Karzai and 22,000 villages.

• Author: Ghani, Ashraf
• Position: Hamid Karzai

General John McColl is a rare military officer. In 2002, without firing a bullet, he led a British brigade into Afghanistan, established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and received Afghan public acclaim for bringing security to the capital city of Kabul. His success reflected an Afghan consensus that international forces were central to building an effective state. They trusted the intentions and capability of the international community--trusted that their presence would catalyze the creation of a legitimate government and a just order. And under this umbrella of security, Afghans began the hard work of rebuilding destroyed homes and mending the social fabric of our homeland.

ISAF's reception today, as General McChrystal acknowledges, is of a very different kind. The mission now faces the twin threats of an assertive insurgency and the predatory, corrupt behavior of the Afghan state. With these threats reinforcing one another, the Afghan public has lost confidence not only in their own government, but also in the international community. This decline in legitimacy has led to an ever-increasing death toll--both of Afghans and international military personnel. The Orientalist image of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires is alive and well.

Regaining legitimacy now requires the creation of a stock and flow of trust: trust between Afghan civilians and their government, as well as trust between the civilians, their government and the international community. Building this trust will require placing the needs and aspirations of the Afghan people at the center of a focused strategy, which delivers sustained results through the kind of burden sharing so evident from 2002 to 2005.

I witnessed the degradation of the burgeoning democratic state, and the increasingly pervasive corruption and violence firsthand, not only living in Afghanistan, but also participating in the political system when running for president. The country is now awash in a loss of confidence, and Afghans wonder whether the international community can buttress the people's own efforts to create stability. As troop numbers ratchet up to one hundred thousand boots on the ground, it is evident that without a concomitant effort in counterinsurgency economics, there is little hope of reestablishing a vibrant Afghan state.

The current political quagmire should in many ways come as no surprise, for a proper political plan to create a legitimate long-term government structure was never implemented. And this has left an opening for our current failures in Afghanistan. The goal of the Bonn meetings of November 2001, led by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative of the secretary-general, was to allow an unrepresentative group of Afghans to agree to a process that would create a legitimate order in the country. The Bonn group prepared a script for reaching that objective, consisting of clear timelines and delineating the key institutional changes that needed to take place. Among these were the transfer of power to an interim administration headed by Hamid Karzai in December 2001; the election of a Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly) by indirect elections under the supervision of the try; the selection of the head of state and key officials of a transitional government by the Loya Jirga; the appointment of a constitutional commission to prepare a draft constitution; debate and approval of that document by a constitutional Loya Jirga; a vote to bring to power the first directly elected president of the country; and parliamentary elections to choose the legislature. The critical benchmarks were completed by October 2004, and the parliamentary elections took place in 2005.

These three years of transition were marked by significant tensions. Even so, Afghanistan underwent a number of positive changes, and began to regain its statehood through an inclusive political process and the desire of the Afghan public to solve disagreements through political channels. The Bonn process derived its authority from the correlation between rhetoric and action, promises and delivery. Afghan stakeholders saw that the system was predictable; the rules of the game clear. And perhaps the greatest achievement of the new approach was the enthusiastic participation of over 9 million Afghans in the 2004 presidential election. Stories of old women and sick men being carried to the ballot box endowed the political drama with a moral, human side, and the willingness of the people to assume the rights and obligations of citizenship was obvious.

Simultaneously, a dedicated team of Afghan technocrats and civil-society leaders articulated a vision for good governance of the economy and polity, translating goals into outcomes through innovative national initiatives, like the National Solidarity Program (NSP), which awards block grants for village-run development projects; the National Communications Program, which taps the private sector to deliver basic services to citizens; the creation of a national health service; and the establishment of a national army. Each program was designed to meet the needs of ordinary Afghans. And each was founded on principles of accountability and transparency. Their success demonstrated that institutional reform was feasible, and the team's efforts helped create a solid set of partnerships with international organizations and donor governments.

The apogee of their efforts was the Berlin conference of March 2004, where the Afghan team presented a detailed, $26.5 billion eight-year action plan for securing the future of Afghanistan. Impressed by their record of reform and the depth and breadth of their plan, the assembled foreign and finance...