Page 1 of 2 The Afghan reconstruction boondoggle
By Ann Jones
The first of 20,000 to 30,000 additional United States troops are scheduled to
arrive in Afghanistan next month to re-win the war US President George W Bush
neglected to finish in his eagerness to start another one. However, "winning"
the military campaign against the Taliban is the lesser half of the story.
Going into Afghanistan, the Bush administration called for a political campaign
to reconstruct the country and thereby establish the authority of a stable,
democratic Afghan central government. It was understood that the two campaigns
- military and political/economic - had to go forward together; the success
of each depended on the other. But the vision of a reconstructed, peaceful,
stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now
believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration's
real goal - to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country
forever.
Whatever the truth of the matter, in the long run, it's not soldiers but
services that count - electricity, water, food, health care, justice, and jobs.
Had the US delivered the promised services on time, while employing Afghans to
rebuild their own country according to their own priorities and under the
supervision of their own government - a mini-Marshall Plan - they would now be
in charge of their own defense. The forces on the other side, which we loosely
call the Taliban, would also have lost much of their grounds for complaint.
Instead, the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set
up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it "liberated",
Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national
treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of
Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point
and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They're all in it together. So far,
the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program.
Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren't
so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about
why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go
belly up.
What's worse, there's no reason to expect that things will change significantly
on president-elect Barack Obama's watch. During the election campaign, he
called repeatedly for more troops for "the right war" in Afghanistan (while
pledging to draw-down US forces in Iraq), but he has yet to say a significant
word about the reconstruction mission. While many aid workers in that country
remain full of good intentions, the delivery systems for and uses of US aid
have been so thoroughly corrupted that we can only expect more of the same -
unless Obama cleans house fast. But given the monumental problems on his plate,
how likely is that?
The jolly privateers
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction
in Afghanistan. While the US has occupied the country - for seven years and
counting - and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has yet to
restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly more populous than
Houston, a single one of the public services its citizens used to enjoy. When
the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, they modernized the education
system and built power plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the
most coveted in the country. If, in the last seven years, Bush did not get the
lights back on in the capital, or the water flowing, or dispose of the sewage
or trash, how can we assume Obama will do any better with the corrupt system
he's about to inherit?
Between 2002 and 2008, the US pledged $10.4 billion in "development"
(reconstruction) aid to Afghanistan, but actually delivered only $5 billion of
that amount. Considering that the US is spending $36 billion a year on the war
in Afghanistan and about $8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, that $5 billion
in development aid looks paltry indeed. But keep in mind that, in a country as
poor as Afghanistan, a little well spent money can make a big difference.
The problem is not simply that the Bush administration skimped on aid, but that
it handed it over to for-profit contractors. Privatization, as is now
abundantly clear, enriches only the privateers and serves only their private
interests.
Take one pertinent example. When the inspectors general of the Pentagon and
State Department investigated the US program to train the Afghan police in
2006, they found the number of men trained (about 30,000) to be less than half
the number reported by the administration (70,000). The training had lasted
eight weeks at most, with no in-the-field experience whatsoever. Only about
half the equipment assigned to the police - including thousands of trucks -
could be accounted for, and the men trained were then deemed "incapable of
carrying out routine law enforcement work".
The American privateer training the police - DynCorp - went on to win no-bid
contracts to train police in Iraq with similar results. The total bill for
American taxpayers from 2004 to 2006: $1.6 billion. It's unclear whether that
money came from the military or the development budget, but in either case it
was wasted. The inspectors general reported that police incompetence
contributed directly to increased opium production, the reinvigoration of the
Taliban, and government corruption in general, thoroughly subverting much
ballyhooed US goals, both military and political.
In the does-no-one-ever-learn category: the latest American victory plan,
announced in December, calls for recruiting and rearming local militias to
combat the Taliban. Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly
donated by Japan, have already been spent to disarm local militias. A proposal
to rearm them was soundly defeated last fall in the Afghan Parliament. Now,
it's again the plan du jour, rubber-stamped by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Afghans protest that such a plan amounts to sponsoring civil war, which, if
true, would mean that American involvement in Afghanistan might be coming full
circle - civil war being the state in which the US left Afghanistan at the end
of our proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. American commanders,
however, insist that they must use militias because Afghan Army and police
forces are "simply not available".
Major General Michael S Tucker, deputy commander of American forces, told the
New York Times, "We don't have enough police, [and] we don't have time to get
the police ready." This, despite the State Department's award to DynCorp last
August of another $317.4 million contract "to continue training civilian police
forces in Afghanistan", a contract DynCorp CEO William Ballhaus greeted as "an
opportunity to contribute to peace, stability and democracy in the world [and]
support our government's efforts to improve people's lives".
America first
In other areas less obviously connected to security, American aid policy is no
less self-serving or self-defeating. Although the Bush administration
handpicked the Afghan president and claims to want to extend his authority
throughout the country, it refuses to channel aid money through his
government's ministries. (It argues that the Afghan government is corrupt,
which it is, in a pathetic, minor league sort of way.)
Instead of giving aid money for Afghan schools to the Ministry of Education,
for example, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funds private
American contractors to start literacy programs for adults. As a result, Afghan
teachers abandon the public schools and education administrators leave the
Ministry for higher paying jobs with those contractors, further undermining
public education and governance. The Bush administration may have no particular
reason to sabotage its handpicked government, but it has had every reason to
befriend private contractors who have, in turn, kicked back generously to
election campaigns and Republican coffers.
There are other peculiar features of American development aid. Nearly half of
it (47%) goes to support "technical assistance". Translated, that means
overpaid American "experts," often totally unqualified - somebody's good old
college buddies - are paid handsomely to advise the locals on matters ranging
from office procedures to pesticide use, even when the Afghans neither request
nor welcome such advice. By contrast, the universally admired aid programs of
Sweden and Ireland allocate only 4% and 2% respectively to such technical
assistance, and when asked, they send real experts. American technical
advisors, like American privateers, are paid by checks - big ones - that pass
directly from the federal treasury to private accounts in American banks, thus
helping to insure that about 86 cents of every dollar designated for US
"foreign" aid anywhere in the world never leaves the US.
American aid that actually makes it abroad arrives with strings attached. At
least 70% of it is "tied" to the purchase of American products. A food aid
program, for example, might require Afghanistan to purchase American
agricultural products in preference to their own, thus putting Afghan farmers
out of business or driving even more of them into the poppy trade. (The
percentage of aid from Sweden, Ireland, and the United Kingdom that is
similarly tied: zero.)
Testifying before a congressional subcommittee on May 8, 2001, Andrew Natsios,
then head of USAID, described American aid as "a key foreign policy instrument
[that] helps nations prepare for participation in the global trading system and
become better markets for US exports." Such so-called aid cuts American
business in right from the start. USAID has even developed a
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
