http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003722.html?wpisrc=nl_headline
In Afghan region, U.S. spreads the cash to fight the Taliban
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By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 31, 2010
NAWA, AFGHANISTAN -- In this patch of southern Afghanistan, the U.S. strategy
to keep the Taliban at bay involves an economic stimulus.
Thousands of men, wielding hoes and standing in knee-deep muck, are getting
paid to clean reed-infested irrigation canals. Farmers are receiving seeds and
fertilizer for a fraction of their retail cost, and many are riding around on
shiny new red tractors. Over the summer, dozens of gravel roads and
grain-storage facilities will be constructed -- all of it funded by the U.S.
government.
Pumping reconstruction dollars into war zones has long been part of the U.S.
counterinsurgency playbook, but the carpet bombing of Nawa with cash has
resulted in far more money getting into local hands, far more quickly, than in
any other part of Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development's
agriculture program aims to spend upward of $30 million within nine months in
this rural district of mud-walled homes and small farms. Other U.S. initiatives
aim to bring millions more dollars to the area over the next year.
Because aid is so plentiful in Nawa -- seemingly everyone who wants a job has
one -- many young men have opted to stop serving as the Taliban's guns for
hire. Unlike neighboring Marja, where insurgent attacks remain a daily
occurrence, the central parts of Nawa have been largely violence-free the past
six months.
But the cash surge has also unleashed unintended and potentially troubling
consequences. It is sparking new tension and rivalries within the community,
and it is prompting concern that the nearly free seeds and gushing canals will
result in more crops than farmers will be able to sell. It is also raising
public expectations for handouts that the Afghan government will not be able to
sustain once U.S. contributions ebb.
"We've blasted Nawa with a phenomenal amount of money in the name of
counterinsurgency without fully thinking through the second- and third-order
effects," said Ian Purves, a British development expert who recently completed
a year-long assignment as the NATO stabilization adviser in Nawa.
U.S. officials responsible for Afghanistan policy contend that the initiative
in Nawa, which is part of a $250 million effort to increase agricultural
production across southern Afghanistan, was designed as a short-term jolt to
resuscitate the economy and generate lasting employment. They say concerns
about overspending are misplaced: After years of shortchanging Afghans on
development aid, the officials maintain that they would rather do too much than
too little.
"Our goal is to return Nawa to normalcy, to get folks back to their daily lives
of farming, and that requires a large effort," said Rory Donohoe, USAID's
agriculture program manager in Helmand province.
Of particular concern to some development specialists is USAID's decision to
spend the entire $250 million over one year in parts of just two provinces,
Helmand and Kandahar. In Nawa, which has a population of about 75,000, that
works out to about $400 for every man, woman and child. The country's
per-capita income, by comparison, is about $300 a year.
"This is a massive effort to buy people off so they won't fight us," said a
U.S. development officer in southern Afghanistan.
The spending here is a preview of what the Obama administration wants to
accomplish on a larger scale. USAID's "burn rate" in Afghanistan -- the amount
it spends -- is about $300 million a month and will probably stay at that level
for at least a year.
The White House recently asked Congress for an additional $4.4 billion for
reconstruction and development programs in Afghanistan, with the aim of
increasing employment and promoting economic growth in areas beset by the
insurgency.
Although some of that money will be directed through Afghan government
ministries and local aid organizations to fund projects designed and run by
Afghans, most of it will go to large, U.S.-based development firms with the
ability to hire lots of people and spend lots of money quickly.
Among the programs in the pipeline is a $600 million effort to improve
municipal governments across the country and to increase the provision of basic
services to urban dwellers. The program is supposed to include extensive
day-labor projects to pick up trash and plant trees, and it calls for the
contractor to implement "performance-based" budgeting systems within two years,
something that most U.S. cities do not have.
USAID also envisions spending $140 million to help settle property disputes.
One of the agency's hoped-for achievements is to train Afghans to appraise and
value land.
Some development specialists question whether Afghanistan can absorb the flood
of money, or whether a large portion will be lost to corruption, inefficiency
and dubious ventures funded to meet Washington-imposed deadlines.
"We've turned a fire hose on these guys -- and they can't absorb it," said a
development specialist who has worked as a USAID contractor in Afghanistan for
three years. "We're setting ourselves up for a huge amount of waste and fraud."
Improving farming
The $250 million agriculture program is the Obama administration's principal
effort to create jobs and improve livelihoods in the two provinces where U.S.
troops are concentrating their counterinsurgency mission this year. It was
designed to address what senior administration officials, particularly
presidential envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, deemed to be scattershot and
underfunded initiatives over the first eight years of the war to assist
farmers, who make up most of the country's workforce.
The program aims to make farms more productive, thereby increasing employment
and living standards. It would do so by cleaning canals so more water gets to
crops, offering subsidized seeds so farmers would be encouraged to switch from
growing opium-producing poppies, establishing cooperatives to share tractors
and constructing a network of gravel roads so they can take their goods to
market.
To forge links between residents and their government, a 42-member community
council decides which canals to clean and which roads to improve.
USAID selected International Relief and Development (IRD), an Arlington-based
nonprofit development firm, to run the program. To get the work started
quickly, the agency gave the company the $250 million as a grant last summer,
instead of hiring it under contract to do the work, which would have taken
longer.
Grants also involve fewer auditing requirements for USAID, but once awarded
they limit the government's ability to make changes.
The program has been a hit with Nawa residents since the day it began in
December, largely because of the plentiful cash-for-work opportunities. Once
the day labor began, unemployment disappeared almost overnight.
The initiative has put money in the pocket of almost every working-age male in
the district. More than 7,000 residents have been hired for $5 a day to clean
the canals, and a similar number of farmers have received vouchers for heavily
discounted seeds and fertilizer. Thousands of others have benefited from
additional forms of assistance through the program.
"We had nothing here before -- only bullets," said Gul Mohammed, a lanky tenant
farmer, as he scooped mud from a narrow canal. He said the day labor is
essential to feeding his family because he decided last fall, after a battalion
of U.S. Marines arrived in Nawa, not to plant poppies on his 6.5-acre plot.
Now he is growing wheat, which fetches only about a quarter of what he would
have made from poppies.
"We are so thankful for this work," he said. "Without it, we would be going
hungry."
Local infighting
USAID's decision to involve the community council in the disbursement was
intended to help build local governance. It has done that, but it has also
generated new frictions in the district.
When the council was formed last fall, the seven principal tribal leaders in
the area decided not to participate. They did not want to risk the Taliban's
wrath by siding with the United States and the Afghan government. But now that
the council has the ability to influence millions of dollars worth of projects,
the leaders want a piece of the action.
The senior elder, Hayatullah Helmandi of the Barakzai tribe, has launched a
campaign to discredit the council members, calling them opportunists and drug
users. "The Marines should be working with us," he said.
The infighting has prompted concern among some U.S. officials in the area.
"These tensions probably wouldn't be so severe if there wasn't as much money
involved," one of them said.
Then there is the question of what to do with all the additional crops grown
this year. Purves estimates that the program will increase agricultural
production by tens of thousands of tons across central Helmand province.
"What on Earth will happen to that?" he said. "There's no way all of that can
be gotten to market, and even if it could, there simply isn't a market for that
much more food."
Holbrooke and USAID agriculture experts want to construct cold-storage
facilities so the produce can be trucked to markets in other parts of
Afghanistan or exported to nearby countries. But that effort will not be
completed in time to help farmers with this year's crop.
The effort to spend the program funds as fast as possible has resulted in some
items going to waste, according to people familiar with the effort.
Plastic tunnels to allow farmers to grow crops over the winter were not
distributed until February -- well after the winter planting season -- so many
of them simply used the plastic as window sheeting for their mud huts. The
metal rods were turned into fences.
The cash-for-work programs are so plentiful and lucrative that some teachers
and policemen sought to enroll before U.S. and Afghan officials barred their
participation.
Among Nawa residents, the biggest worry is what will happen when the program
ends Aug. 31. U.S. officials hope this effort will result in new farm jobs, but
nobody thinks it will be enough to employ all of those participating in the
day-labor projects. Although USAID is considering a follow-on agriculture
program, it is not clear whether the labor component will be as large as it is
now.
If not, Afghan officials said their government does not have the resources to
make up the difference.
"Those cash-for-work men -- half of them used to be Taliban," said the district
governor, Abdul Manaf. "If the Americans stop paying for them to work, they'll
go back to the Taliban."
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