Afghanistan needs stronger state for development: World Bank

The World Bank on Tuesday said war-torn Afghanistan needs to build a more effective state to promote economic development and urged the international community to help in the process.

"Building an effective state that can provide security and services to all Afghan citizens and make government accountable to them is critical to achieving development results in Afghanistan," the World Bank said in releasing a report ahead of the Paris Conference on Afghanistan on Thursday.

The report, "Building an Effective State -- Priorities for Public Administration Reform in Afghanistan," calls for a shift of government functions that are still performed by the international community, or are not performed at all, to strengthen Afghan institutions.

The Afghan government meets its donors in Paris with its most ambitious post-Taliban reconstruction plan on the table -- a 50-billion-dollar strategy that spans five years.

Its Afghanistan National Development Strategy envisages development of security forces and infrastructure and a new emphasis on agriculture among a range of goals.

Analysts say it is a realistic assessment of the needs still facing the destitute country seven years after the ouster of the extremist Taliban regime.

But the World Bank and others have raised concerns about how well the plan prioritises its objectives and the corruption-dogged government's capacity to handle such an enormous sum while keeping an eye on how well aid is spent.

The World Bank recalled Tuesday that the Afghan government and the international community have been working closely together for the past six years to rebuild Afghanistan after more than two decades of conflict.

The development of an effective state is at the heart of the reconstruction agenda, the bank said, and public administration reform is intended to contribute to that effort by building up civil service, improving governance and service delivery at the local level, and making government accountable.

"It is vital to persevere with the longer-term task of building an effective state, one which can gradually take on more responsibility for Afghanistan's future," said Alastair McKechnie, World Bank Director, Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group.

He said the challenge lay in "finding innovative ways to improve service delivery to citizens as quickly as possible, while at the same time gradually improving the country's own capacity to deliver services without large amounts of external expertise."

The report acknowledges that public administration reform in Afghanistan is particularly difficult because of the country's strong, informal power relationships, weak formal government systems and insecurity.

It stressed the importance of building an effective civil service capable of reassuring donors that their financial support is being credibly spent.

"Unless citizens can see that civil servants are serving the larger public interest rather than their own, the government's trustworthiness will be eroded," the bank said.