The Afghanistan experiment

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

The Afghanistan experiment
Sunday, 08 06, 2006

I have just come back from Afghanistan, after another six weeks of immersion in its National Assembly, and my friends are surprised to see me alive and in one piece, given the incessant negative publicity about the peace and security situation in that country.

To anyone who relies solely on international media coverage, Afghanistan would seem to be one where the faint of heart should never dare to set foot on. But I have been there, and I can say it is not as dire and forbidden a place as just anyone would like to speculate about. Except for Southern Afghanistan, where there are sporadic attacks on the US-led coalition forces, and isolated incidents of violence in Kabul, the capital, all the handiwork of the Talibans to send the message that they are not yet a spent force, the rest of that country is peaceful and is the focus of development efforts.

Afghanistan is on the verge of breaking free from its ignominious recent past. Various agencies of the United Nations (UN) are seeing to that, providing assistance to the rebuilding of institutions and the reconstruction of this post-conflict country. Many Filipinos connected with the UN system are at the forefront of this massive effort at nation building under a democratic set-up.

With the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, the UN took the lead role in guiding Afghanistan toward a peaceful and stable self-rule. One crucial area of development where the UN has been pretty successful is the strengthening of democratic assemblies, encompassing the National Assembly with its two chambers and 34 provincial councils.

For a country that has not had any semblance of democratic participation of its citizens in a working parliament for the past 35 years, the present state of the National Assembly of Afghanistan is pretty amazing. The UN experimentation for a working parliament in Afghanistan has been achieved through a project of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) called “Support for the Establishment of the Afghan Legislature” (SEAL). In a short period of 15 months, SEAL put in place a working parliament that can compare with the more established parliaments in other democratic countries.

Housed in a complex of modern buildings, fully-automated and equipped with the latest in technological devices that make for an efficient and effective lawmaking, the National Assembly is manned by a secretariat of dedicated civil servants eager to learn from experts of other countries who have had the benefit of being exposed to parliamentary practices. The members of the National Assembly, 249 of them in the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) and 102 of them in the Mishrano Jirga (upper house), are just as eager to adopt the practices of other jurisdictions consistent with the Constitution of Afghanistan.

SEAL is pushing the immediate adoption of Rules of Procedure akin to those we are observing in our own Congress of the Philippines. We have the advantage of many years at experimentation with democracy, in the area of executive-legislative relations, and we have to put forward in Afghanistan the best we have here in our country. The Rules of our own Congress are broad enough to cover the excesses of the executive, and tight enough for the legislature to rein in such excesses, and these have proven to be effective going by our experience with the Senate where nothing that Malacañang and its minions have shamefully done have not been spared going through the crucible of public investigations and eventual prosecution. The National Assembly of Afghanistan is beginning to be very much like our own Senate, flexing its own muscles to curb corruption in accordance with a set of rules.

The Constitution of Afghanistan authorizes the creation by the Wolesi Jirga of special commissions to investigate government actions. These work in the same fashion as the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and the Committee on Good Government of the House of Representatives. This is a rich area for experimentation by SEAL, and already the proposed rules governing these investigations have been submitted to the leadership of the Wolesi Jirga under President Qanoni for consideration.

The members of the National Assembly are starting to dabble in investigations in aid of legislation, an arsenal of our own Congress we are very familiar with. In a country whose one-year-old constitution calls for the enactment of laws in at least 116 areas of concern, investigations in aid of legislation certainly are effective devices to flesh out the bills to eventually form the corpus of laws of this new democracy. The legislative agenda is dictated by the national government of Afghanistan by what are called “Government Bills,” but this does not preclude initiatives from members of the National Assembly called “Members Bills.” The committee system of the National Assembly is undergoing an overhauling, to see to it that the committees effectively discharge their role at lawmaking given this peculiar arrangement.

The Wolesi Jirga is even doing one better than our own Commission on Appointments. It rejected during the confirmation process five nominees for minister of Afghanistan President Karzai, and his nominee for Chief Justice.
The provincial councils of Afghanistan are likewise the beneficiaries of SEAL’s efforts at capacity building. Local government administration in the hands of professionally-trained local executives is fast becoming the norm, replacing the decades-old system of governance under local kingpins who wield military power and have control over substantial local revenues from the poppy trade.

There are thousands of Filipinos working in Afghanistan. They are as much the beneficiaries as the citizens of that country, of laws enacted by a working National Assembly and by effective local governments. The UNDP-SEAL is committed to see this experimentation succeed. And I am as much committed to see that Afghanistan adopt our best parliamentary rules and practices and at governance.

For comments about this website:Webmaster@tribune.net.ph

The Daily Tribune © 2006