WASHINGTON– American leaders will be looking to the international community this weekend to stand by the U.S. in its commitment to financially support Afghanistan in the next decade.
“We have to convince our partners and the Afghans and ourselves that we are not leaving Afghanistan in the lurch, even as transition moves forward,” Alex Thier, assistant to the administrator for the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this week.
Approximately 70 countries and organizations will meet in Tokyo Sunday to examine the challenges facing Afghanistan and garner international financial aid for the country as NATO forces move power over to Afghan security forces over the next two years. Discussions will emphasize commitments through 2024, what is now being called “the Transformation Decade.”
One of the primary goals of the Tokyo Conference will be to reach clarity on the amount of financial and institutional resources available to the Afghan government in the long run, said William Byrd, development economist and former World Bank country manager and economic adviser to Afghanistan.
“All along, the U.S. has been the largest single donor and the largest dominant provider of international military forces to Afghanistan so clearly the U.S. has an important stake in what overall amounts are agreed on,” he said.
A successful transition in Afghanistan relies on more than just financial support, Thier said. It must establish long-term international commitment to Afghanistan, set priorities for what needs to be accomplished, promote reforms in the Afghan economy and government and establish follow-up mechanisms to ensure the goals are on track, he said.
“What you will see coming out of Tokyo is something that attempts to bind all these four things together in a mutual accountability framework, a framework that is an agreement between the international community and the Afghan government about how together we will achieve those four objectives,” he said.
Byrd said the Tokyo Conference must avoid giving Afghanistan unrealistic expectations by outlining clear targets in the transition process that can be monitored over the next decade. Published reports have suggested Afghanistan will receive pledges of $15 billion from donor countries Sunday.
Mutual accountability will likely play a large role at the Tokyo Conference, Byrd said. Aid commitments from the international community must be met by agreements from the Afghan government to be held accountable for economic and governmental reform, he said.
“We need to remind the Afghans that [long-term aid] is conditional on you folks not electing a corrupt warlord in 2014 for president,” said Michael O’Hanlon, fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Tuesday at a panel discussion that also featured Thier. “How can we possibly give several billion dollars a year internationally to a regime that let’s say was hypothetically worse than the current Karzai regime?”
Although Afghanistan has experienced significant progress over the last decade — 64 percent of Afghans have access to health care now compared with 6 percent 10 years ago, the successes remain unstable and conditions volatile, Thier said. “Due to ongoing insurgency, lack of political settlement, corruption, impunity and institutions and a society that remains weak after 30 years of turmoil, we have an enormous amount of fragility in Afghanistan,” he said.
Because of this, many experts believe international support over the next decade is of paramount importance, not only for the stability of the Middle East, but American national security as well.
“If people who believe they are God-inspired in their attacks on us now see the vindication that the second superpower has been destroyed, has been defeated in Afghanistan, I think they have an enormous psychological boost which will invigorate that movement of attack on us for a long time to come,” former Afghanistan Ambassador Ronald Neumann said at Brookings event