Kabul greatly needs to strengthen governance at all levels and to think about sustainable development, with the NATO summit in Chicago having clarified the date of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In an attempt to contribute to public policy capacity building and long-term stabilization of the country, several governments from around the world have offered various forms of assistance in training and re-training the national cadres of professional and effective civil service officials. The government of Kazakhstan designed a special program in which the doors of this country’s most prestigious universities were opened to about 1,000 graduate students from Afghanistan, to study under Kazakh governmental scholarship. The main question is whether this innovative – not to say courageous – act by Kazakhstan’s government will lead to effective public policy capacity building in Afghanistan.

BACKGROUND:  Afghanistan sails towards 2014 with a strong need for governance capacity building, especially at the local and provincial levels, and strengthening of its public administration sector.  To this end, a number of countries have been providing different forms of assistance in reforming the public administration and training and re-training cadres. Kazakhstan, which signed a special agreement on education, has become an important player in the field of education. The agreement signed in November 2009 envisioned training about 1,000 students from Afghanistan over the course of ten years, under special scholarship fully funded by the government of Kazakhstan.

Indeed the stability and development of Afghanistan in the 21^st century fully depends on the quality of its civil service sector. Building a workable public administration and effective governance is quite a challenge in a country with a literacy rate just above 60 percent and an urban population between 23 and 30 percent. It will be the public administration officials who will have the challenging task of delivering the array of state services required in this vast country: providing educational services, collecting taxes, maintaining infrastructure, and enforcing law and order. It will be the quality of those deliverables that will define the stability of government and sustainable development in Afghanistan in coming decades.

The civil service in Afghanistan includes more than 200,000 people working at various levels of government. The quality of those government officials varies significantly from sector to sector and from province to province. There are highly trained government officials who received education and training in the best educational institutions inside and outside the country. Yet, these efforts have produced mixed results. On the one hand, there are a number of public administration officials who manage to handle very complex national financial institutions, the national currency, etc. On the other hand, the public administration unfortunately faces severe shortages of personnel capable of meeting the everyday challenges of running the state institutions. Human capacity building is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, especially at the local level. In this regard, electronic government (e-government) could be an effective tool to deliver administrative services over e-platforms to every corner of Afghanistan in a much more effective way, being both cheaper and faster than other administrative systems.

Kazakhstan–Afghanistan cooperation in educating a new generation of cadres capable of dealing with governance and administration may produce meaningful results. These two countries have an almost 40-year-long history of cooperation in education, as well as having some similarities in culture and administrative and organizational systems. Kazakhstan can share with Afghanistan its achievements and know-how in e-government, as over the last 5 or 6 years it has introduced and drastically improved the quality of e-government services in the country. These efforts were reflected in the UN E-government Survey where Kazakhstan ranked 38^th out of 190 countries in the E-government development index and second in the E-participation index in 2012.

IMPLICATIONS:  The realities of building a stable state administrative system in the current political and security environment in Afghanistan require innovative and creative approaches. Building the institutions of the modern state and complex systems of governance is not an easy task in any developing-country environment; it is even more challenging in a post-war environment. The process of utilizing international assistance in building viable governance systems – including re-building old universities and building new training and retraining institutions around the country as well as setting up e-governance facilities – has been quite hectic. And yet the government of Afghanistan has managed to achieve some formidable improvements. True, according to the latest UN E-government Survey (2012), Afghanistan is indexed as holding the 184^th position in the world (out of 190), ahead of only a very few of the least developed countries.  However, in the ‘online service index and its components’ it holds the 147^th position (just behind neighboring Tajikistan, but ahead of Syria, Nigeria and Turkmenistan). This index also clearly points out the area where improvement is vital – capacity building among government officials at all levels – as Afghanistan is in the 183^rd place in the Survey’s ‘human capital index’.

However, one area in which Afghanistan’s government has shown significant improvement over the last few years is building a better environment for private businesses and foreign investors. According to the World Bank Doing Business ranking (2012), Afghanistan was in 160^th place out of 183, just behind the Ukraine, Senegal and Mauritania, but ahead of Cameroon, Iraq and neighboring Uzbekistan. However, it was in 63^rd position in the paying taxes indicators, well ahead of Tajikistan, Russia and the Ukraine. Afghanistan took the impressive 30^th place in global ranking in starting a business, ahead of neighboring Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – and even Russia.

CONCLUSION:  The future of effective governance in Afghanistan rests on two pillars. One is competed and results-oriented state administration cadres at all levels of government. Second is e-government via e-government stations introduced in all major towns and cities. Over the last few years training mechanisms within and outside of the country have been established. It is important to revise the training materials and educational modules regularly in order to improve the efficiency and practicality of these training and re-training courses. In addition, the government of Afghanistan, international donors and the United Nations Project Office on Governance (UNPOG) should put increased efforts into adapting e-government technologies to the realities of the country. New technologies including Internet and social media integrated into the e-government system and delivered over all kinds of platforms – from the Internet to cell phones – combined with capable government cadres would allow a drastic improvement in the efficiency of administrative services, contributing to achieving stability. In this regard the targeted efforts of Kazakhstan and other donors in capacity building will greatly contribute to the enabling of effective governance in Afghanistan.

AUTHORS’ BIOS: Rafis Abazov, PhD, is a visiting professor at Al Farabi Kazakh National University. He also teaches at SIPA, Columbia University, NY. He is author of The Formation of Post-Soviet International Politics in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (1999), The Culture and Customs of the Central Asian Republics (2007) and The Role of Think Tanks in the Policy-Making Process in Kazakhstan (2011). He has been awarded an IREX 2010–2011 EPS fellowship (Title VIII program) for research on public policy reforms in Kazakhstan.  Dr.Alexei Tikhomirov is acting head, United Nations Project Office on Governance, UN DESA, Seoul, Republic of Korea.