02.02.10 UNAMA in Afghanistan. Challenges and Oppertunities in Peacemaking, State-building and Coordination

The United Nations has been engaged in Afghanistan in various capacities ever since 1946. It has provided humanitarian and development aid, as well as playing a specific political role during the many wars in the country. In the 1980s the UN led a multi-party mediation effort that concluded the Geneva Accords, and in the 1990s it oversaw a series of agreements between the Afghan government and Mujahedin leaders. After the events of ‘9/11’, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) was mandated by the Security Council to take on a range of responsibilities – managing relief, recovery and reconstruction activities, holding elections, in addition to providing political and strategic advice for the peace process.

At a time when policy and strategic reviews are being conducted in major Western capitals it is important to examine the role of UNAMA as well. This report focuses on its role in peacemaking, state-building and coordination. Some of the main findings are the following:

• UNAMA played a critical role in facilitating the Bonn process that set the roadmap for re-establishing territorial sovereignty to Afghanistan in 2001. Although it has been hailed as a diplomatic miracle, both the UN and the USA failed to include many Pashtun groups and the Taliban in the process. This exclusion in 2001 and the continued unwillingness of the USA to engage these groups have resulted in many groups in the South opposing the Afghan government (among other things). The situation has also provided a challenging environment for the UN to facilitate a political process. This has shown that, for a peace deal to be sustainable, all conflicting parties need to be signatories to an agreement such as the one in Bonn.
• The USA and the UN have on some occasions worked at cross-purposes. Activities undertaken in the name of the ‘war on terror’ and short-term successes have undermined the UN’s focus on peacemaking and peacebuilding. Backing and funding Mujahedin leaders and warlords as well as recruiting militiamen to fight against the Taliban have undermined the UN’s Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme and its work on transitional justice. This is symptomatic of the lack of common purpose and strategy in Afghanistan.
• A major comparative advantage of UNAMA is its in-country expertise and institutional memory that builds on the UN family’s decades-long engagement. UNAMA is the closest one gets to an impartial actor with no other interest but to serve the Afghan people. Nevertheless, its credibility has been put into question on occasion – particularly in 2002, when stability was chosen over justice.
• UNAMA’s set-up has hampered its ability to be successful in many spheres. The ‘light footprint’ approach was understood by UN Headquarters to mean having a limited presence with a small group of professional staff. That has hindered UNAMA in being an effective coordinator of donor assistance and international political engagement.
• In recent years when UNAMA has sought to expand, it has been severely limited by the bureaucratic recruitment procedures at its headquarters in New York. Despite having the funds, the recruitment process takes about a year. This is not unique to the UN mission in Afghanistan: the need for reform in this area is critical for setting up quick and flexible UN missions in the future.
• UNAMA’s ability to coordinate the international community [The term ‘international community’ will be used to refer to the (primarily Western) donors and troop-contributing countries and major actors, like the World Bank and UN agencies, that are present in Afghanistan.] has also been limited by the general way in which the international community has organized itself. There is no single chain of command, as the military forces are not peacekeepers under a UN Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG). Having two separate structures for the post-conflict operation is problematic, resulting in several plans for the same province or region. Moreover it is problematic that the military command is not subordinated to a civilian head given that the security line of operation is only the supporting one, not the lead. The frequent rotations within the military mean a lack of the continuity that could have been expected if the UN had been the lead.
• The organizational set-up is problematic also because there are three supranational structures seeking to coordinate civilian efforts: UNAMA, the European Union and the NATO Senior Civilian Representative (SCR). Coordination of donor funds is difficult for any institution because power over the purse sits in the capitals and philosophies differ as to how aid should be spent to be most effective. Today there are three such organizations – surely a waste of resources and time.
• With regard to the internal organization of UNAMA, the integrated mission concept seems to have worked, to a considerable degree. It has provided broader awareness within the mission about the cross-cutting and overlapping challenges. However, the potential of such an organizational set-up seems under-utilized. This may be because UNAMA lacks its own strategic plan for how it wants to implement the Security Council mandate.