LONG AND
WINDING ROADS
heard of for reconstruction teams
in particularly volatile areas to survey
their projects — a newly constructed
schoolhouse, for instance — by taking a
ride over it in a helicopter.
“It was a ridiculous situation,” said Sonia Pinto, a young researcher who spent
more than a year evaluating Western development projects in turbulent regions
of Afghanistan for a non-governmental
organization. “A lot of the time, the people
who do evaluations just go to the base, but
they don’t go to the actual project. Instead,
you send Afghan interviewers into the
field and they will fill out questionnaires
for the locals. It’s not proper research.”
Aid workers in Kabul tell horror stories
about Afghan employees who falsify data,
or visit the wrong sites. “At the end of
the day, you just have to trust them,” said
Pinto. “You never know.”
Even if they could see more, they rarely
have enough time. Civilian officials do rotations of a year, or a year and a half — at
one point in 2009, 40 percent of the government civilians who were based in Helmand didn’t make it six months. Many
military tours are even shorter.
In December 2009, President Barack
Obama announced that he was dispatching 30,000 extra ground troops to Afghanistan, along with a “civilian surge”
that included hundreds of fresh experts
in development and governance — and
lots more money. The idea, at its heart,
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
was that the solution to Afghanistan’s
various crises was more of everything:
more troops, and more development
funds. At the urging of Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, then the commander of U.S.
troops in Afghanistan and a determined
advocate for counterinsurgency, and the
veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, this
meant a significant boost in America’s
development and reconstruction budget.
Already at $2 billion per year when
Obama assumed office, the Afghan development budget rose swiftly to $2.7
billion, and then, by 2010, to $4.6 billion, according to the Pentagon’s Special
Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which audits the
spending. (The budget has since dropped
back to $2.9 billion.)
Obama believed that civilian expenditures in particular were “far cheaper,”
and ultimately more enduring, as he said
in a speech in early 2009 — and there
was no reason to hold back. “It all came
down to money,” writes Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his recent book, Little
America, of the mindset of Obama’s top
Afghanistan advisers at the time. Holbrooke, Chandrasekaran writes, “believed
the United States needed to spend big if
it wanted quick results.”
A TSUNAMI OF MONEY
The results, from a purely developmental point of view, have been impressive.