Letter to Friends and Family #13: the surge may work; the splurge surely won't

Up north, in Kunduz, the Germans have the lead in development and in military activity. USAID definitely plays a secondary role and, consequently, keeps the budget as low as its profile. Basically, I have been whining about the lack of resources (i.e., “Show me the money! Can’t you see I’m hungry up here?”).

That attitude changed drastically when I attended a contracting course with many colleagues in the two primary theaters of the Afghan War: Kandahar and the south as well as Bagram and the east. These regions comprise the Pashtun belt whence the Taliban came and where trouble remains.

My colleagues worried out loud about having too many dollars to commit too quickly! Initially, I felt the ‘burden’ of too much money to shovel out the door as quickly as possible was a high-class problem.

WRONG. Over the ten day life of this course, however, I came to believe that excess monies undermine the enthusiasm of high-minded people for surprisingly evident reasons.

First, capital inflows into Afghanistan surpassed long ago the country's saturation limit. By drowning in liquidity, Afghanistan has the appearance of a society on a lightning-fast mend from centuries of poverty and pain.

But that burgeoning wealth is bogus and represents short-term funding for unsustainable projects and, worse, a catalyst of greater corruption. President Obama’s prudent time-table, unhappily, has had at least one unintended effect: corrupt local political brokers realize that the aid spigot is about to be shut-off and are busy grabbing what they can.

But once the imported liquidity dries out, the Afghan withdrawal from an addiction to other people's money will almost certainly trigger renewed, and savage, civil strife. The one-eyed bandit will look clairvoyant and Al Qaida sympathetic by comparison.

Second, this massive display of ‘generosity’ simply does not work. After eight years of allied presence in their cities and villages, most Afghans have formed firm opinions about the success, failure, desirability or repugnance of a forceful foreign presence.

Additionally, there simply are not enough skilled laborers in the country to complete and maintain the projects in process or in the planning stage.

Third, my colleagues feel very vulnerable. The requirement to dispense with so much money so quickly subverts the USAID due-diligence process. My acquaintances despise this 'spending at all costs', as the U.S. government equates dollars obligated and funded with success.

Well – “surprise” writ large across the sky – it is not working. And for reasons additional to the sobering fact that, at best, 20% of the “billions and billions” of aid dollars actually reach Afghan beneficiaries. Worse, many of the funds funnel over to the enemy.

Further, my peers foresee a day when the U.S. government’s accounting ‘Gotcha-Goons’ will picking through every nook and cranny of twisted documentation to find fraud, waste and abuse. Given the complexity and unwieldiness of the grants documentation, combined with the surfeit of aid that overwhelms it, my colleagues dread the day when investigators may impugn their professional integrity over policy errors and errant appropriations emanating from Washington.

The part that drives my colleagues to anxiety are emerging sadnesses: that 75-85% of the Afghans will remain illiterate throughout this spree; that girls all-too-often will continue not going to school; and, that women will face brutal hurdles in exercising their electoral franchise.

The solutions to this queasy quandary number as many as the people proposing them. Cobbling together bits of some ideas with pieces of others produces a simple policy.

First, cease all funding for long-term projects that lie ahead of the Afghan learning curve. Then place these ‘de-obligated’ funds into a trust to be spent down over the next generation as Afghans mature their capabilities to use them wisely.

Second, suspend any further work in the Pashtun provinces for at least six months to see who and where the bad guys are; they will be ‘razing hell’ soon enough.

Third, target the surge toward these ‘unpacified’ areas.

Fourth, turn over all USAID ‘stabilization’ programming to the military for use under the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. USAID is not suited for palliatives. Moreover, those released funds allow the Army field soldiers to apply $750 million for consequence management during the surge. It just may save their lives.

Lastly, diminish USAID personnel to 25% and funding to 10% of their current levels in Afghanistan to focus activities on tranquil parts of the country. Good citizenship should be supported first and now.

And why are these solutions, and others like them, “meet and right so to do”? Otherwise, we leave a sullied legacy of civil strife, of ethnic cleansing and of “life being nasty brutish and short”.

Letter #12 to Friends and Family: Ned forgot his Wheaties

This letter should not require even five hundred words. The first draft was three times that amount. Three items drive this mea culpa. First, I under-estimated President Obama. Second, I imputed my cynicism to the President. Third, the sum of two counts half-accepted represents yet another bout of the unbearable greyness of being.

FIRST: UNDER-ESTIMATING the PRESIDENT
Recently, I had dinner in Kabul with some acquaintances from the Embassy who were wired into the real events of General McChrystal’s fateful half-hour meeting from which he emerged a relieved man. Apparently, General McChrytsal walked into the White House meeting proudly, almost defiantly. No surprise there. Present at the ritual slaughter with President Obama were Vice President Biden, National Security Council Chairman Jones, General Petraeus and Secretary Gates. After the usual pleasantries and, perhaps, a briefing, the meeting turned to the real subject. General McChrystal apparently stated that President Obama had his letter of resignation. The ritual slaughter for which I had previously argued should have followed. Except, it never occurred. President Obama proved his capacity as a statesman by replying that he was “considering [accepting] it.” General McChrystal asked the other four whether he still enjoyed their confidence and support. Two said ‘yea’; two remained silent, at which point McChrystal recommended that the President accept the resignation. President Obama accepted the resignation but did not bust General McChrystal’s rank down to Lieutenant General (i.e., from four to three stars on the epaulet). The senior Embassy types, like David Smith, chastised me kindly for mis-reading the situation. And so I had – thank God Himself for that!

SECOND: REALIZING the CYNIC’s PARADOX
Not one person I know - Democrat, Republican, Independent or Fair-weather partisan - has bought into my concern that President Obama appointed General Petraeus to assume command in Afghanistan to hang the Afghanistan War on the latter. Most people think that General Petraeus accepted the request with all of the earnestness at his command for three reasons. His theory of counter-insurgency faces a steep test in Afghanistan; the South is not progressing well. ‘Governance in a box’ appears to be ‘government as a hoax’. Additionally, General Petraeus has the credibility to squeeze one more year out of the American people if conditions do not favour the commencement of withdrawal in mid-2011. Lastly, I genuinely believe that General Petraeus remains, to his core, a devoted citizen-soldier of the United States of America. Three plausible reasons; three cheers for General Petraeus.

THIRD: TWO HALF-COUNTS of SECONDARY IMPORTANCE
The two half-counts, in view of their moral ambiguity, can only unleash a torrent of ‘Hamletizing’. Since you, the reader, are about as interested in contemplating my navel as I have time to do so, I prefer to leave those debates to you. First, intelligence types tell me that the locals, most Pashtuns included, welcome U.S. special forces as they kill very bad men; in fact, these villagers want to see more aggressive attacks by the U.S. Fair enough. Nevertheless, I cannot help but wonder if Afghans, conditioned to a culture of conflict, find such ethical finery to be just so much nit-picking. After all, had the social lottery placed me in Afghanistan as a subsistence farmer, I would most likely be dead by now and dead for several years. The other half-count, whether General McChrystal should have lost his command over the Rolling Stone article, really is anyone’s judgement call. While I remain unconvinced, people more intelligent than I seem to agree that Gerneral McChrystal went too far and was fortunate not to be summarily fired.

In conclusion, the irony remains that I was not a big fan of General McChrystal. In any case, President Obama deserves credit for pre-meditated statesmanship after the die was cast. The lesson for me? Oscar Wilde was right: a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Best I quit counting my pennies and put them back into my loafers.

Letter #11 to friends and family: The Politics of Murder

Life returns to normal – that is to say: back to sunny surrealism – after a bloody incident like the “complex” attack that occurred two nights ago in the heart of Kunduz City (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-attack-20100703,0,2973351.story). Life on the plateau, on which we rest complacently, appears to be relatively immune to reality. Five of the six murdered belonged, in some capacity, to one of USAID’s largest “implementing partners”, Development Alternatives International (DAI).

Many of the eighteen wounded, however, had nothing to do with the incident. Again, they were pure innocents falling victim to the local police peppering the stricken building with rocket-propelled grenades. Beat cops with R.P.G.s? Not good for community policing. The attack that hammered DAI was complex in that it represented a tightly planned sequence of attacks.

Had DAI’s security people followed the spurned advice of the local police, the car-bomb would have killed one DAI guard – Afghan, I am sure – instantly at the front gate. The remaining five insurgents should have had to face a second, strongly fortified perimeter ten feet behind the gate and meet a rather quick demise. Such “simplistification”, however, misses the larger question: why was DAI itself attacked? The obvious answer, and the one that ends most analyses, is that DAI is a large USAID contractor. American NGOs are fair game; end of story.

Well, not quite. Several USAID implementing partners work in Kunduz, not to mention about half a dozen others from Europe working on Germany’s far larger program. So, why DAI in particular? Because DAI’s dormitory was in a residential area and neighbors were none-too-pleased with its presence. Now why would that be? After all, this house populated in large part by highly paid foreigners would normally be pumping money into the neighborhood economy.

True; nevertheless, local inhabitants suspect that large American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) pose as front organizations for intelligence organizations and, worse (from the Afghan view), the special forces. The ‘black ops’ mode of selective elimination of key enemy figures has significantly reduced collateral damage, a definite “PLUS” ethically. On the other hand, many Afghans rightly or wrongly view these midnight rangers as assassins or terrorists in uniform.

All very interesting but where does DAI figure in all of this? DAI is implementing a program to aid the counter-insurgency by investing in small local projects in contested areas. This 'window-dressing' program confers “quick-impacts” on hostile communities by employing local workers. All just fine; that is counter-insurgency. To do that, however, DAI likely works with intelligence resources to target particular villages for these non-lethal activities aimed at winning hearts and minds.

The villagers see through the manipulation as easily as we can see through overt and often insincere efforts of someone trying to ‘buy’ our liking. Taliban sympathizers may take -- and even like -- the money. Yet they continue to detest the ulterior motives imputed to the DAIs of the world. Buying allegiances will not work. Furthermore, companies like DAI should fail developmental smell-tests.

DAI is a for-profit organization dedicated (apparently) to development or capacity-building, the flip-side of ‘sovereign’ loans extended by international money-center banks. Admittedly, I once made the argument that international banks should take the lead in lending to poorer countries because the money-centers would differentiate third-world countries – those with the ability to grow and pay off loans to the banker’s profit – from fourth world countries (i.e., today's the bottom billion). All very logical on my part...when I was a twenty-two year old trying to get a job in banking in the late 1970s.

We know the reality of global finance by now, with periodic 'sovereign debt' write-offs in exchange for (supposedly) coerced votes in the U.N., and the like. (Not original to me, but to a self-indulgent former ‘development professional’ in a book titled “Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man”; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man.) In the contemporary economics of U.S. development aid, much of the money designated as "pledged" to a poor country, barely trickles down to the intended beneficiaries. The bulk of this 'foreign aid' funds white-collar make-work consulting jobs that enrich Americans and U.S. companies like DAI.

Large non-profit implementing (what?) partners often are little better. The good news is that most NGOs, including American and those contracting out to USAID, do not fit the profile of “beltway bandits”. They do good work. Their best work comes through working with start-up NGOs in Afghanistan and elsewhere that engage local populations to take back their futures to the extent they can, little-by-little.

Thus, DAI was attacked more for being perceived as a corporate bag-man doing the bidding of the U.S. government. Sadly, two nights ago, theocratic thugs murdered six people most of whom had no axe to grind with insurgents, criminals, freedom-fighters, corporate welfare chiselers or anyone else. Every bit as sad will be the continuing “battle rhythm” of many large USAID implementing partners: high-profiles, fast bucks and fleeting, if any, results.