Development

In a talk given this afternoon at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, retired Gen.  John Abizaid outlined his view of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. He argued that it is foolish to approach issues on a country-by-country basis, complaining that "we look at Iraq through a soda straw. We look at Afghanistan through a soda straw." Instead, says Abizaid, the United States must develop a regional strategy that accounts for the roles of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

For the same reason, he suggested, the debate over whether or not to send more troops to Afghanistan has been over-simplified; the discussion should be broadened to include the relative demands of Iraq, Afghanistan and the region at large.

Abizaid also emphasized the ideological nature of the conflict, and the need for soft power to address the root causes of radicalism. He noted that Baitullah Mehsud, the top Taliban leader, is referred to as "the commander of the faithful."

"While we may chuckle at that title," Abizaid said, "the people fighting for him do not." When asked whether there should be a shift to a counter-terrorism approach in Afghanistan that relies more upon targeted strikes than nation-building, Abizaid responded that such a plan is impractical. Stabilization in Afghanistan and Iraq is a precondition for effective counter terrorist operations, he argued, because it provides the infrastructure needed to develop the "superb, superb intelligence" needed.

The theme of the talk was that instability anywhere in the region is a serious threat to surrounding countries. With our "ground forces spread thin" and "our 24-7 forces totally engaged," the United States must more fully incorporate diplomatic, political and economic plans to get a handle on the region. A number of questions were directed to the resources required for such a broad regional approach, and towards the end of the talk, the retired general was asked if the situation would be better in Afghanistan had the United States not invaded Iraq.

"All's I know is that we did what we did, and we are where we are," he answered.

Dubai's VIPs swarmed its new metro system for the grand opening, taking advantage of the unique date. To steal a line from Blake, it's good to be a Sheikh in Dubai:

When a giant clock reached 09:09:09 on 9/9/09, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE, swiped a personalised plastic card at a ticket barrier and took his place as the first passenger on a network that will, when finished, have cost an estimated Dh28 billion (US$7.6bn).

The first two trains were filled by VIPs but eventually, lucky members of the general public were allowed to take part in the festivities. 

A little later, a third train left the Nakheel Harbour and Tower station with 400 members of the public, the winners of “golden tickets”, picked from about 10,000 people who entered an online competition.
One of them, MV Martin, said: “I can’t believe I am going to be part of history.”

With all the layoffs in Dubai and abandoned luxury cars everywhere, the Metro could provide a cheaper transport option. Or maybe abandoned cars are still available for bargain prices? 

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

Over at UN Dispatch, Alanna Shaikh has a thought-provoking eulogy for Nicholas Negroponte's fizzling One-Laptop-Per-Child program:

Americans wanted the OLPC. We fell in love with its tremendous promise and adorable shape. (note: I own an OLPC) We were the first market it conquered. OLPC launched a give one-get one promotion that let individuals pay $400 to donate one laptop and receive one for themselves. It was a huge success, except that OLPC wasn’t set up for that kind of customer order fulfillment. Laptops arrived far later than promised, and several thousand orders were simply lost.

Once the laptop finally started arriving in the developing world, its impact was minimal. We think. No one is doing much research on their impact on education; discussions are largely theoretical. This we do know: OLPC didn’t provide tech support for the machines, or training in how to incorporate them into education. Teachers didn’t understand how to use the laptops in their lessons; some resented them. Kids like the laptops, but they don’t actually seem to help them learn.

It’s time to call a spade a spade. OLPC was a failure. ...

As Shaikh suggests, OLPC is a classic case of a development program more tailored to the tastes and interests of its funders, than the needs of the people it was supposed to help. Back to the drawing board. 

PAL PILLAI/AFP/Getty Images

Last week, Peter Bergen wrote an optimistic post titled "The Afghan Phoenix" over on the AfPak Channel, giving some counterfactuals to the doom and gloom over the plight of Afghanistan and the U.S. mission there. Five million refugees have returned to Afghanistan. One in six Afghans owns a cell phone. And, he notes, "You were more likely to be murdered in the United States in 1991 than an Afghan civilian is to be killed in the war today." This statistic struck me most, though: "In 2008, Afghanistan's real GDP growth was 7.5 percent. Under the Taliban the economy was in free fall."

I won't argue that Afghanistan's economy was anything other than terrible, and worsening, under the Taliban. It was and remains an impoverished country with a host of profound basic infrastructure and business development challenges -- from the lack of roads to the surfeit of bombs to the high illiteracy rate. It has a massive black-market economy. 80 percent of working-age men are involved in subsistence farming. A woefully high proportion of its population relies on the drug trade.

But I still don't find the 2008 GDP growth figure too much of a reason for optimism. Why? Afghanistan's GDP isn't growing because of booming Afghan production and consumption, or rising wages. Afghanistan's GDP is growing because of all the Americans and other foreigners -- around 65,000 troops and 200,000 nongovernmental workers -- building and buying things there (with dollars, no less), and because of the $57 billion pledged by international donors since 2002.

For an illustration of the phenomenon, see this chart of Afghan GDP in inflation-adjusted dollars, which I made with UN data. The Taliban took over in 1996, and Afghanistan's economy dwindled. The U.S. invaded in 2001, and it boomed. Afghanistan's GDP depends entirely on the armed force in charge. This isn't to say the local commerce supplying the 265,000 relatively flush foreigners in Afghanistan isn't real. But were the United States to drawdown, aid workers and military contractors and commerce would follow. My guess is that much of the GDP growth comes from service-sector jobs, not from new production. 

That's the real issue. Foreign spending in Afghanistan is a good thing for GDP. It's less clear whether it has fostered economically meaningful development. Dollars are all well and good -- but won't do much unless they help create businesses, employment, infrastructure development, and longer-term growth. (This is why Jonathan Zasloff's plan to hand out cash to Afghans wouldn't do much more than stoke inflation.) Whether they can remains the question.

Plus, many worry the U.S. troop presence cannot foster the foreign direct investment, local economic growth, agricultural development, and security and economic paradigm the country so desperately needs. But the U.S. military is hoping so. The civil-military plan by U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal Laura Rozen posted today mentions the Afghan economy, licit agriculture, cross-border commerce, and reconstruction dozens of times.

On Sunday, the NYT's Peter Baker noted that only 304 of 543 appointed positions have been filled by the Obama administration after nearly a year. Though some of the hold-up has been from petty pork-barrel politics in the Senate, much more has resulted from the White House's incredibly tough preemptive vetting of its own appointees.

This vetting, which has already stopped Paul Farmer from heading USAID, has been defended by the White House, which argues it is ahead of the historical precedent. Why isn't that reassuring? 

Even less reassuring is David Herbert's report in the National Journal that the State Department struggling to get security clearances for its interns in time for the periods they were supposed to be working.

One would-be intern, a graduate student at Tufts, came to Washington in May for a summer gig working on development issues. But he never got his security clearance and never started his internship. He's driving home to New York today after spending a frustrating summer spent calling his congressmen for help and wondering what happened.

"With the clearance process, as an applicant, you don't know anything," he said.

Not only are some going home without ever starting, the State Department actually takes this into account when choosing its number of interns. Don't we need to attract more talent into civil service, not scare it off with bureaucracy?

Even worse, the prospective interns most likely to run into delays are those who have spent time living or studying overseas, according to Daniel Hirsch, co-founder of Concerned Foreign Service Officers:

The Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which handles clearances, farms out most investigations to contractors, who are more efficient at processing applications than the bureau's agents, he said. But when an applicant has lived or traveled extensively overseas (as Buniewicz and others interviewed have), Diplomatic Security (DS) takes over. "Most DS agents consider [personnel security background investigations] to be beneath them, and security clearance investigations are a very low priority item for most overseas DS agents, so they probably sit on the back burner for a while," Hirsch said. 

So it is harder to get an early jump on a career at the State Department if you already have international experience. No wonder Paul Farmer gave up on the bureaucratic route.

As a side note, why do interns require such significant security checks? The old joke about interns running everything notwithstanding, are they really handling that much classified material? Any State interns out there, let us know. 

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Last week in the Washington Post, Michael O'Hanlon lamented the inability of the U.S. military to get "boots on the ground" in peacekeeping operations in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. O'Hanlon, who served in the Peace Corps in Eastern Congo, made the case that an all-volunteer military force trained for peacekeeping could help overcome the current overstretch of the military and the U.S. hesitation to deploy peackeeping troops for fear of public outcry when, as in Somalia in 1993, casualties could result:

The notion is this: Ask for volunteers to join a peace operations division for two years. They would begin their service with, say, 12 weeks of boot camp and 12 weeks of specialized training and then would be deployable. They would receive the same compensation and health benefits as regular troops, given their age and experience. Out of a division of 15,000 troops, one brigade, or about 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers, could be sustained in the field at a time.

This type of training would be modeled after standard practices in today's Army and Marine Corps. To be sure, soldiers and Marines in regular units usually go beyond this regimen to have many months of additional practice and exercise before being deployed. But the peace operations units could be led by a cadre of experienced officers and NCOs -- perhaps some of whom would be drawn back to military service after leaving...

The dangers of deploying such units to missions such as the one in Congo, would be real, but the risks would be acceptable. First, those volunteering would understand the risks and accept them. Second, in most civil conflicts such as Congo's, possible adversarial forces are not sophisticated. Soldiers in the new division would not need to execute complex operations akin to those carried out during the invasion of Iraq or current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would largely monitor villages and refugee camps, inspect individuals to make sure they did not have illicit weapons, and call for help if they came under concerted attack.

I agree with O'Hanlon's major point that it can be difficult for peacekeeping operations to succeed without active U.S. support. Most current missions are undermanned and underfunded, even for their already very limited mandates. I also think the volunteer idea has potential, but my hangup is the idea of creating a separate track within the military that has less training. Wouldn't it be better to ask for volunteers from within the armed forces and give them additional peacekeeping training?

To get a perspective on this proposal from the kind of person who might volunteer, I called my friend Marcus Williams, who at the last minute this spring chose to withdraw from his planned Peace Corps deployment in West Africa and instead apply to Officer Candidates School for the U.S. Marines.

Interestingly, Marcus cited peacekeeping and development as one of the reasons he hopes to join the Marines. "Arguably the Iraq war and Afghanistan are right now peace keeping missions. So it becomes kind of hard to define where people are deploying," he said. He added that for better or worse, working on development from within the military means you get resources that Peace Corps volunteers simply do not. 

The proposed short training period and separation from the normal military also worried Williams, who graduated from Stanford in four years with both a degree in International Relations and a Masters in African Studies:

If you had people volunteering and there was less training involved, there's this sort of vision of the idealistic African advocate who's in college or going to college and may not have the serious commitment it takes to serve in the armed forces. They're going to end up in the field and not be a very effective unit. When it comes down to it you have to follow orders and accept very seriously that you might die.

Williams pointed out that for the Marine Corps, Officer Candidates School itself is almost 12 weeks and for those who choose to join afterward another six months or so of basic training is required. 

Ultimately, Williams argued, if the U.S. wants to get serious about supporting peace-keeping operations in places like the DRC, that would be great, but U.S. troops aren't necessarily the key.

I think that if the U.S. were really committed to these peacekeeping operations we wouldn't be focused on getting U.S. boots on the ground. The cost of the Ghanaian peacekeeper on the ground is much less and if the U.S. peacekeeper is going to literally receive less training, it seems like it would be better to support other troops.

If the U.S. really wants to help, he said, it should focus on its comparative advantages:

flying helicopters, intelligence, communications operations. I'm thinking most of the peacekeepers in Sudan. They had boots on the ground but they didn't have any real logistics.

Does all this mean O'Hanlon's idea should be written off? Absolutely not, Williams said, it just needs some careful thought. "I think you'd have a lot of people interested in volunteering," he said.

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images 

229,524, according to the AIDS & Rights Alliance for Southern Africa in a PR video calling out the African Union and African leaders for not spending enough on health.

The organization also calculates that Robert Mugabe's 85th birthday party could have covered 10,501 TB treatment courses. See the rest in this video set to Akon's "I'm So Paid":

Hat tip: Jina Moore