AAM DISPATCH

It’s no secret that when it comes to US foreign assistance, it can be hard to measure the effectiveness of aid dollars. As we explored in our show Arrested Development, Ethiopia has a long history of receiving tons of cash from AID coffers. Many say the agency — along with other international actors — has effectively kept major famines from reaching the fatal proportions of the 1984 emergency; but most are equally quick to point out that billions of USD haven’t exactly transformed Ethiopia either. Just after we left Ethiopia, reports started to come out from opposition leaders that the ruling party was steering US food aid away from the opposition.

Today’s BBC report uncovers some shocking testimony from former rebels who say that in the mid-1980′s they were using US funds sent for famine relief to try to topple the Addis government. The BBC also quotes a 1985 CIA report, saying that:

“Some funds that insurgent organizations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes.”

Today, some of those insurgents, from the Northern community of Tigray, are now heading the government in Addis.

Matt Ozug Africa, Foreign Service

Back in November I spent a couple of weeks in Peru on an International Reporting Project Gatekeepers Fellowship. The program was a whirlwind tour of the country. We began with a few days in Lima, flew to Cusco, visited Machu Picchu, trekked off to the Amazon region of Madre de Dios, and back to Lima. Along the way we met with government, business, academic, and development figures. We explored public health, development, environmental, and political issues.

We even visited the International Potato Center and learned that the country has more potato varieties (on the order of 3,000), than any other country.

So, I want to share some thoughts, observations, and takeaways from the trip. In essence, the best summary of Peru came from the US Embassy team who described Peru as a “swing state.”

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Sean Carberry Amazon, illegal mining, Latin American politics, Lima, Peru, Rainforest

“The people of Haiti will have the full support of the United States in the urgent effort to rescue those trapped beneath the rubble, and to deliver the humanitarian relief – the food, water and medicine  – that Haitians will need in the coming days.” – President Obama on Haiti relief

President Obama has put the U.S. Agency for International Development in charge of America’s earthquake response in Haiti. USAID is no stranger to the island nation where it has spent decades struggling with political and natural disasters. The agency once had tens of thousands of experts doing development work across the globe, but today, it has a tenth of the staff it once did. And, it’s stretched thin in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to meet the soaring demand for aid in failed states and conflict zones.

National security, economic growth and humanitarian relief are at the heart of U.S. assistance abroad. As USAID takes the lead in U.S. humanitarian assistance in Haiti, what are the challenges the agency faces to deploy resources around the world?

Listen to Arrested Development: Shortchanging Foreign Aid on America Abroad.

Javier Barrera Haiti, USAID

First, for some context. I am writing currently from Cusco, Peru where I am on a 2-week journalism program. It is the Gatekeepers Editors trip organized by the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University. We are traveling the country to learn about health, environment, development, resource, and indigenous issues, and we are also learning about another growing sector of the economy: gastronomy.

Peru is an export nation. Gold, silver, oil, coffee, and now asparagus. The nation is growing into an agricultural force, providing an assortment of fruits, grains, and vegetables for the world market. But it’s not just providing the raw materials. Peru is now an exporter of cuisine, and not just the traditional Andean dishes of lomo saltado or chupe. Today, the country is leading a movement in Nuevo Andean cuisine.
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Sean Carberry

A few fast, fun facts about Ethiopia: it’s home to the second largest population in Africa, with 83 million people. The majority either farm or raise livestock. But only 12% of the land is suitable for agriculture, and of that, only 1% is irrigated. So you’ve got millions of people watching the heavens, relying on the rain to grow the crops that would feed this nation. Add to that the fact that historically there have been droughts every three years – with major droughts happening every decade or so. It all makes for some serious topsoil erosion. The dry and dusty topsoil eventually ends up as river silt that flows toward the Nile delta. As one development worker put it to me, Egyptian farmers have been reaping great harvests for three thousand years courtesy of Ethiopian silt.

That’s just the agricultural side. Add it all up and you get some major challenges for development. It’s no wonder that the Ethiopian mission is USAID’s (United States Agency for International Development) largest in sub-Saharan Africa. Addis Ababa is teeming with development workers. Conservatively there are easily 400 foreign nationals in that line of work here. And every NGO and foreign mission employs many more local staff. At USAID there are 7 local staff for each American. That’s not including the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), the US State Department, DOD (Department of Defense) and other US agencies who’ve all taken a slice of the development pie in recent years. Over the coming month, America Abroad will be exploring how the bureaucratic jungle of agencies try to work together to make life for Ethiopians more secure, healthy, and economically well off. It’s a tall order given some of the natural demographics working against them.

What everyone here will tell you is that it’s all about food, food, and more food (though that may not be reflected in the way Congress allocates USAID’s budget here). The challenge is getting Ethiopia off of it’s reliance on imported subsidies/relief and begin to develop the natural capacity of this country to feed itself – in spite of environmental challenges and a population that’s doubling every generation. What’s encouraging is that most aid workers say that things are in fact trending up, and the situation has significantly improved in 25 years. In 1984, Bob Geldoff and the BBC trained the world’s lens on the famine (don’t say the F word here today) that killed a million Ethiopians. Despite a doubling of the population since then, this country has not seen loss of life on that scale since. Still, nobody will tell you Ethiopia is out of the woods. This year the government announced that 6.3 million of its people are at risk of starvation. A number that’s considered low if anything. Add to that the more than 7 million who are permanently “food insecure” and you start to see the scale of the problem.

In my short time here, I’ve met some amazingly committed, hard working, and innovative aid professionals. Some come from abroad, but many are Ethiopian, who are rolling this boulder uphill. While it seems a long, long way from the political wranglings happening on Capitol Hill about the future of USAID, most folks here are keenly watching who will finally be appointed to head the United States Agency for International Development; and nervously waiting to see if, alongside Diplomacy and Defense, Development will really be Obama’s third – and equal – “D.”

Arrested Development: Shortchanging Foreign Aid on next month’s America Abroad.

Matt Ozug Africa, USAID

Bob Cline is a farmer. He’s also a lawyer. He’s a captain in the Indiana National Guard and is currently serving with the 1-19 Agribusiness Development Team based at FOB Salerno in Khowst Province. He’s an Animal Husbandry Subject Matter Expert. In other words, he’s the head goat herder on the base.

I should also disclose that he’s the Public Affairs Officer for the ADT, so it’s his job to get me to say nice things about the ADT and his work. And as a reporter, it’s my job to question and look for the truth in his story, or anyone else’s.

That said, Captain Cline and his goats are on the front line of the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.*

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Sean Carberry Afghanistan, Agribusiness Development Team, Counterinsurgency

Eight years after 9/11, the United States should be far less worried about domestic terrorist attacks and far more concerned about foreign attacks on Western brands, an effective public diplomacy message and well-spent development aid.

At least, that was the consensus from the fourth annual day-long conference on Al-Qaeda put on by the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Organizers noted that while conferences in past years separated tactics from diplomacy and diplomacy from aid packages, the separate strands of each of these worlds are now inseparable.

One State Department official spoke of a changed attitude in the government, an attitude that has USAID speaking the language of COIN strategy and the Department of Defense running international health missions. Yet a panel examining the economic dimensions of fighting Al-Qaeda admitted that smaller is sometimes better and aid can create as many enemies as it is meant to solidify allies.

David Katz, a career foreign service officer, who worked in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province from 2006-7 said:

“There’s an assumption that our aid wins hearts and minds but if you’re an aid worker you know that aid frustrates a lot of people…. Aid contributes to instability, especially in the south [of Afghanistan] – it creates enemies and a lot of the money goes to the Taliban.”

Robert Jenkins of the U.S. Department of State, admitted the U.S. is already on the defensive if it’s going into area, attempting to use aid as a means of fighting terrorism:

“Perception is everything in these environments. If I’m a young man or woman and I’m hearing that these projects are supposed to be making my life better and they’re not, then I’m not going to buy into the system.”

Lower-impact projects seem to be the answer. Aid divided into smaller bundles and distributed the way the locals want and where they want it. As Katz noted, “You will often find that you get a lot more out of a $30,000 project than a $30 million project.”

But what about those who are already moving beyond the reach of aid? A de-radicalization program in Yemen failed by casting a wide net and rounding up any young man suspected of harboring anti-government or terrorist tendencies. A Saudi government program has made some small gains by enlisting Muslim volunteers to infilitrate chat rooms and rebut supposedly theologically-based arguments for jihad. Dr Abdulrahman al-Hadlag from the Saudi Ministry of Interior, noted that the factors that contributed to participation in jihad were “almost all related to media.”

The Saudi radicals in the program were primarily men in their early to mid-20s, most often from average-sized middle class families. The keys to radicalization appear to be weak parental control – the young men often had fathers over the age of 60 – and exposure to images of Western dominance and alleged brutality in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Television shows, Web sites and radio programs fueled a frustration and sense of impotence eventually leading to travel to jihadist hot spots and association with like minded young men who provided a sense of belonging and validation.

Peter Bergen, co-director of the Counter-Terrorism Strategy at the New America Foundation, believes that the terrorist threat here in the United States is “close to zero. Al-Qaeda has found it extraordinairly difficult to recruit American Muslims.”

Bergen notes that the threats planned by American Muslims have come from specific communities – Afghan-Americans, Somalis and African-American and Latino converts.

“These communities look a lot like European domestic attacks from Muslim communities. You have those who don’t have as much, who don’t have job prospects and who live in ghettos.”

Bergen says that while Al-Qaeda has ineffectively managed its public relations strategy and managed to alienate possible sympathizers by killing Muslim civilians, several troubling trends emerge:

-          More attacks on Isreali and Jewish targets

-          More attacks on transportation and Western brands, such as bars and hotels

-          American residents/citizens who travel overseas for suicide bombing missions

However, Bergen noted:

“It’s naïve to think that it’s impossible that it’s impossible it could happen here.

Katherine Gypson

Yesterday I went out on a mission with the Paktya Provincial Reconstruction Team. The purpose was to inspect the progress of construction work on several schools in districts near the PRT’s headquarters at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Gardez. These are projects contracted by the PRT, and funded using CERP (Commander’s Emergency Response Program) money. Unlike many past projects where the military or US contractors would do the work, all of these projects were put out to bid to local contractors who hire local workers.

The goal is to provide jobs, empower locals, and ideally, partner with the local government to develop projects that the government wants and will operate and maintain. It’s all part of the development side of counterinsurgency campaign.
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Sean Carberry Afghanistan

One thing has been a constant in all of my embeds (and for most journalists) and that is sitting and waiting for military flights. Airlift has been, and is, in short supply in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve heard stories of soldiers waiting for weeks on standby to get on a flight, or units running short of critical supplies because cargo flights were backed up. For journalists, it’s a nuisance, but it has real consequences for those on the front lines.

It’s one thing when you are finished with an embed and have plenty of tape to listen through and work to do while you are waiting, but it’s particularly frustrating when you are at the front end and waiting to start your embed. That’s where I sit at the moment – the media bunks at Bagram Airfield – hoping that I will get on a flight tomorrow morning.

So, to make use of the time here at Bagram Airfield, I am talking with anyone I can. This afternoon I met with Colonel Mike Farley, commander of the Kentucky Agribusiness Development Team, and Lt. Colonel Ruth Graves who is the Ag-team leader. Prior to this conversation, I knew little about the existence and mission of ADT’s.

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Sean Carberry Afghanistan