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2 US
business guru loses Afghan
battle By Mark Perry
When, in June of 2010, the New York Times
featured an article reporting that the United
States had "discovered nearly $1 trillion in
untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan" (and
that the country could be "transformed into one of
the most important mining centers in the world"),
you could hear the scoffing all the way to Foggy
Bottom. "That's just great," a career diplomat
with more than 20 years of service in South Asia
said, "but just who the hell is supposed to
provide security for us to get to it?"
That was only the beginning. The article
brought a near avalanche of derisive comments:
that the report was a part of a government
orchestrated "information operation" to sell the
Afghan war to the American people, that there was
"less to the scoop than meets
the eye", that the findings
had appeared earlier in other publications, and
that the corruption in the Afghan government would
only be "amplified" by the findings. The article's
author, James Risen, struck back: "Bloggers," he
said, "should do their own reporting instead of
sitting around in their pajamas."
The
"Risen" broo-ha is now more than two years old,
and yet the story of Afghan's mineral wealth, and
the prospects that its development could help to
stabilize the country, refuses to die. The primary
reason for that is because Paul Brinkley, the head
of the Pentagon's Task Force for Business and
Stability Operations in Afghanistan, has refused
to let it die.
Brinkley, a bullet-headed
Texas A&M engineer and former Silicon Valley
businessman, has been arguing since 2004 that
America has to find new ways of thinking about
political stability operations in conflict
societies. Or, as a Pentagon expert on Afghanistan
puts it, "we need to find a way to provide
18-year-old Afghans with an alternative to toting
a gun".
Brinkley's story is fascinating -
and controversial. He was originally brought to
the Pentagon in 2004 by then-secretary of defense
Donald Rumsfeld to modernize Pentagon business
practices. A workaholic, Brinkley established the
Pentagon's Office of Business Transformation,
working 18-hour days to improve business practices
designed to save US taxpayer money. But Brinkley's
Pentagon-oriented focus was short-lived. In May of
2006, he was asked to go to Iraq to look at ways
the Pentagon might more capably manage its
finances.
While visiting Baghdad, Brinkley
was contacted by the then-commanding general of
the Multi-National Corps, Peter Chiarelli, who'd
heard that a group of private sector business
leaders were in town. The two met, and Chiarelli
asked Brinkley to look at ways to put young Iraqis
back to work.
"The 18 to 25 cohort was
about 50% unemployed," a former military officer
familiar with their discussion says. "Chiarelli
was desperate to lower that number. If your choice
is either getting a few bucks from the resistance,
or starving ... well, you know, you'll take the
money."
But Iraqi unemployment wasn't
Chiarelli's only problem: J Paul Bremer's
Coalition Provisional Authority team in Baghdad
had a 102-page reconstruction plan that envisioned
a kind of free market utopia that was right out of
the neo-conservative playbooks - and had little to
do with Iraqi realities.
At Chiarelli's
request, Brinkley toured Iraq's shuttered
factories and decided that the US should work to
reopen them, state-owned or not, and transform
them to private operations over time. One month
later, after he'd returned to Washington, Brinkley
established a team of experts to find ways to
jump-start the Iraqi economy.
He
envisioned his task force as a group of civilian
business leaders and military experts that would
focus on stimulating economic growth (including
reopening Saddam Hussein's state-run industries),
and that would interest outside investors in the
country.
Its creation exposed a gap in US
strategy: traditionally, the military fights wars
and leaves nation-building and economic assistance
to the US Agency for International Development and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), outfits
familiar with dispensing aid money, but with
little practical experience in business
development.
Now, for the first time, the
Pentagon was working to make business development
a component of a broader military
counter-insurgency. "This is a situation where
something didn't exist, so it had to be invented,"
said a Pentagon backer of Brinkley's. "It was a
new and exciting concept."
At first,
Brinkley's efforts yielded few results. By
September of 2007, after numerous trips to Baghdad
with financial managers and potential investors,
Brinkley's team had reopened only 16 factories,
employing 5,000 Iraqis. Worse yet, Brinkley's
initiative sparked resentment among officials at
the State Department and White House, who accused
Brinkley of being a "Stalinist" a "closet
communist" and "un-American". While Brinkley never
met Bremer, his visits to Baghdad were greeted
coldly by Bremer's team, who shunted him into a
closet-sized office in the Green Zone.
Inevitably, Bremer partisans attempted to
get Brinkley fired. In mid-2007, an unsigned
rambling 12-page memorandum ended up on the desk
of the Pentagon's Inspector General with a host of
allegations against Brinkley. While an IG
investigation determined that the allegations were
without foundation, the incident confirmed that
those parts of the George W Bush administration
tied to Bremer wanted Brinkley out of the way.
"This was pure politics, and dirty
politics at that," a Pentagon official says.
Eventually, the strategy to remove Brinkley failed
because the claims weren't true - and because
Chiarelli and head of US forces in Iraq General
David Petraeus told then-new secretary of defense
Robert Gates that Brinkley was succeeding. They
needed him.
In essence, the
"Bremer-Brinkley Feud" (or the "Paul-Paul
Controversy" as it is known in military circles),
pitted the followers of Bremer (who believed
Iraq's state-owned enterprises should be
shuttered, in a kind of economic "shock and awe")
against the followers of Brinkley, who believed
that Iraqi's state-owned enterprises should
sustain employment until a free market economy
could be built.
A Brinkley partisan
reflects a more caustic view: "The Bremer-Brinkley
feud was between a guy who'd taken a course in
economics and one of America's best business
minds." By early 2009, and having weathered the
criticism leveled by Bremer's partisans, Pentagon
reports showed that Brinkley's task force was
yielding results, sparking investments from
Boeing, General Electric, Daimler and Caterpillar.
Other programs, seeded with American
funds, had jump-started private banking
development, agricultural projects and fertilizer
plants. Most importantly, Iraqis were beginning to
go back to work.
A review of Brinkley's
Iraq initiative yields a formidable list of
successes: by mid-2009, his task force had
sponsored more than 200 visits to the country by
corporate executives and investors, generating
more than $5 billion of investment commitments.
Unemployment dropped - from about 50% of the total
population, to somewhere near 15%: by then,
General Electric had contracted to build power
plants and Honeywell opened a Baghdad office to
sell its equipment to the oil industry.
Brinkley's program was not without its
costs: his task force spent $140 million in 2008.
But those costs paled in comparison to military
expenditures of over $140 billion, and a
development and aid budget of over $3 billion.
The money was well spent and offset by
more than $8 billion in new business contracts. A
Der Spiegel article on Brinkley's successes notes
that, as a result of his efforts, the Iraqis were
building a steel mill in Basra and that ABC Carpet
and Home - a New York "home finishing business" -
was having its hand-knotted rugs made in Iraq.
Brinkley himself prefers not to speak on
the record, but his reticence hasn't kept him from
promoting his program, or recruiting government
officials as his allies. In the wake of Risen's
New York Times piece, he defended his efforts in a
Pentagon briefing, then wrote articles on his
successes for Newsweek and Military Review.
In the wake of Barack Obama's inauguration
as president, the former Silicon Valley management
expert was asked by senior military officers to do
in Kabul what he had done in Baghdad.
Petraeus, now commander of US forces in
Afghanistan, was one of Brinkley's strongest
advocates, because he viewed his program as an
important piece of his counter-insurgency
campaign. Gates approved the initiative and, in
March of 2009, Brinkley put together an expert
team to travel to Afghanistan.
Brinkley
and his group faced a number of challenges: unlike
Iraq, Afghanistan had no infrastructure, had
suffered through nearly three decades of war, and
had few management or business experts. Not only
were there no state-owned industries - there
weren't any industries at all. Brinkley was
starting at zero.
In Kabul, Brinkley
followed the Baghdad model: a Business Week
feature showed him spending hours on the telephone
with potential investors, then days escorting them
to the offices of Afghan ministers. He conducted
his program from the inside of armored cars and in
the midst of dusty villages, where he drank
endless "cups of green tea".
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