The Nuances of Afghan Office Etiquette

One of the highlights of my current job is getting to talk to people. In doing market research on construction materials I regularly find myself in the offices of five to ten heads of companies in a given day. This means I have had ample opportunity to compare and contrast different different settings in which Afghans conduct business. After a while, I couldn't help viewing these things through an anthropological lens as well.

The basic schematic of the Afghan office is, like many throughout the world, a projection of power. There are typical two rooms. The first will be less lavishly furnished and be occupied by an average of five people at any given moment; a mix of servants and sundry employees. The second room will be the lair of the boss himself. It will contain an enormous desk and the rest of the space will be taken up by obscene plush couches arranged in a salon setting. The meeting will also entail some sort of serving of food. This schematic allows numerous waits for exhibiting and mediating power, so here's how.

The number of people in the anteroom. This shows the power or status of the person you are about to meet. In fact most of them seem to have nothing to do but hang out (there are usually different servants who will bring you your tea later on). The people in the anteroom therefore, not just show how many people the boss can afford to hire, but also that he can afford to have them sitting around not doing much. The more powerful the boss, the more people and the more leisure on hand.

The main reception room. You and the boss will not be the only people in this room. Very often other people have been waiting since before you arrived to conduct their business. They may even have been waiting through multiple previous visitors. Unfortunately (for Afghan society) I never am made to wait, owing to the fact that Western visitors accord status, and those like myself who speak English are at the top of even that pecking order. Being made to wait and seeing the other guests that are brought in will impress upon the other individual the importance of the person they are waiting to see. If the person you are waiting to see cannot speak English themselves, they will frequently produce a foreign-educated son as a measure of social advancement, usually with the excuse of acting as a translator, which is pretty thin when everyone speaks Farsi. The desk is often little used and mostly for show, a fact often compounded by the impractical arrangement of unnecessary electronic gadgets upon it.

The food offered and the method of its offering. Tea can be served either before you sit down or offered just when it becomes clear that you are about to leave. The food will be non-existent or the usual assortment of nuts and raisins or include some specialties as souhan and gaz. Some people, as a result of class or pretension, go for the cornucopia effect, presenting you with a table covered in things like Pringles, Dorritos, and LU cookies. Some also dispense with tea and offer you coffee (perceived as a core indicator of things Western; Westerners are often perceived to dislike tea), soda, or even Red Bull.

The use of Western artefacts. This is something of a cross-cutting theme. The amount of Western artefacts on hand is inversely proportional with the amount of modernisation of the given boss. This extends from clothing to food to decor. The person educated or brought up the West will great you behind a well used desk in an office tastefully decorated with Afghan objets d'art while wearing a kurta-pijama. On the other extreme, we once spoke with the son of the boss, who had been left in charge. This individual, whilst making an aweful attempt at a Tehrani accent (which is prestigious thanks to the cultural power of Iran and the massive Farsi-language entertainment industry based in Los Angeles which is also given voice in the accent of Tehran), was wear probably one of the most amazing get-ups off all time, consisting of: acid-washed, flared, and incoherently embroidered jeans (Rajastani embroider on one pant, mickey mouse on the other); a collared shirt which had massively oversized cuffs, cufflinks the size of bones, and patterned with oversized neon-hued pieces of cheesecake (the collar was necessarily popped), and to top it off, a leather life-preserver-style vest that was sekwinzed.


It's not just the boss's personality or pretension that factor into this but also those of the clientele. Whatever the individuals preferences, there clients or potential clients will also look for certain signals. Many people have a regal salon-style set up, but will instead take you too a modern and efficient office when given the chance. Another axis is professionalism. The more professional the company, the more familiar its offices will look to someone from the West. People who sat behind a desk where they were visibly at work knew how much they would sell in a given interval, the cost of their inputs, and be full of potential strategies for growth. The biggest divide overall is between businesses that just consist of trading and transporting goods and those that are trying to establish an actual corporate structure, which is necessary to institutionalise the benefits of economic growth.

Life on Planet Altai

Going into my third week at Altai, I think I really like this place. It's a good mix of being professional and informal. The work is well divided so I don't have to focus on much beyond the job which I am supposed to do.

My job right now consists of finishing up some market research on construction materials in the place of someone who got sick just before I started. In a sense this is training for a large market survey which I am going to head up for Nestle starting in November. As little as I know about construction materials, the work is really interesting as it involves me going around Kabul and getting to talk to all different sorts of people, plus also getting to know the Afghan economy close up.

Due to my lack of technical know-how, I've been paired up with an Afghan engineer (Aref, long based in Germany) who helps me fill in the gaps in my interviews. While necessary for this project, in general I hope I won't have to take assistants in the future. It makes the interviews more difficult because people don't expect me to speak Farsi when I have an Afghan assistant. It is also problematic because Aref speaks only German and Farsi, and my technical German is crap. He is used to thinking of German as the language of technology where I accord that status to Farsi. As a result, rather than asking a direct question in Farsi, I have to discuss with Aref in German and then have him translate into Farsi. Yes, my German is improving quickly. It also amusing because I have spent so many years devaluing German as just another old European language and now have to treat it with some respect. But Farsi is better, way better.

The living arrangements are okay. Currently I'm in the largest guesthouse out in Taimani. Let's face it, these are dorms. It's great fun. I rarely get to sleep on time and instead spend time drinking Ovaltine with Mitra and Arzu. We have continental breakfast laid out for us every morning and people clean our rooms. I'm not complaining; I've been roughing it for the last year and I'm quite happy for the perks! My living situation will soon get much better as well. Four expats are moving out so Altai held a room auction. I was the only one who placed a bid, so I got my pick :-) My new room will be in the guesthouse directly across from L'Atmosphere (a French restaurant with readily available alcohol which serves as a second office for the Altai staff) and only 50m away from the office. The room is right next to the bathroom and kitchen (yes, at moment my room is unattached, so I have to go outside to get to the bathroom, common room, or kitchen, which will suck come winter) and also has a desk and really soft mattress. I might also spring $120 for a diesel heater. One year of lighting the bokhari (wood stove) by myself has been quite enough, plus with a wood stove it will be cold in the morning unless you keep waking up in the middle of the night.

Back in Kabul

Well, after four months in India I am finally back in Kabul. The last week in Delhi was fun if also a bit hectic. I stayed with my friend Kaushik in Mayur Vihar and ran around doing errands. On top of this, a few others were getting ready to leave--Mohit Sinha is going to Bangalore to work at a think-tank and Aashish Mishra, who's off to do a PhD at LSE. On top of this 4S, the infamous cheap bar of Defence Colony will be shutting its doors on the 20th for a one-month renovation. True, it's not the end, but one must worry that renovation will entail making it less ghetto and dive-y, which after all, was the whole point.

The flight to Kabul was relatively normal, by general standards, not those of a typical flight to Kabul. No goats, neem trees, or firearms in sight, nor was anyone carrying much more than twice the allowed amount of baggage with them. Indian served complimentary beer on the flight (I was the only non-taker), and no-one felt compelled to fast, even though the journey is under two hours. The terminal reconstruction is quite evident in Kabul and it's gotten much nicer at the airport.

Having been gone for four month I noticed a lot of changes. For one, things appear to be looking up. There's even more construction than before and a lot of small businesses are being repaired as well. On the hand, people are bitching about increases in the price of flour and oil.

It's nice to be back, the weather is perfect, about 25-30C with no humidity. I've made it a habit to sit out at L'Atmosphere, where no one is bothered by my using the internet, even though I'm not ordering anything due to the fast. In summer, it's an open-air restaurant (any of you who have been to San Diego, think Cafe 976) with lots of fig, pomegranate, and cherry trees, as well as grapes and roses too. I'm a bit annoyed by the constant repetition of the soundtrack from My Best Friend's Wedding (the English version of Mere Yaar Ki Shadi Hai), but oh well.

I found, with Nathan's help, a nice guesthouse behind the Kabul City Centre shopping mall. It's actually a private house run by a nice and mellow Australian guy, and is next to an awesome Lebanese restaurant. Beyond finishing my survey of perceptions of NGO-sector corruption in Afghanistan, I'm trying to rustle up a new job but networking with everyone imaginable. It's much easier to find work hanging out here than going to DC or Cali, just because communication tends to be so poor between Afghanistan and wherever the donors are. Plus you just get a lot of experience in anything you do here.

So, basically, the job search begins, the partying continues!

The Gilded Tissue Box: Trying to distribute aid to Afghanistan

Right now I'm wrapping up my big report for IWA and getting ready to go back to Kabul, and on to the next job. The concept for the report is 'perceptions of NGO integrity in Afghanistan'. It's actually two reports, based on two questionnaires (one for the population as a whole and one for NGO professionals and political elites) with participants in twenty provinces. What we've found is this: There are major areas of Afghanistan who are confused about what NGOs are and there are lots of non-Afghans who are also equally confused. Now, at this point it's important to underline that people in highly educated societies tend not to know what NGOs are. Yes, but these same people tend also to live in functioning states which provide public goods. Afghans have a whole array of competing would-be public goods providers, amongst which the dominant one by far is not the Afghan state per se (please no one say they need a citation for this). These are my thoughts about the significance of this work.

Before we can move on to the Afghans, we need to look at the situation from the point of the NGO community itself. First and foremost there is a general failure to be practical--this means a relevant combination of theoretical and specific, not one or the other. The NGO community would do well to recognise the realities defined in political science and economics (which is often disdained in itself). You'll observe my point as I continue, the grand scales bears heavily on the specific analyses. Here are some ground rules for understanding the situation in Afghanistan:

• States are geographically delimited public goods monopolies. As such, they try to build, maintain, and enforce monopolies over the production, distribution, and consumption of public goods, such as the rule of law, justice, freedoms, etc. The state is also the principle agent in the state system, which, thanks to a huge body of treaties and common law, has been growing since at least 1648. There global political arena is composed of states, bodies composed of states, organisations which operate under the auspices of the state, and those who define themselves in response to states and the state system (the last two need not be mutually exclusive).
• Political actors are any person, group, organisation, body, multilateral institution, reptile, or platypus which has an effect on the any political economy or ecology. Yep, every conscious being is pretty much a political actor.
• Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are just that. Your local sewing circle is any NGO, as is McDonalds, Bearing Point, Louis Berger, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, Counterpart International, and the Foundation to Protect Swedish Underwear Models. For the purpose if this spiel, I'm talking about NGOs as organisations that distribute aid.
• While a given organisation is either part of the state or it is not, it's relation to the state could be discribed on a continuum. At one end of the continuum you have the organisation being completely inside the government, basically the Man's bitch. An example would be the Department of State in the US. At the other extreme would be an organisation that has nothing to do with the government (like the secrecy-shrouded PLF--Platypus Liberation Front; holed up in an undisclosed location). Yes, the reality is that every organisation falls somewhere in between, and there's a handy adjective for this, official. The more anything is sanctioned by anything else, the more official it is, with regards to point of reference for definition.
• Legitimacy is how much support something has. It doesn't matter what it is or how official it is.

So, in Afghanistan we have a lot of political actors, all with varying degrees of officialdom. On the official side we have the internationally recognised government of Afghanistan and bodies (militaries, embassies, development agencies) of other sovereign states. On the unofficial end we have the Taliban (boo!), warlords, clan, kin, and tribal structures. None of the above are necessarily good or bad, and all have varying degrees of legitimacy.

The state can not distribute the amount of public goods necessary for all the citizens of Afghanistan, so other organisations fill the vacuum. Some organisations are official; the Afghan government and other states acknowledging its lack of capacity open bids, sign contracts, and invite other organisations to provide [public] goods. Along with the actual provision of public goods, said organisation also often help to strength the Afghan state's ability to do so (capacity building).

Uninvited are the Talban and other traditional power structures. The Taliban want control over the state and hence the monopoly, warlords want the added prestige and wealth associated with the ability to distribute public goods, and maybe a monopoly over an area as well. Tribal or clan institutions may or may not compete with the state, but given different discourses of legitimacy, traditional institutions may serve as an arbiter between the average citizen and larger actors. Actors that can best tap into and influence the discourse of legitimacy gain the most power.

Most actors lie somewhere between official and unofficial. Non-official actors such as warlords or local jirgas may be coopted into the state in exchange for improved legitimacy and interest aggregation and adjudication. NGOs also lie on this continuum. USAID is a highly official arm of the US government. It contracts out a project to an independent NGO, say, Counterpart, which then becomes a more official player in so doing. The individuals and organisations who then work with Counterpart have varying degrees of officialdom within the resulting structure. Notice that whether the NGO is for- or non-profit is of only tangential importance. Legitimacy is often misconstrued, by those within and with the NGO community to be a function the profit motive. In reality, an NGO is a business and a corporation, and it's profit status doesn't necessarily relate to its transparency, accountability, efficacy, or legitimacy.

The point of IWA's recent survey is that, while Afghans are more aware of NGOs than, say, the average American (they deal with them more), they are still quite confused. Some provinces where people rate official power structures as most influential are unlikely to ever have experienced proper governance by the national government. In other places, political actors blur together, with local government, NGOs, and warlords being identified with each other in important ways. Aid delivery must be thought out and organised, yet there is a paradox because we know that command economies don't work. This means that not only do NGOs have to coordinate, they have have to coordinate in structuring and regulating the market to increase the demand for [certain kinds of] aid and integrity in their consumption and distribution.

One of the most important points in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is that harmonised aid is important, but it does not go so far as to recognise the necessity of adapting to market forces. Along with economic markets, there exist also ideological markets, requiring marketing and PR. The branding, marketing, and packaging of aid are as important as the product itself (of course the product also needs to be good, as the makers of US foreign policy would do well to understand). We've all made fun of the 60-odd page brand identification manual that USAID puts out, but there's a logic there.

To go beyond what the results of survey, or even what a trough of phenomenological interviews can suss out, the problems faced in the reconstruction of Afghanistan are at least as much a result of structural factors in the aid distribution regime as they are the result of specific factors in the Afghan beneficiaries. These include the problem of dual accountability, whereby aid distributes are supposed to be accountable to both their beneficiaries and their donors (who are often nation-states whose interests may conflict with those of the intended beneficiaries), and the problem of the orientation of NGOs themselves. But just as important is the notion amongst many non-profits that they are superior or more rashid than for-profits.

The tendency of non-profits to fully grasp the reality of the situation makes them overall less confident and less effective in aid distribution. Non-profits should strive to internalise the principles of integrity and accountability as deeply as they advocate them. They also need to realise that there is no magic bullet for accountability and hence to stop wringing their hands about it. The consequences are immediate. Afghans are confused over non-profits/ intentions as well as their identity, often not being aware of who is supposed to benefit or why.

The problem with accountability for non-profit NGOs is the lack of incentives. While for-profits are certainly involved in many abuses, their model theoretically creates a more efficient model for integrity. The same profit model that can cater to a baser instinct also introduces more checks and balances by which the for-profit should be more transparent and accountable, at least to its shareholders. Following the theory, a for-profit will lose money if it doesn't do the job and do it well, and furthermore it will face internal punishment if it loses out on revenue or future contracts (being unethical costs money!). In too many non-profits, this business ethnic is non-existent. No one gets fired when a product fails or doesn't get produced in a timely fashion. Donors sympathise with the non-profit NGO that can't balance its budget and don't cut off its funding right away. It is considered tolerable for a non-profit not to pay its employees (who work just as hard as employees of for-profits) well or be insolvent, whereas a for-profit would become a laughing stock for this. Most non-profits are accountable or at least genuinely try, but the non-profit model has serious flaws and strains which should be better addressed.

For the situation to change, NGOs have to grow up. (Some place are ahead--NGO discourse is much more advanced in the US and Iran than in Europe for example) In order to become truly effective, non-profits need to realise that they are just one of many political and economic actors, and that they are political and economic actors themselves. They also have to be as conversant and comfortable with economics as with the discourses of justice and public health. Non-profits also need to embrace markets, and embrace the hard game of politics with all the clever PR of Shell and Unilever. Economics is the moral science, explaining how humans satisfy their wants and needs and theirin explaining how we can help them be satisfied more often. The market for public goods in Afghanistan will be filled, the question is how we are going to structure the market.

Barsaat!

The monsoons have finally brought some relief to my AC-less ass. Temperatures are now topping about 30 during the day, with the addition of a pleasant breeze. Thanks to global warming, there not to much actual rain here, but still enough. And moreover the sky is now often blue instead of copper.  I've made some quite good friends here and you meet quite a few interesting folks around Delhi in general.

As hinted at by my lack of AC, my NGO still remains insolvent, hence I have not gotten paid and have instead received quite a bit of kindness from friends. I, however, am now thoroughly on board with the job search. I have learned that Monster and Jobster both suck. For Monster, I didn't exactly have a narrow search--about ten different kinds of proffessions in about 20 countries. Got back one result. I mean what the hell? I guess things have not changed much since the old Monster which would respect to my interest in, say, non-profits, by returning search results for IT workers for such companies. Jobster is also strange in that the social networking phenomenon doesn't apply well to job-searching in that most people are not in a state of constant search. When they find a job, they forget about their profiles. A better thing would be to offer these services with Facebook or Friendster, since people would still be logging in even when happily employed. Of course this would require more people to grow up and use social networking sites.

All of my experiences with my current NGO just encourage me ever more to get into my own business and simply run things myself. And India's a positive environment for that in that there are plenty of opportunities to be had here.

Another upshot of my insolvency is that it's led me to try eating at more cheap places here. One, an Andhra restaurant near where I live, produces a lamb-nugget that is awesome. Consisting of a manlier meat, it even beats the chicken nugget from the roadside dhaba in Tamilnadu. Crispy and batterfried in a spicy batter with all sort of chillies and garlic, these lamb-nuggets are mighty. Serve them with cheese sauce and white people would kill for them too. This Andhra restaurant also makes a fish curry that is no joke. Being good Andhra food it's the first properly spicy thing I've found during this stint in India. In general this country suffers from one pepper, the green/red chillie, which is often not that hot. The first step to good hot food is to supplement that heat with black pepper, which is different and complementary. But more importantly, more kinds of chillies could be used like in Mexico or the US. Of course I still haven't found a good Christian or Zoroastrian (Parsi) restaurant. Having brough the chili to India in the first place, Christians are the most reliable connoisseurs of spice in India.

Delhi: The Arrival

Now I've been in Delhi over two weeks and it's a big improvement over Kabul. Thanks to Chitra's help I found a decent appartment in Green Park and I've set up my office in Priya Complex market in Vasant Vihar. My "office" is actually Passion, which is a tea house that looks like a post-modern Starbucks and offers free wireless hi-speed internet.

It's an interesting experience finally getting to live in Delhi, and here are the biggest insights I have into Indian society so far.

-Some things are universal. The guy from AirTel who's supposed to set up my internet has so far managed to miss two appointments.

-You litterally cannot build stores and fill them with products fast enough here. People have a desire to spend their money but few places to do it. In the upscale suburb of Gurgaon there are countless megamalls and hypermarkets under construct to complement the 15 already completed. Delhi only really has a few decent shopping areas--Ansel Plaza, SouthEx, Khan Market, and Priya Complex, the rest are all out in Noida or Gurgaon. Now before you realise my bias, I'm not saying this as a snobby Californian so much as a consumer who just wants to be able to get stuff in an enjoyable and navigable environment. The old bazaars, say in Shahjahanabad, are now mostly wholesalers and not practical for the consumer, and the rest are crowded, dirty, and annoying (or tourist traps), even if they do have good food. Overall Delhi makes Los Angeles look pedestrian-friendly, which means not that it doesn't have public space, but that those spaces are too superhuman in size and hence too alienating. Whoever can fill demands more decent public/commercial space will make a lot of money. (this relates to my theory on how any good public space needs to be comercially oriented, this is why the National Mall in Washington DC is such a dramatic failure; it's not fun and it's not social)

-There is a serious lack of entrepreneurialism here and this has serious implications when coupled with the need to feed this growing economy. I'll give an example of how this plays out. At the tea house where I work they have a music playlist that basically consists of Backstreet Boys and Michael Jackson, which the odd bit of Shaggy thrown in. All day long they will play the same Backstreet Boys songs over and over again and this doesn't change ever, I've been here almost every day for two weeks now and I've stopped in before as well. Now it's interesting that this never drives the staff crazy and that they don't think that they can say something to their manager about changing it. Trust me, nobody likes Backstreet Boys that much. Ever. The next point goes to why I don't ask them to change it. My reason is simple--the music will switch to whatever I ask them to change it to and then probably remain on that in perpetuity. In other words, it wouldn't get any better. This may be a bit presumptuous on my part, but I think as an example it captures something of the picture. I remember seeing a newspaper ad that has the shocking title of "World's Most Reliable Career!". Think about that for a minute.

A other cool thing is that I've already managed to have some visitors here. Shareena came to stay with me here and Liz and Sahar, both of Kabul, are also in town for short periods. Sahar actually will be here for about four hours tomorrow on a layover, during which I plan to take her to the famous Bukhara restaurant.

Shifting to Delhi!

A lot has happened since my last blog entry. My trip to Delhi went exceedingly well in way I never imagined. The girl who I had just met at the time of my last entry (Chitra) is now my girlfriend, and I will be shifting to Delhi for two to three months!

In Delhi we did end up going to Chitra to Elevate and then the three of us (me, Chitra, and Sanaa) hung out the next day and went to an excellent R&B club in Vasant Vihar, and me and Chitra decided we were a couple. Soon I found myself extending my stay by another week.

Upon arriving back in Kabul we tried to work out my visa paperwork, but it was more complicated than before. In order to get a working permit, we have to conven our board of directors to clarify that we can hire foreigners in our charter. This isn't very difficult or unreasonable--it's simply a matter of following the steps--but there's no way it would have been done before my one month tourist visa (which I got in Delhi) expired. So we came up with the decision that I will work from Delhi for the next two months while this gets straightened out, which also conveniently allows me to spend some time with Chitra!

With housing prices in Delhi being what they are, I should be able to get a very nice place with all the amenities. One amenity which I will be getting for the first time in my life will be air conditioning, which is essential now that the temperatures are consistently topping 40 degrees there.

My last weekend in Kabul is proving to be very pleasant as well. One of the higher-ups from Nathan's NGO, the COO, came to town and we spent the day touring various attractions. First we went to the OMAR (an organisation which clears landmines) mine museum, which has a collection of old military hardware. All of this was illuminated by Azim, Nathan's driver, who was conscripted out of high school by the communist government to fight the mujahidin. Azim also pointed out who controlled which hilltop during the worst of the fighting (from 1992-96). Basically all the warlords in Kabul (Dostum, Hekmatyaar, and Mas'ud were the main players) controlled various hilltops and spent the four years before the Taliban took over trying to dislodge each other from them (to give you an idea, Kabul consists of two big plains, with about three huge mountain peaks in the middle, and the northern plain also has about five major mesas interspersed upon it). With warlords such as Hekmatyaar firing up to 2,500 poorly guided, Pakistani-supplied rockets a day, one can see how the city emptied quickly and got to its current state.

After the museum, we went to Babur's tomb (Babur was the descendent of Timur who founded the Mughal state in India), which is surrounded by pleasant gardens filled with picknicking families. It has been restored by the Agha Khan Foundation, which has faithfully planted the garden with Babur's favourite trees like fruit trees and sycamores. After that we drove around the bombed- and burnt-out hulk of Darulaman Palace. All and all it was a very nice tour on a very nice day.