold because it was “too slow” and needed to be improved.

37. IDLG official, interview by author, Kabul, March 2012; USAID official, interview by author, Kabul, March 2012. 

38. See Van Bijlert, “Between Discipline and Description,” 1.

39. IDLG official, interview; IARCSC official, in communication with author, March 2012.

40. van Bijlert, “Between Discipline and Description,” 3.

41. Hamish Nixon, “The Subnational Governance Challenge,” 3. 

42. International analyst, interview by author, Kabul, March 2012.

43. Douglas Saltmarshe and Abhilash Medhi, “Local Governance in Afghanistan: A View from the Ground,” 

Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, June 2011, 44.

44. As of late 2011. UNDP, National Area-Based Development Programme, www.undp.org.af/whoweare/UNDPin

Afghanistan/Projects/psl/prj_nabdp.htm.

45. USAID, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program, “ASOP Fact Sheet”, June 2011.

46. Shahmahmood Miakhel and Noah Coburn, “Many Shuras Do Not a Government Make: International Community 

Engagement With Local Councils in Afghanistan,” United States Institute of Peace, September 07, 2010.

47. USAID, Afghanistan Social Outreach Program, “ASOP Fact Sheet,” June 2011.

48. IDLG, “Implementation of the SNGP,” 45.

49. ASOP’s provision of shura stipends ended in late 2011. Though this formally signaled the end of the ASOP 

program, USAID officials reported some continued to meet and discussed ways to continue to support them 

through training. USAID officials, in interviews by author, Kandahar, Kabul, and Washington, February, March, and 

May 2012.

50. Nixon, “Sub-national State Building in Afghanistan,” 23.

51. IDLG, “Implementation of SNGP,” 38.

52. For a discussion of decentralization and deconcentration in the Afghan context, see Sarah Lister, “Caught in 

Confusion: Local Governance Structures in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, March 2005.

53. Former World Bank Afghanistan official, interview by author, Washington, May 2012.

54. As befits the cyclical nature of Afghanistan assistance, this was actually not the first “provincial budgeting pilot” 

introduced—an earlier, UN-backed iteration occurred in 2006 in Balkh, Panshir, and Kandahar. 

55. USAID/Afghanistan, “Stabilization,” http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/programs/stabilization.

56. AIR Consulting, “Final Survey Report: Opinion Survey on Performance of Municipality in Kandahar City,” March 

2011.

57. ISAF official, interview by author, Kabul, February 2012.

58. Fishstein and Wilder, “Winning Hearts and Minds?” 

59. Asia Foundation, “Afghanistan in 2011: A Survey of the Afghan People,” 3.

60. Beath et al., “Winning Hearts and Minds through Development,” 3.

61. International community analyst, in personal communication with author, June 2012.

62. Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (London: C Hurst & Co, 2011), 191.

63. Fishstein and Wilder, “Winning Hearts and Minds?” 59. 

64. In the case of Nawa, this included $300 in spending for every resident and employing over half of the district’s 

working-age males through U.S.-sponsored cash-for-work projects. See Scott Dempsey, “The Fallacy of COIN: One 

Officer’s Frustration,” Small Wars Journal, March 13, 2011.

65. Seth G. Jones, “It Takes the Villages,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2010). 

Of Related Interest

•	 Lessons from Afghanistan’s History for the Current Transition and Beyond by William Byrd 

(Special Report, September 2012)

•	 Mutual Accountability: Lessons and Prospects for Afghanistan Post-Tokyo by William Byrd 

(Peace Brief, August 2012)

•	 Learning from Women’s Success in the 2010 Afghan Elections by Scott Worden and Nina 

Sudhakar (Special Report, June 2012)

•	 Afghanistan’s Civil Order Police by Robert M. Perito (Special Report, May 2012)

•	 Paying for Afghanistan’s Security Forces During Transition: Issues for Chicago and Beyond by 

William Byrd (Peace Brief, April 2012)

•	 Myths and Misconceptions in the Afghan Transition by Shahmahmood Miakhel and Noah 

Coburn (Peace Brief, April 2012)

•	 The Future of Afghanistan by J. Alexander Thier, editor 

•	 How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan

(USIP Press, 2008) by Roy Gutman

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