Bernd Debusmann

America’s costly efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq came under intense scrutiny this month in critical reports and a gloomy Senate hearing that prompted a memorable assertion. “If there is any nation in the world that really needs nation-building right now, it is the United States.”

That came from a Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, who continued: “When we are putting hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure in another country, it should only be done if we can articulate a vital national interest because we quite frankly need to be doing a lot more of that here.”

Webb spoke at the confirmation hearing of the veteran diplomat President Barack Obama nominated to be his next ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, who faced questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that left no doubt over the growing impatience of U.S. lawmakers with a military and financial commitment that is producing limited progress.

Webb’s juxtaposition of spending on Afghanistan and the state of things in the United States – a stalled economy, stubborn unemployment, an aging infrastructure – is made more often in online debates and private conversations than in official hearings. But it is a subtext for a debate likely to grow in the campaign for the 2012 elections and feature both Afghanistan and Iraq as money pits, object lessons for ill-conceived development projects, and lack of foresighted planning.

A report by the bi-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting issued early in June set the tone. “U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan are scheduled to begin in July 2011, and the U.S. military presence in Iraq is scheduled to end by December 31, 2011. But America will leave many legacies in both countries carrying large sustainment costs long into the future.”

The commission, the report said, saw no sign that the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were making plans to make sure that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan could operate and maintain, on their own, the vast array of projects built under U.S. government contracts, from schools and clinics to hospitals and power plants.

An examination of a decade’s wartime contracting in the two countries, says the report, had identified tens of billions of dollars of waste. Unless the U.S. paid prompt attention to the “how to” of maintaining, operating and paying for the projects it will leave behind, “the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

One example of money already wasted, and beginning to waste even more: the Kabul Power Plant, built with $300 million in American taxpayer money. “It is little used and the cost to operate and maintain it is too great for the Afghan government to sustain from its own resources.”

WHAT SUSTAINABILITY?
That raises a question: what resources? According to a World Bank estimate, 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) comes from “spending related to the international military and donor community presence.” Annual government revenues run to around $2.5 billion, funding the Afghan security forces costs more than twice as much.

The word “sustainability” sounds very much out of place in this context though it is sprinkled liberally through the Contracting Commission’s report as well as a report issued a week later by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It focused solely on Afghanistan and questioned the long-held theory that development projects in conflict zones helps to stabilize them.

That report pointed out that Afghanistan now receives more U.S. civilian assistance ($320 million a month) than any other country and it addressed a problem which looks more difficult to solve than any other: “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption …”

No doubt about that. Both in Afghanistan and Iraq corruption is the stuff of legend, featuring tales of government officials becoming multi-millionaires, warlords getting kickbacks for allowing development projects to go forward, contractors for the U.S. government over-billing to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, suitcases stuffed with $100 notes being shipped out of Kabul airport, newly-rich Iraqis and Afghans buying extravagant mansions in Dubai. In Kabul, the word for this is “Afghaniscam”

Things are not getting better, notwithstanding dire warnings about the corrosive effect of badly-spent aid. In 2008, the year the Commission on Wartime Contracting was set up in response to reports on vast misappropriations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the two countries ranked 176th and 178th out of 180 on a widely-respected corruption index. It is put out annually by the Berlin-based watchdog group Transparency International.

On the 2010 list (of 178 countries), Iraq ranks 175th and Afghanistan 176th. Myanmar and Somalia occupy the bottom slots.

Which helps explain the frustration about nation-building priorities Senator Webb expressed at the Senate hearing. He was one of the two senators who introduced a bill, in 2007, that led to the establishment of the Commission on Wartime Contracting.

Its members need not fear running out of work.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

In the flurry of statements on the killing of Osama bin Laden, a remark from Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, spoke volumes about how U.S. foreign aid tends to be perceived by its recipients. It’s not enough.

“The United States spent much more money in Iraq than it did in Afghanistan,” Haqqani said in a television interview. “And then it spent much more in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan. So were there cracks through which things fell through? Absolutely.”

That twisted logic suggests that if only Washington had given Pakistan a few billion more than the $20.7 billion it provided over the past decade, bin Laden, a man with a $27 million bounty on his head, would not have “fallen through the cracks.” Those cracks were wide enough to swallow bin Laden’s one-acre walled compound with a three-storey building in a garrison town near the Pakistani capital.

The mass murderer’s six-year stay in Abbottabad has prompted some members of Congress to demand the immediate suspension of aid to Pakistan, others to look for reductions. Deep cuts, however, are unlikely. The 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan rely on supplies landed at the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked through the Khyber Pass to bases in Afghanistan.

As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bin Laden unit, puts it: “They (the Pakistanis) know we need them more than they need us. They also know that the Saudis and the Chinese would step in with money and aid if we backed out.”

Consequently, military and civilian aid is likely to continue flowing and the strained marriage of convenience between the U.S. and Pakistan will survive this latest spat. But giving billions of dollars to a country where, according to President Barack Obama, “we think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden” will probably rekindle a long-running debate over the how and why of foreign aid as a whole.

The United States is the world’s biggest donor of foreign aid, giving more than the runners-up, France and Germany, put together. Last year, Washington provided assistance in one form or another to 149 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. That’s almost four-fifths of all the countries on earth but the aid has not made the United States the world’s most popular country.

On the contrary. Why? There are a variety of reasons, including one that is not often mentioned in policy debates on aid. It has to do with human nature, according to Ken Adelman, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine, he wrote: “Giving someone a gift generates initial gratitude (often along with gripes about why it wasn’t bigger). The second time the gift generates less gratitude (and more such griping). By the third iteration, it has become an entitlement. The slightest decline engenders resentment.”

NEGATIVE VIEWS
Perversely, in Pakistan and Egypt, two of the four countries that topped the list of U.S. aid recipients in 2010, the publics hold overwhelmingly unfavorable views of the United States, according to the annual global attitudes survey by the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank.

For decades, Washington has seen foreign assistance as an essential instrument of foreign policy, meant in part to positively influence attitudes abroad. This works in some of the large variety of activities that come under the label foreign assistance – for example reducing poverty, widening access to health care and education, or promoting human rights. But even U.S. disaster relief, often prompt and efficient, does not always change attitudes, viz American emergency aid in the wake of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan.

If foreign assistance does not buy gratitude, loyalty and cooperation, does it help to influence the decision-making of friendly governments? Not necessarily. Take the example of Israel, the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since its creation in 1948. Despite the aid, the government has continued building Jewish settlements on the West Bank contrary to U.S. wishes and contrary to international law.

So, is foreign assistance to 149 countries reflected in votes in support of U.S. positions at the United Nations (which has 192 members)? It is not. According to a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation, about 95 percent of U.N. member states that receive U.S. assistance voted against the United States in General Assembly votes between 2000 and 2008.

That helps explain why opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans are in favor of cutting foreign aid. The latest survey, in January by Gallup, showed 59 percent wanted reductions. Those results would probably look different if Americans had a clearer idea of how much of their tax money goes to helping foreign countries.

A series of studies shows that the public vastly overestimates the share of the budget that goes to foreign assistance – widespread perceptions put it at around 20 percent. In fact, in 2010, it was just 1.1 percent.  (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)