Whither AID? Posted by Michael Cohen

I've been crashing a bit this week on a long article, but I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to highlight Rajiv Chandresekaran's fascinating and depressing article from last week's Washington Post on the many travails of America's development agenda in Afghanistan.

Rajiv highlights an issue that should be foremost in the minds of US policymakers - the ongoing degradation of the US Agency for International Development and its inability to carry out America's development agenda. One line, in particular, jumped out at me:

"The agency no longer has people on its staff who implement development and reconstruction programs -- all of them left in the 1980s and 1990s because of budget cuts -- it turned to contractors."

The quote from Richard Holbrooke about AID's efforts in Afghanistan is even more troubling:

"In my experience of 40-plus years -- I started out working for AID in Vietnam -- this was the single most wasteful, most ineffective program that I had ever seen," he said in a recent interview. "It wasn't just a waste of money. . . . This was actually a benefit to the enemy. We were recruiting Taliban with our tax dollars."

AID has, in the words of Patrick Leahy become little more than a grant-making and check-writing agency for contractors and non-profits. And the failure of AID to carry out crucial development work in Afghanistan over the past 7 years, which Chandresekaran highlights, is the result of this bipartisan hollowing out of America's development agency. As the article makes clear, AID doesn't even the capacity to adequately oversee the contractors who they hire. If AID doesn't have development and reconstruction experts on staff what is the point of having a development agency in the first place?

Relying on the military to take these responsibilities is hardly a long-term answer to the problem, particularly since AID's work must be done in both kinetic and non-kinetic environments. But in general, the Defense Department has no core competency in doing development work; this is work that needs to be done by a development agency. And while efforts to improve AID's performance in Afghanistan are underway the rot starts with the head.

And lest we forget, it's now been 154 days into a new Democratic Administration - and we still have no nominee for the head of USAID. 

Read the whole article here

Comments

[Jason Fritz]

This is a huge issue that needs to be addressed soon, but that I'm afraid probably won't be fixed any time soon. I would say that to whatever degree you may say that PRTs in Iraq have been successful, it has been in spite of USAID - especially with their 3161 temporary appointment personnel (which in my experience was the bulk of their Iraq staff).

If the larger issues of the Agency are addressed (As you point out, for instance, they don't even have a nominee for Director. And there's the whole F Bureau and who owns what agreement), I would imagine that they would have a hard time manning any expanded role with new and competent recruits. I see it will be a lot like DoS - sure a "civilian surge" briefs well, but where are those people going to come from? I don't have any answers for this, but I'm pretty sure USAID has a long, challenging road ahead of it before it becomes a useful arm of foreign policy again.

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