More than a few State Dept. officers disagree with Van Buren, and personally distrust his motivations (write a provocative book at/near retirement and get rich and famous) instead of blowing the whistle internally and trying to change the system from within.
Myself, I have a problem with his "greedy contractors"/"corrupt bureaucrats" line. First, contractors don't write the contracts, the government does. They just bid on the work and then implement it. Secondly, Van Buren presents no evidence of U.S. government corruption.
If Van Buren meant corruption within the Iraqi and Afghan governments, then, well, duh. We never should have expected to funnel $ billions through these nascent institutions and trust all the money to be well-spent or even accounted for. But in fact, trying to spend a lot of money fast -- and this was a hell of a lot to spend on development, more than any nation had ever tried to spend before in such a short time -- no matter who was managing it, was bound to lead to waste, poor accounting, missed and moving targets, sloppy work, etc.
Those disagreements aside, Van Buren's central points are true and bear repeating: 1) using development aid as a counter-insurgency tactic almost never works; and 2) in our arrogance and cultural blindness we have failed to understand that they don't want to be like us, they don't even want most of our stuff. This is especially true in Afghanistan.
Why has the US spent so much money and time "so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad"?
By Peter Van Buren
August 28, 2012 | Al Jazeera
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