In August 2005, Colonel Mike Capstick led a 15-person Canadian Forces team into complex, dangerous and very unfamiliar territory – governance. While some have raised eyebrows at the notion of soldiers developing integrated management frameworks and other such measures for sectors in the Afghanistan government, his Strategic Advisory Team (SAT-A) had a significant and lasting impact, and played a small but important role in building the foundation for capacity in the nascent Afghan civil service.

Between 2005 and 2006, SAT-A worked with the Afghanistan National Strategy Working Group, charged with assembling the national development strategy (ANDS) to be presented at the 2006 London Conference on Afghanistan, which launched the Afghanistan Compact; the Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission, helping the commission develop a comprehensive strategy for public administrative reform; and the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, assisting in the development of a strategy to coordinate and deliver rural development objectives in the ANDS. Capstick explains how the team began and how it is evolving.

During the 1990s, we started to realize that the solutions to the bigger problem of stabilizing failed or failing states were not going to be solved by military means alone. I think most knew that intuitively, but Bosnia focused it. The military and security objectives of the Dayton Accord were solidified fairly early in NATO’s deployment, but the other objectives of governance and development were not.

In Afghanistan it became clear to General Rick Hillier, the NATO ISAF commander in 2004, that the international community was at risk of doing the same thing. He and some Afghan government officials – particularly the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ashraf Gani – realized that security, governance and economic and social development needed to be tied together. And he recognized that military staff officers – people who have been learning to plan from the day they started their officer cadet training – could help provide the skills and mechanics of planning to address civilian problems.

He assigned officers to work with the Minister of Finance and they came up with an integrated management framework, the precursor to the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS).

Not everyone was as forward looking. Gen Hiller’s successors in ISAF wanted nothing to do with the concept. There are so many international organizations and embassies in a place like Kabul that it’s easy to be misunderstood and to come into conflict with another group. It was unconventional for military forces and nobody wanted to take that risk, so it died a natural death.

But in 2005, when he visited the troops as Chief of the Defence Staff, President Karzai asked if he would be willing to “provide those guys again.” The CDS agreed: the disconnect between the military-security pillar and the other two pillars hadn’t closed, and the Afghan government’s internal capacity hadn’t improved very much.

Earned respect
Our mission was the triumph of imagination over bureaucracy. I had few precise orders but we had a good team in Kabul with Canadian ambassador Chris Alexander, a bright young guy who understood the idea, and his head of aid, Dr. Nipa Banerjee.

In the first few weeks, the aim was to identify the places where my team could have the most positive impact. I had a choice to put people in a dozen ministries or concentrate our effort in a couple of places, and decided on the latter so our effort would not be fragmented and we could be effective in a short period.

It became clear that the people tasked to develop Afghanistan’s national development strategy were very bright but they had no planning experience. I told the team, stay out of the substance. We don’t know, for example, what this country needs in terms of the amount of water coming off the Hindu Kush each year; our job was to help put all of those inputs into a coherent plan.

I wish I could claim a rigorous selection process and take credit for the high quality of people I ended up with, but my team was selected in less than two weeks. I grabbed people wherever I could find them – many bosses were not willing to send their subordinates into the unknown – and it was more by good luck than good management that I wound up with one of the easiest leadership jobs I’ve ever had.

The team included army, navy and air force, regulars and reservists, and a couple of civilians, but they all brought to the table Canadian values and a can-do attitude.

There is a lot of international help in Kabul – technical assistance from big organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, various UN agencies – but they tend to act as consultants. I decided early on that we did not want to be competing or in the way of these organizations. There was enough high-priced help mentoring cabinet ministers, and being special advisors. Where the Afghans most needed help was at the working level. We’d work right in their offices. And if they did not assign Afghan counterparts to work with us fulltime we’d go somewhere else. We were going to help them build capacity; we weren’t there to replace capacity.

That quickly earned us trust and respect. They realized we were serious, that in typical military fashion our team would show up for work every morning. The Afghans are not used to that with internationals. We ate lunch and bonded with them. In Ramadan, we respected their culture by not eating or drinking in their sight during daylight hours.

Most importantly, we did not do it for the Afghans. For example, when they started work on the ANDS, the Afghans were trying to figure out how to coordinate all the various inputs they were getting from cabinet ministers, the World Bank, IMF, UN, and various academics and experts on Afghanistan working out of places like New York and Delhi. A young helicopter pilot and an infantry officer created the framework for a database in which all these inputs could be populate and cross-referenced, but the Afghans had to do the actual work – we couldn’t do it because much of the material was in Dari.

You measure success in small bits. When they were getting ready to brief the cabinet, who can be a fractious bunch, on the work they had done in two months, they did what we in the army call a mission rehearsal exercise. It was impressive.

Institution building
There is an American-led program to rebuild the Afghan National Army (ANA), and a German-led and mostly American funded program to build an Afghan national police force. On the public administrative side, there is no parallel program of the magnitude of ANA reform. There are many different agencies doing a variety of things to make the Afghan civil service better, but the effort is not nearly as well coordinated as it should be.

We kept bouncing around the idea of putting together a Canadian team that would include people with the expertise that we didn’t have – expertise from the Public Service Commission or other departments in HR processes and staffing, in administrative processes and organizational design. I would like nothing better than to have a big program that other countries could contribute to, led by somebody like a former clerk of the Privy Council. Until the civil service capacity and values improve, and the public service is professionalized, it will be tough to make progress.

The demand for this type of initiative is growing. The current team has expanded to more ministries and the next team is expanding in size to accommodate that.

Impact
The level of influence, respect and access that Canada had in Kabul in 05-06 is directionally proportional to the reputations of the Canadians that senior Afghans know: you can’t talk to a senior Afghan without Gen Hiller, Gen Andrew Leslie, Chris Alexander or Nipa Banerjee being mentioned. Those people working together built Canada a superb reputation and gave us a lot of capital.

Equally important, this was a bilateral arrangement between Canada and the Government of Afghanistan; it was not part of the US coalition or ISAF. The minute Afghans learned that – that it wasn’t part of either of those two military headquarters in Kabul – doors opened that I’m sure would not have otherwise opened. We were not perceived as acting in NATO or US interests. It was a very interesting dynamic, and it would be hard to extract ourselves and still keep face.

Col (Retd) Mike Capstick commanded Strategic Advisory Team Afghanistan from August 2005 to August 2006. An associate with the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and the University of Calgary, he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for his service in Afghanistan and was appointed to the Order of Military Merit in 2006.