Page 2 of
2 US
business guru loses Afghan
battle By Mark Perry
As
in Iraq, the initiative cost money: $150 million
each year to support a 130-person team and a
regular shuttle of American and international
business executives. By January of 2010, months
after Brinkley's initial visit, the Pentagon was
buzzing with rumors that the Brinkley team had
found "a mother lode" of copper, iron, lithium and
other minerals. If exploited, Brinkley said, the
discovery would allow the Afghan government to
"finance their own security" and economic
development - what Brinkley calls "economic
sovereignty".
Brinkley's mission still has
its detractors, who claim the implementation of
the mineral development strategy stands to benefit
nearly everyone but Americans. American officials
defend the effort. "This is a very traditional
society," a long-time South Asia analyst and
Brinkley partisan says. "The first son inherits
the family business, the second heads to the
mosque, the third
goes to the Taliban. Carrying
a gun puts bread on the table - because there's no
third thing. Now there is."
How serious is
Brinkley's mineral find? Serious enough to get
China's attention. Prior to Brinkley's engagement,
in 2008, Metallurgical Corporation of China signed
a contract to exploit Afghanistan's copper
deposits. Other companies are now following suit.
Fortune Magazine recently reported that
last December, JP Morgan, hosted by Brinkley's
team, facilitated the first Western investment in
a gold mine in northern Afghanistan, a transaction
intended to break the ice among international
investors.
Several major deposits are
slated to be tendered for international investment
in the coming months.
And, at Brinkley's
urging, the Afghan government recently hired
respected law and engineering firms to ensure that
assessments of Afghanistan's mineral wealth are
done correctly and that the bidding process is
transparent. Still, diplomats roll their eyes.
"It's naive," one says. "You establish a mine, you
build a highway to it, a village springs up and
then a town. Wonderful. And who guards the highway
- the Americans? The Afghan security forces? It's
all fine and good what Brinkley's doing, but it
takes generations of work. It doesn't happen
overnight."
The disagreement reflects a
fundamental difference in approach between the way
the government thinks about political stability,
and the way Brinkley thinks about it. Experts at
the Pentagon and State Departments point out the
destabilizing effect Afghanistan's drug trade has
on a nation overly dependent on foreign aid, where
97% of Afghanistan's gross domestic product comes
from spending related to the foreign military and
international donor presence.
Brinkley
answers that economic development is the way
forward. "Everyone talks about the Afghan drug
problem," a Brinkley partisan says, "but the money
we're plugging into the country dwarfs the
cartels. They account for about $4 billion of
income every year - we spent $14 billion in the
country. If you're an Afghani, your primary
mission in life is to get on the American tit."
The judgment is harsh, but accurate: or, as former
State Department official Dov Zackheim recently
noted, Afghanistan is simply "on the take".
The Brinkley initiative also seems to
provide evidence that Americans fight wars not to
make the world safe for democracy, but for
American companies. Yet, while members of the US
Congress (even conservative Republicans) extol the
virtues of the free market system, they have
consistently voted to disburse American largesse
to foreign governments through government
agencies.
So how is that working? Congress
recently issued the results of US aid efforts in
Afghanistan provided through the US Agency for
International Development (USAID). The report
slammed the efforts as ineffective and wasteful,
and focused on short-term stabilization programs
instead of longer-term development projects, ie
they don't work.
That's unlikely to change
anytime soon. Two years ago, the State Department
claimed that Brinkley's program violated Title 22
federal requirements, which give the State
Department responsibility for providing foreign
assistance. The claim caused a sudden dust-up
between the two bureaucracies, with military
officers criticizing Foggy Bottom for failing to
provide the kind of economic support that would
most effectively reinforce their military
operations.
"There are plenty of dedicated
people in the State Department and USAID who risk
their lives to help in developing countries," a
Brinkley supporter inside of the US Central
Command says. "And that's fine. But they're busy
handing out money to NGOs. And it just doesn't
work. There's no third way - there's no program in
the government that actually helps countries
sustain their own economies."
In January,
congress passed legislation at the behest of the
State Department requiring that Brinkley turn over
his program to USAID by this summer's end. Almost
immediately, key business leaders on his team
began leaving. After five years of continual
engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Brinkley
submitted his resignation effective June 30.
The tussle over the Brinkley program had
all the subtlety of a testosterone-fueled
fistfight between liberals and conservatives - and
their stand-ins: the State and Defense
departments. But for Brinkley partisans it's a pox
on both their houses. "Liberals view the world as
some kind of Vermont petting zoo," a Brinkley
colleague and Afghan expert says, "while
conservatives want to hold seminars on the
nobility of the free enterprise system. What a
crock: both sides want to promote American values,
when we ought to be doing is promoting American
products."
The good news is that the
debate has recently shifted to a quiet rethinking
of the John F Kennedy administration's 1961
decision that gave USAID pride of place in the
disbursement of overseas development monies. No
one is arguing that USAID is doing a bad job,
they're just not doing the right job.
In
2010, USAID was funded to the tune of $20 billion
for programs on education, hunger, democracy
promotion, conflict mitigation, counter-narcotics,
environmental programs (and dozens of others).
They're all worthy of funding, but they have
nothing to do with promoting American business or
exports.
At the same time that USAID
funding is going to overseas development, an
embarrassing pittance is set aside for opening up
new markets to American corporations or promoting
American exports. Export promotion is in the hands
of the Commerce Department's International Trade
Administration (ITA), whose budget is scandalously
modest (just short of $80 million), while the head
of the agency is a political appointee who once
taught tolerance to Latin Americans.
Worse
yet, the ITA is a forgotten part of America's
foreign policy arsenal. It didn't used to be that
way. Back in 1953, in the wake of the
knee-buckling Korean War, president Dwight
Eisenhower reversed Harry Truman's
we-will-fight-em-everywhere national security
policy by stripping away appreciable amounts of
money from the defense budget, while increasing
American exports.
It's not kosher to
criticize the beknighted Truman, but his
pro-defense policies were bankrupting the country.
So Eisenhower made it clear to America's admirals
and generals: his "New Look" national security
strategy was going to be redefined to include
economic power. Monies sent to the Defense
Department would not simply be cut, they would be
spent elsewhere.
That's where we are now,
though there seems little stomach among liberals
or conservatives for a "New Look" that would
ignore both diplomacy and force and emphasize what
America does best. We're a nation of merchants,
not soldiers.
The "New Look" succeeded not
only because it kept the country out of war, but
because it abandoned the view that what America
could offer the world was its values. "Removing
burkhas from Afghan women sounds like a good
project," a senior Afghan strategist at the
Pentagon says, "but you aren't going to get many
19-year-olds to fight for it, and while we'd all
like everyone to stand up and sing yet another
rendition of America The Beautiful, it's a
pretty hard sell. But what we can sell is what we
make - and despite what you've heard, we still
make things."
In a recent meeting over
coffee, Brinkley discussed his organization's
demise. He sounded almost wistful. "There's a lot
that can still be done, at a fraction of the cost
of traditional development aid programs," he said.
"I believe in free enterprise and think it's the
most potent thing America has to offer the world."
For just a moment, he sounded like
Eisenhower, who talked incessantly of free trade,
open markets and economic power.
Is
Brinkley out of step? "Yeah maybe, maybe," he
responded, but then he set his lips and his eyes
flashed beneath his shaved head. "But I'll tell
you this: the greatest success story of the 20th
century is the lifting of 400 million Chinese out
of abject poverty. And the Pentagon and State
Department didn't have a damned thing to do with
it."
Mark Perry is a military and
foreign policy analyst based in Washington, DC.
His most recent book is Talking
To Terrorists.
(Copyright 2011 Asia
Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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
