The more things change....
By John Blake
November 1, 2012 | CNN
Showing posts with label reconstruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reconstruction. Show all posts
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Today's racial parallels to Reconstruction era
This is worth reading, especially if you are a white Republican. The 1865 parallel to Obamacare is especially interesting. It's absurd and sad at the same time that freed blacks were accused of relying on handouts only a year after their emancipation: the 19th century version of Reagan's "welfare queen" myth.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
DOS 'whistleblower': Nation-building FAIL
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
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Ex-diplomat: Iraq rebuilding plan a failure
You can't re-build a country while it's at war.
Ex-envoy says Iraq rebuilding plan won't work
By Sue Pleming
Reuters | Sat Feb 17, 10:32 AM ET
Kiki Munshi was showcased by the media in September as a seasoned U.S. diplomat who came out of retirement to lead a rebuilding group in Iraq.
Now she is back home, angry, and convinced that President George W. Bush's new strategy of doubling the number of such groups to 20 along with a troop surge of 21,500 will not help stabilize Iraq.
A diplomat for 22 years, she quit her job last month as leader of a Provincial Reconstruction Team -- groups made up of about 50 civilian and military experts that try to help Iraqi communities build their own government while strengthening moderates.
"In spite of the magnificent and often heroic work being done out there by a lot of truly wonderful people, the PRTs themselves aren't succeeding. The obstacles are too great," Munshi said this week in Washington, where she was pressing her view at the State Department and to Congress.
"Once again we are proceeding to lay people's lives on a line drawn with faulty information. Once again the fantasies of the 'policy-makers' drive decisions without much link to the realities on the ground," said Munshi, who retired from the foreign service in 2002 .
Her postings included Romania, India and Sierra Leone before Iraq, where Munshi said he had felt a "moral obligation to sort out the mess we have made there."
An audit by the special inspector general for Iraq last October found similar problems with the PRTs to those listed by Munshi, including an "ever-changing security situation, the difficulty of integrating civilian and military personnel, the lack of a finalized agreement on PRT operational requirements and responsibilities."
REJECTION
Members of Congress have also been critical of the program, which suffered early on from not being able to attract enough civilian staff and a dispute between the State and Defense departments over who would provide security for the teams.
The Bush administration rejects Munshi's views and the State Department said the expanded PRT plan was more focused, requiring team members to do pre-deployment training and with a clear goal of bolstering moderates and sidelining militants.
"We have been very mindful of the problems our PRT leaders have reported to us. We have worked very hard to streamline it," said Barbara Stephenson, the deputy coordinator for Iraq at the State Department, which oversees the PRT plan.
Munshi said the PRT plan was ill-conceived, under-funded and poorly staffed.
She said security was so bad that the council in the town in Diyala province where she was based had not had a quorum since last October and that death squads were rife.
PRT members found it hard to meet with Iraqis because of intimidation, she said, giving the example of training sessions that had been canceled because of poor security.
The PRTs are embedded with the military, a tactic Munshi says has varying results depending on the ability of the unit.
"All the PRTs embedded with the military are subject to the vicissitudes of military fortune, for good or ill," she said.
But the State Department countered that Munshi's experiences were not repeated in all the provinces and set up interviews with two PRT leaders who said while there were difficulties, they believed their work was making an impact.
Stephanie Miley, a PRT leader in the Iraqi town of Tikrit, said her teams managed to get out to see Iraqi officials five or six times a week but security issues meant they could not stay for long.
"I just hope that people will recognize that this is not something we will achieve overnight," she said.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
GAO: $ Billions wasted in Iraq
Where's the outrage from fiscal conservatives about all the $ BILLIONS in waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq?
By Jim Fry | Voice of America News
Washington, DC
19 January 2007
Government auditors told Congress Thursday that waste and fraud in the reconstruction of Iraq have been rampant. They predict they will uncover losses in the billions of dollars. Key Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee demanded an accounting within two months.
You can see traffic flowing on some Baghdad streets--and evidence of progress. In Baghdad the traffic lights are under repair.
Some reports say Americans and Iraqis have made headway reopening schools. The U.S. has pumped about $22 billion into Iraq reconstruction -- mostly between the years 2003 and 2005. Many reports out of Iraq indicate the U.S. has little to show for the effort.
Democrats now running the House Armed Services Committee called government inspectors general and auditors to explain.
Rep. Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, explains. "The story on reconstruction is that it's not a total failure but it's not, by any means, a success."
The auditors said the assumption of those who planned reconstruction is that daily violence would be long over by now, but it is not.
Last week President Bush announced, in the face of mounting political opposition, that he plans to send more than 21,000 additional troops to Iraq to reduce the violence.
Comptroller General David Walker said Iraq was expected to be a relatively stable society. "That's the number one problem--the lack of adequate security. And the lack of adequate security also impairs the ability to make progress with regard to oil, electricity, potable water as well as employment."
After years of anecdotal reports of waste and abuse, the Pentagon is now auditing the overall performance of its largest contractors.
Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen, Junior told Chairman Skelton the first of the findings will be reported sometime this year:
Mr. Bowen added, "Then we can begin to parse what the actual waste number is."
To which Mr. Skelton asked, "Do you have that figure as of this date?"
"No, I don't have that figure yet," said Bowen. "Do you have a judgment as of this date?" he was asked.
"As I said, the potential loss could be 10 to 15 percent. But we are waiting till we finish the actual hard analysis," Bowen answered.
Bowen said that losses at that rate would amount to perhaps $3 billion. But Walker is more pessimistic. "I think the numbers, frankly, will be higher than you might expect. Given G.A.O.'s professional standards to have evidential matter, I can't give you an estimate right now. I can tell you that it's billions," said the comptroller general.
The Iraqi government has allocated another $14 billlion in oil revenue for reconstruction. Committee members asked Bowen how much of that has been spent wisely. He answered, "Given the fact that there's been three governments over the last three years in Iraq and the lack of accountability on the Iraqi side of how they've disposed of their funds, we don't have a firm figure of how much as been spent since 2004."
One Democrat, Gene Taylor of Mississippi, wanted to know if auditors would look not just at money squandered by contractors, but at bad decisions: "My question is, in Iraq, how often do you look at something and say: 'Gee, that was a stupid way to spend money?' "
The congressman did not get a clear answer. The comptroller did say that so-called "cost plus" contracts give government officials in Iraq the power to spend freely. He said that should be curtailed.
President Bush is asking for another $1.2 billion for rebuilding and jobs in Iraq. But with so much uncertainty, the committee chairman wants the government auditors to return in two months with estimates on how much money has been wasted in Iraqi reconstruction.
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