Abstract
Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan included an unprecedented level of international civilian and military cooperation to address water insecurity within violence-prone rural communities. However, water development projects often fell short of expectations held by Afghans and by civilian and military personnel within the International Security Assistance Force. Failure to adequately consider hydrologic principles and social realities was often to blame. Joint pre-deployment training programmes are suggested as key to effective coordination and tactical implementation to address similar problems elsewhere. Also needed are consistent use of metrics for success and the selection of appropriate interventions complementary to long-term development objectives.
Since 2001, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) has been largely conducted across the rural watersheds of Afghanistan. Simultaneously and sometimes in coordinated fashion, rural development activities were intended to benefit, and benefit from, achieving security objectives. Against this backdrop, interviews with Afghan leaders at all levels routinely identified water resource issues as paramount concerns. These included a desire to sustain agricultural and household water supply for their constituents during dry periods, mitigation of flood damage during times of abundance, and improved or renewed access where infrastructure had been degraded or destroyed (Groninger & Lasko, Citation2011). Unresolved or worsening water supply issues were also recognized as contributing to social instability, as well as providing leverage for political influence by antigovernment forces.
Water development strategies commonly rely on functional governments and other social institutions under conditions typically associated with peacetime environments. Accordingly, state-based solutions such as basin-wide watershed restoration plans have been proposed and can be expected to proceed in limited areas within Afghanistan as in other countries (Habib et al., Citation2013; Varis & Kummu, Citation2012). However, many critical water source and use areas identified in central plans are in rural areas and beyond the control of the central government (Groninger & Lasko, Citation2011).
Irrigation agriculture–dependent people living in these under-governed areas face multiple threats to a sustained water supply. Here, global political actors or equally disruptive regional insurgent groups, village and intercommunity rivalries, and local warlords threaten the stability needed to address existing agricultural livelihood challenges for most rural districts. In these uncertain environments there are limited opportunities to perform system maintenance. Also, there is little incentive to address distribution issues or restore the functionality of antiquated infrastructure. Even more challenging are the larger-scale agro-environmental threats driven by abusive land-use practices and year-to-year climatic variation across watersheds of increasingly degraded functionality (Saba, Citation2001).
Extensive exposure to rural Afghan society raised awareness among International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) military and associated civilian personnel concerning the strategic importance of fostering positive relationships with farmers and their families. This resulted in efforts among some commanders to impress upon their personnel the value of exercising sensitivity to the land, water, vegetation and livestock resources essential to rural livelihoods as well as provision of agricultural resources for struggling farming communities (Kock, Harder, & Saisi, Citation2010). At the same time, traditional development efforts became increasingly restricted as workers became vulnerable to attack and kidnapping despite their sometimes great pains to avoid associating with military or affiliated civilian personnel (Lischer, Citation2007). Therefore, what has emerged is ‘expeditionary economics’, a security assistance model that incorporates elements of traditional development and traditional military purview with the goal of achieving a robust private sector (Johnson, Ramachandran, & Walz, Citation2011; Schramm, Citation2010).
In response to equally urgent development and security issues, efforts to support water resources development represented at first a layering of multiple civilian and military institutions and individuals, gradually brought towards coordination through the Whole of Government National Security Strategy (GAO, Citation2010). ISAF personnel representing diverse institutions and professional backgrounds and with little experience working with one another were thrust into an already challenging work environment. Needs for institutional learning, differing perspectives based on physical frame of reference, and evolving military strategies were all important drivers of development actions and outcomes achieved by foreign military and civilian institutions and Afghan partners.
During 2008–2013, the authors worked throughout Afghanistan as technical experts on several water-related development projects in a variety of civilian and military settings, and also trained other personnel to conduct rural water management activities in support of OEF (Groninger, Ruffner, Brewster, & Sommers, Citation2013). To address the need for rural water resources, in 2010 a consortium of lead civilian agencies and military representatives developed the US government's Inter-Agency Water Strategy for Afghanistan (2009–2014). However, strategic progress towards comprehensive water resource solutions remained uncoordinated and ineffective (SIGAR, Citation2014). Through our combined experiences, we explore the relationship between water resources development and stability operations within the context of a civilian-military cooperative framework for insecure areas. We address some of the institutional and situational factors that we observed influencing the decision-making process and project outcomes in Afghanistan. We suggest that understanding conflicting perceptions of water issues and the factors that drive these may help inform programme design and implementation where a whole-of-government approach to security and local capacity building includes water resource development. We conclude by offering recommendations to promote and enable sustainable water projects within insecure environments.
Challenges to water development
Operation Enduring Freedom necessitated that ISAF personnel (typically from Western societies) and rural Afghans learn to understand one another's motives, constraints and needs. During the early years, numerous ISAF and local Afghan leader engagements were conducted to build good will and develop working relationships among all parties. Given that the critical need for water resources among Afghan farmers and grazers was universally recognized by Afghan and foreign leadership alike, water improvement projects were a common topic for discussion and action during stability-operation planning, funding and implementation at all levels. Afghan leaders' wishes for development projects were sometimes specific and fully developed, some through planning efforts encouraged by foreign entities as long ago as the 1960s (e.g. Anonymous, Citation2007; Lee, Citation2003). Typically, project implementation during OEF involved construction contracts using local business enterprises and labour, producing immediate financial gains to the community, with additional motivations of long-term economic improvement upon completion as water availability or flood-control benefits were achieved. However, project failure proved ultimately to be a destabilizing force (Table ). In some cases, foreign ISAF personnel did not understand the subtleties of rural Afghan politics and subterfuge and were unwittingly duped by individuals or groups seeking to use changes in water access and land control to settle scores or gain advantage over neighbouring groups. In other cases, the hydrological consequences of seemingly innocuous engineering practices were not appreciated by Afghan recipient or foreign donor alike.
Table 1 Examples of failed watershed projects contributing to local physical and/or social destabilization in Afghanistan.
Water-related projects of local interest were implemented across Afghanistan to support regional ISAF commanders' and sub-governors' requests. In eastern Afghanistan, the benefits of community-level water projects, such as installation of erosion-control measures and improvements to water delivery systems, became apparent for manifold reasons. Specifically, they addressed urgent requests for improving water supply and erosion control identified by Afghan village and provincial leaders as threats to community stability. Training and implementation fostered cooperation and education, allowing communities to pursue further projects independently. Successful projects used simple technologies whose purpose and low-cost construction methods were easily understood and replicated by local communities. In reality, these activities were usually difficult to coordinate beyond the village level due to a myriad of control, access and security issues, and consequently they represented a patchwork of small-scale upper- and lower-watershed interventions.
Lower-watershed activities typically ranged from multi-village to farm-level supply infrastructure improvement and farm resource improvement (Figures and ) (Torell & Ward, Citation2010; Walters & Groninger, Citation2014). Upper-watershed activities sought to engage rural communities to reduce their reliance on antigovernment-element activities by instigating forest and range rehabilitation projects (Groninger & Lasko, Citation2011). Specific activities included increasing water supply to a village directly from the aquifer and implementing soil-conservation or erosion-control practices (Groninger, Citation2012). Efforts to coordinate and sustain these within small, model watersheds were often thwarted by issues of continued access, personnel turnover, shifting ISAF priorities, and inconsistent availability of key resources.
Large dam projects posed a different set of challenges. These efforts were years in the planning but resulted primarily in short-term economic gain for the contractors building the structure and the recipients of the dam's services during its short projected life. An inherent flaw in planning dam projects was the failure to meaningfully address the need to stabilize the upper watershed in order to make the dam an enduring asset for long-term regional development. Consequently, most irrigation dams filled with sediment within their first few years of service. Furthermore, the large, inaccessible catchment areas divided among multiple military units' areas of operation would probably have overwhelmed the coordinated efforts needed to achieve meaningful stabilization within the degraded upper-watershed areas.
At the ISAF central command level and within Regional Commands (multi-province), foreign civilian agencies tried to facilitate coordination among constituent agencies of the Kabul-based central government. Agencies within the government of Afghanistan primarily concerned with implementing water policies in the agricultural landscape include the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock (MAIL), the Ministry of Energy and Water (MEW), and the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) (Mahmoodi, Citation2008). Although ostensibly responsible for fostering water management nationally, but with an emphasis on local solutions, these agencies have little impact in much of the country (Wegerich, Citation2010). MAIL has authority over agricultural water in canals and feeder channels, MEW over hydroelectric dams and large basins, and MRRD over supplying clean, potable water to outlying villages. Given the inherent multipurpose uses of rural water systems – karezes, supplying irrigation for agricultural and domestic use (Hussain, Abu-Rizaiza, Habib, & Ashfaq, Citation2008) – Afghan bureaucrats routinely avoided what should have been interagency cooperation to address water resource issues by claiming that problems in outlying villages were the sole responsibility of counterpart agencies. Locally, sub-basin authorities and canal water managers (mirabs) are concerned with the flow of water to meet their constituents' needs, with highly variable effectiveness (Rout, Citation2008; Thomas, Mumtaz, & Azizzi, Citation2012). Beginning in 2011, water management trainings have been implemented seasonally at MAIL's Kabul-based research farm, targeting mirabs and sub-basin engineers.
At the same time, coordination among and within foreign ISAF agencies posed additional challenges. Within the civilian-military agencies, perceptions of water issues, priorities and solution differed, typically as a function of command hierarchy and associated spending authorization limits (Table ). At the brigade (typically provincial) level, commanders tended to emphasize large canal-system restorations or delivery upgrades within existing systems while having the Provincial Reconstruction Teams under their command build facilities and infrastructure within a ‘stability operations’ framework (Palmer-Moloney, Citation2011). Meanwhile, some of the Agribusiness Development Teams and District Support Teams focused on assisting local farmers increase water-use efficiency and rehabilitate upland zones of water collection and transport (Stewart, Citation2014). Locations for these rapid-impact and highly localized activities were often prioritized to build cooperation between local populations and military Special Operations Commands, both to achieve short-term tactical objectives against enemy combatants and to lay the groundwork for longer-term local stability. Projects that reinforced familiar Afghan social structures helped strengthen community capacity for further work, in terms of both watershed management skill building and leadership development (Conniff, Citation2010). In other instances, water resources development was often pursued by coalition forces as a tactical means to a military end and ultimately did not match the long-term hopes and expectations of many Afghan communities, who tended to view water resources improvement strategically. In many but not all cases, this could be interpreted as an overriding desire by impoverished people to obtain cash when their future access to more permanent improvements could not be guaranteed.
Table 2 Civilian and military interactions with water resources and perspectives.
At all levels we observed, jurisdictions characterized by a wide range of watershed conditions and potential interventions had the most difficulty constructively coordinating watershed activities. For instance, Regional Command South was dominated by extensive agriculture landscapes and the city of Kandahar, both within a vast lower-watershed area. Here, emphasis was placed on undertaking large dam projects to satisfy high-level political promises of enhancing water storage capacity for farmers and crop associations, with little regard for stabilizing the upper-watershed reaches that were typically tens of kilometres away and within the less populated portions of the region. This contrasted starkly with eastern Afghanistan's regional command, a largely mountainous region with more dispersed population centres, mainly in small valleys. There, communities often controlled all aspects of the watershed function, making sustainable watershed projects attractive and feasible.
Local Afghan requests regarding water did not always work towards long-term resource improvement or stability. In many instances, local Afghans sought to implement unsustainable water projects for short-term income. Short-term construction projects generated income but frequently lacked the design or structural integrity to retain functionality. In other cases, strategic motivations of local Afghans were aimed at using ISAF resources for water resource management as a weapon against local rivals. Innocuous requests for wells, diversion dams, pumps or intakes to increase community water supplies could be used to divert or deplete availability for downstream users.
Responsible and responsive project management was also challenged by high-level policies that stymied local trust and cooperation. At certain critical stages of OEF, US personnel were put in the position of administering more money than they could effectively manage, leading to quality-control issues, project failure and frustration among Afghans. This was followed by a period when development funding availability lurched to the opposite extreme and was all but eliminated, flummoxing potentially successful water development strategies and further eroding trust and opportunities for cooperation among Afghan and coalition partners.
Despite a general awareness of water resources, military decision makers typically lacked a sufficiently deep appreciation of the significance of water issues to local people. Most frequently, water resources were considered only when they presented obstacles to tactical movement or operational control. In this gap lies a lost opportunity for positive military engagement with the local population through coordinated water rehabilitation activities. Within civilian and military ranks, some of those serving overseas deployments had considerable knowledge and skill sets for managing water resources. While residing throughout the organizational hierarchies, these individuals most often informed discussions, planning and actions at the brigade or division levels. A common problem was that security challenges limited the access needed by appropriate experts to provide adequate quality assurance for ongoing water development projects. In some instances, civilians assigned from US agencies to serve as water experts proved overly specialized in their skill sets and lacked the broadly applied, and easily adapted, field-oriented skills needed to function within Afghanistan's austere rural environments. Similarly, NGO water development sometimes suffered from narrow expertise, reliance on inappropriate technologies or, more generally, misapplied development experience from previous assignments outside Afghanistan. This led to project failure that strained relations between local Afghans and outside personnel.
The problems associated with bringing in technical and policy experts from highly developed, secure and bureaucratic countries were apparent time and again at all levels of engagement. Westerners typically failed to grasp the flow and sedimentation rates within Afghanistan's highly eroded and flashy watersheds. Project designers were unable to foresee the poor construction methods, shoddy materials, and inadequate quality control employed by many Afghan contractors. Advisors could not conceive the lack of enforceability of well-intended policies. Unlike the military, where international deployment is part of the culture, personnel coming from civilian agencies in settled, secure and highly bureaucratic environments need to be better prepared for the realities of wartime service.
US institutions engaged in the whole-of-government approach brought their own differences in institutional emphasis and metrics for success (GAO, Citation2010). For example, USAID stressed, as a measure for success (paraphrased), ‘lives positively impacted that could be attributed to specific sponsored interventions’, including improved market access and techniques to enhance basic subsistence. Military planners submitting development projects for funding were also required to define the population to be benefitted. However, these interventions served the ‘shape, clear, hold, build’ model. Here, water projects could be applied tactically to help deprive insurgent forces of cooperation from local people who controlled critical territory both prior to and during combat operations. By offering assistance with water resources issues, ISAF forces gained or maintained access to otherwise reticent communities. While improving basic hydrologic infrastructure was the goal of many development unit commanders, eventual success was measured in part by changes in the incidence of attacks by antigovernment forces.
The coordination needed to achieve both short-term and long-term objectives through water resources development in a wartime environment remains a lasting challenge. System changes require planning and implementation that are rapid and responsive but also enduring and unequivocal in their positive impact. This typically necessitates coordination among disciplines that span multiple agencies with diverse modes of operation. In response to an evaluation of US civilian-military institutional integration in water issues, the Department of Defense cautions that water development must be integrated with overall counter-insurgency operations and not task field personnel with overly burdensome reporting requirements (Hill, Citation2010).
Afghanistan was replete with missed opportunities to appreciate water development as having both long-term and short-term benefits and potential consequences. We question the view apparently held at high civilian and military levels that water development is largely a long-term and large-scale proposition focused heavily on dam construction (Johnson et al., Citation2011; United States Senate Majority Staff, Citation2011) and believe this to be based on a misperception of water development issues and opportunities. Disproportionate focus on large-scale, high-visibility water resource projects has stymied opportunities for localized efforts (SIGAR, Citation2014). In particular, the focus on revamping large dams, such as the Dahla Dam on the Arghandab River north of Kandahar, resulted in missed opportunities for meaningful and more immediate improvement across a multitude of locales (International Water Power, Citation2014). For example, many communities in the upper watershed were willing to pursue small check dam and stream channel protection projects in exchange for the cost of materials. These requests were rejected, and funding was reserved to raise the dam, with no regard for the positive impacts on its sustainability.
Dams present very special challenges. Thus, where deemed appropriate, both hydrologic and structural engineering considerations need to be more fully addressed by qualified professionals. The time commitments and cost of these large structures make them generally unfeasible for military teams doing development work in insecure areas. Even the prospect of new dam construction can be destabilizing to would-be recipient communities who see the promise of more water for drinking and agriculture.
Recommendations for future actions
Once policies and strategies are established, it is critical to give implementing military units and civilian advisors sufficient training in assessing water and agricultural conditions and basic knowledge of the appropriate interventions to apply, as well as those to avoid. One week of training is sufficient to convey basic information prior to deployment. We also suggest that basic agriculture and watershed/environmental literacy should be included in education programmes for future officers and field diplomats (Groninger & Ruffner, Citation2014). It would be especially helpful to provide this training prior to deployment, before unit mindsets are formed. If civilian personnel and military units are serving together, joint pre-deployment training could help calibrate expectations and would foster the development of constructive relationships. Civilian advisors and remote access to more specialized expertise (reachback) may also be helpful, but it is the unit on the ground who must bear ultimate responsibility for assessment and outcomes. The serial nature of deployments (typically less than a year long) among military and civilian personnel alike create many challenges for maintaining the continuity of effort by qualified individuals to manage all aspects of large or complex water development projects. Especially critical is extensive participation during all stages of the process by respected village elders and, where possible, Afghan government representatives to provide continuity of project focus. Where this does not occur, unscrupulous local parties may leverage uncertainty in communications among personnel in consecutive deployment cycles to achieve strategic gains for themselves or their communities at the expense of others.
Our experience favours small-scale, low-profile interventions that directly impact the local community without destabilizing the broader social environment. Ideally, these practices are introduced fairly early in the military shape-clear-hold-build cycle to provide community employment during times when local populations are especially susceptible to recruitment by enemy elements. Furthermore, carrying out these interventions from start to finish within a single deployment cycle will help avoid transition problems. Under this model, water development is built from the farmer and village level to grow outward incrementally with local landholder and user buy-in. When water-saving techniques are adopted and watersheds are stabilized, then a dam may be a subject for future consideration at carefully selected sites and under traditional civilian development conditions. This further incentivizes cooperation, as short-term benefits are provided along with the potential for a larger payoff if long-term security is achieved. Even if plans cannot be carried to completion, small-scale actions and knowledge may contribute towards long-term stability across many sites. However, large-scale projects such as dams do not require local community investment or provide long-term employment opportunities. They also potentially threaten local or regional balances of power. Moreover, future civilian-military development efforts should learn from the OEF Afghanistan experience and avoid stifling small-scale water projects with the vain promise of a comprehensive water programme that would include conservation and cropping-system improvements, instead devolving into a simple dam project or eventually remaining unfulfilled (Groninger & Lasko, Citation2011). At the time of our involvement in OEF, the metrics used by civilian development agencies did not adequately recognize the value of this approach to long-term strategic success. In contrast, some military operators' actions – educating and training key individuals to be agents of change – reflected a better understanding of the value of knowledge transfer within Afghan rural society. While difficult to measure, that approach had positive short-term tactical impacts and also laid the groundwork for long-term improvements to struggling rural communities and the broader social stability that these may help support.
Increased awareness among military leaders regarding the role of agricultural development in conflict environments has led to a call for improved education and training for military officers and field personnel in matters of development in complex military operations (Johnson et al., Citation2011). In 2011–2013, approximately 800 civilian and military personnel participated in a programme, funded and coordinated by the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, that included water resource development as a key component of the Agriculture Development for Afghanistan Pre-deployment Training (ADAPT) programme (Groninger et al., Citation2013). Water-related training focused on basic hydrologic functionality, Afghan expectations for water and water resource management, underlying land ownership and land tenure–related issues, and exposure to irrigation systems and other hydrologic engineering structures (Table ). Through the lens of water development, participants gained further insights into the function and norms of rural Afghan societies and concepts of propriety, ownership and cooperation, as well as developing a basic understanding of myriad aspects of agricultural concepts and practices.
Table 3 Basic hydrology principles taught in the Agriculture Development for Afghanistan Pre-deployment Training (ADAPT) programme from short-term operational awareness and long-term development perspectives.
We believe that the defence departments of nations in the international security community should institutionalize a generalized version of the ADAPT programme to strengthen and build an understanding of water issues as related to mission and operational objectives. Our experience suggests that a week-long training session combining classroom and hands-on field training can convey important water and agricultural concepts to help field personnel and unit leaders more effectively interact with rural people (Groninger et al., Citation2013). Personnel receiving this training would be better prepared to conduct assessments, identify appropriate projects, manage programmes, focus on water management as a key concern for integrating practices and infrastructure, access technical reachback resources, and minimize negative impacts of military operations to critical resources. Also important is providing knowledge to foster cooperation and coordination with traditional development efforts that may occur simultaneous with or following military operations. While generalities may be taught, it is important also to emphasize that water development is highly situation dependent and not well suited for indiscriminate deployment of a limited range of technologies or concepts. In many locales in Afghanistan, failed micro-hydropower and drip-irrigation systems serve as examples of this. Just as matters of sensitivity to religious practice, hunger and security are viewed as central to stability among all people, water supply is no less critical to crop- and livestock-dependent rural societies and must be integrated into any effective planning and cooperation efforts, during peacetime or war.
Conclusion
Watershed degradation, agricultural and household water supply disruption, and resulting food shortages all can play into the hands of antigovernment forces (United States Senate Majority Staff, Citation2011). From this perspective, water development should be viewed as intrinsic to societal stability and resiliency against destabilizing militant forces. Addressing water availability problems should always reinforce or build up the community social structures, including mirabs and volunteer work forces, needed to operate and sustain water distribution systems. In Afghanistan we observed a tendency to view water resource issues and projects simplistically and within the framework of individual agency or unit missions, often to the detriment of both short- and long-term success. We suggest that future complex operations in chronically under-governed and arid regions should fully assimilate the extent to which rural people view access to an adequate water supply as pivotal to security and stability. There, concerns about security and stability must move from broad-scale projection to determining how military and development operations will impact specific locations and the roles that individual institutions may play in preventing or resolving future conflicts. Successful early integration and cooperation among development and security professionals may continue in what will ultimately be a generational process. Water resources provide a potentially useful focal point for this integration. It is our hope that the OEF Afghanistan experience be seen as a foundation or inflection point for a continuous, holistic and practical application of water interventions to help elevate security and sustainability in some of the world's most vulnerable regions.
Acknowledgements
The authors were employed or under contract with the following institutions: US Agency for International Development (Afghanistan Water Agriculture and Technology Transfer Project); US Army Corps of Engineers; US Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service; and Civilian Expeditionary Workforce. The views expressed herein are entirely our own and in no way reflect the policies or positions of the aforementioned institutions. We gratefully acknowledge the indispensable and heroic support provided by the many men and women, representing countless military and civilian agencies from around the globe, who made this work possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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