Episode 49. Development as a Tool of National Security Part II: USAID in Afghanistan– Achievements, Lessons Learned and Using the Right Resources in Future Challenges

Episode Transcript:

Deborah McCarthy: [00:00:13] From the American Academy of Diplomacy. This is the General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in discussions about their partnerships overseas in tackling some of our toughest national security problems. You can find all our podcasts, information on our guests and much more on our website: Generalambassadorpodcast.org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy and I'm the producer and host of the series. Welcome to part two of our podcast with Alonzo Fulgham and Jim Beaver, veterans of the US Agency for International Development. Today our conversation will be on how development is used as a tool of national security, especially in conflict zones such as Afghanistan. While the US was not the only donor country in Afghanistan, many NATO and non-NATO members also contributed and wanted to ask who were the major donors and how was that assistance coordinated with the massive US assistance?

Jim Bever: [00:01:17] Thanks for asking that question. I think it's important for our audience to understand we may be the first ones in, but traditionally in US development and foreign assistance, we try to bring our friends and allies into the situation as well. The very first bilaterals that were in there with us were the British, the Australians, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Germans, The Italians, The international multilateral agencies like the United Nations, UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund being the most important, I believe were also active at times it was described as herding rabbits. The first health minister was a surgeon, happened to be a surgeon general, a major general in the police of the Afghan police forces. Now, this surgeon had a reputation for courage. This surgeon held off the Taliban when the Taliban tried to break into the surgeons clinic and wanted to pull out the women and the children and make sure that they were not receiving any treatment. Well, this minister of health was tough as nails, and this minister insisted that the donors like us, like the British, like the World Bank and others would march to the minister's beat. This minister was Dr. Sohail Siddique, a woman surgeon and major general. She kicked shins and made people conform, and that's how we coordinated among the donors. So she got the rabbits to all work together.

Deborah McCarthy: [00:02:51] There was also great risks for your staff as mission directors. How did you balance the need to protect your people with the need to go around the country to carry out whether it's health or education projects?

Jim Bever: [00:03:03] Well, we were operating in a war zone in the one year I was there as the mission director, and we were rebuilding the highway from Kabul to Kandahar. And we were building schools and clinics all over the country. And we were helping with the elections and the c and out there with people all the time we were shot at, we were strafed. Unfortunately and sadly, our implementing partners under the US, companies that we hired and the local Afghan companies and local non-governmental organizations. I think in that year alone, we lost 100 civilians killed in doing our development assistance and humanitarian assistance, 50 to 100 every year. Last time I looked it was 500 killed and 500 injured or kidnapped. It's a dangerous place. You don't have to be there very long to realize that. We were attacked at the embassy by rocket fire. There was a assassination plot that I can't go into within days of my arrival there. Anyway, I could go on, but we started out by asking our US military to consider what's called a Quick Reaction Force, a QRF for us, and I cannot go into the details on that. It was a reassurance for us if we got in trouble somewhere out on the road or in a village somewhere. We also would coordinate with the embassy's regional security officer. I literally arrived on the plane with, sadly, the parents of a 29 year old UNHCR young woman who had been shot down in cold blood in the streets of Ghazni just a few days before.

Jim Bever: [00:04:38] It made you realize, as mission directors, we have a duty to protect. That quick reaction force was helpful to us. For example, when one of our health teams came under fire outside of Kandahar after working with the community clinic and as their helicopter was taking off, the Australian pilot and I knew the pilot, he had crashed once before and a crash landing almost broke his back. But he said, "no, I'm in this for the long haul with you Americans, you yanks." He was killed with a sniper bullet between the eyes, managed somehow before he was shot to land after they shot the top propeller off. The other three in the helicopter, the American woman, The American man, One was shot in the stomach, One was shot in the knee. And if it had not been for our Afghan security officer, they would have been killed. The Afghan security officer fired back, held them off and called in the Quick Reaction Force from the US military, which got there within 10 or 12 minutes and were able to get them out of there. So we worked out arrangements where we could take reasonable risks and when we got in trouble we tried to get the hell out of there as fast as we could with help of whoever we could find.

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:05:50] You always wondered if somebody was in a PRT, whether or not they were outside the wire, or they could be going to a health clinic and then an IED go off in the middle of the street on the street that they were on, or they could be in part of indiscriminate fire. That's something we all worried about. But at the end of the day, if we wanted our military colleagues to believe that we were all in, we had to take those chances. And everybody who came to Afghanistan on the diplomatic and on the development side of the equation all recognized that they were taking risks. And we were all in because we thought Afghanistan was the righteous war.

Deborah McCarthy: [00:06:23] There have been a number of analysis of what we have accomplished in Afghanistan from the development side. And you mentioned the special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction. I want to ask you both, with your knowledge of the country, what is your assessment of the major accomplishments that the United States has achieved via its foreign assistance program in Afghanistan? I know we hear a lot about education, but girls education. You talked a lot about the health sector, but want to educate our listeners to the wider panoply of accomplishments in the country.

Jim Bever: [00:07:00] First, I think politically, Afghanistan is a country and a government is still functioning. The Tajiks and Uzbeks and the Pushtun sit down together daily, regularly, whether it's in their parliament or in their executive branch, in order to provide government services to the people. That was not something anybody took for granted 18 years ago. Number two, they established a system of both taxes and customs duties, especially at the borders, so they could begin to collect their own revenues and to finance their own executive government functions. Again, something that we could not take for granted and we helped them with that. They have a system of commercial markets in the country and a banking system. And even though the banking system has been on occasion corrupted, they were able to make those repairs. So these are all parts of a functioning economy and society that we take for granted in America. But they have been absolutely obliterated and destroyed during the fighting. I mean, when we were trying to build the Afghan highway from Kabul to Kandahar, there was not a barrel of asphalt in the entire nation of 20 some million people. There was not even a stone crusher. They had plenty of stones, but nothing they could even crush stone with. So we have worked with them to rebuild the basic infrastructure in their country and even have international agricultural market exchanges with India, which is the largest market in that part of the world for their agricultural exports. So those are some of the elements. Now, maybe I should close by saying their media, they have commercial television in the country. Privately funded commercial radio stations. Free Press. Again, this is something we take for granted in the United States, but nobody was dreaming of that 18 years ago.

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:09:01] Once again, I keep harping on this. What did we inherit as the United States of America? When we first went in in 2001, we had a failed state on our hand. They now are producing electricity. We set up a grid that would bring electricity from the north and also from Pakistan. We refurbished the Kandahar station that we helped set up, as Jim said, some 45 years ago. And the transportation network, you couldn't go from one part of Afghanistan to another without doing rest stops along the way, take you 24 hours to get through Afghanistan at one time. And I think the one that is really most important is the political reconciliation that continues to go on. Everybody complains that things are totally disorganized, but it took us quite a long to get our democracy together as well, and we're still not there. So there are young democracy. And I think the point that Jim made about the Tajiks and Uzbeks and others are talking and also they were able to bring Ishmail Khan, some of the warlords into the government to potentially create statesmen out of them. So it's a fledgling democracy, but it's no longer a failed state. And I think the most important thing for me is they're not now trying to launch attacks against us from there anymore, and that's why we initially ended up going there. So. It's not stable. It's not where I want it to be. I think there have been disappointments along the way, but as I said earlier in the podcast, development is hard. It's extremely hard. And I think the professionals who put their lives on the line every day are trying to work toward perfection. But we're still a long way from it.

Deborah McCarthy: [00:10:27] Well, it may be that the US is called to help in stabilization efforts elsewhere, maybe in Syria, you mentioned Yemen earlier and the special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction in its Lessons Learned review of 2018 stated amongst its list of recommendations that the State Department should take the lead in laying out a whole of government strategy, that USAID should be the lead implementer for stabilization and the DOD should support these efforts. Do you gentlemen agree with that conclusion?

Jim Bever: [00:11:04] My experience in these kind of situations, we usually needed the office of the president and our government, the National Security Council, to bring everybody together. I would also say clear leadership is helpful in the case. For example, not a conflict situation, but definitely a national security threat situation of Ebola outbreak in West Africa. That was a mission director in Ghana at the time, just two countries away from those three that were most seriously affected. It was presidential leadership in our government that turned to the military and said, Defense Secretary, I need you to facilitate the work of the civilian assistance agencies so they can get their job done. And the military could mobilize Fast and Furious to make that happen so the civilians could go in with the reassurance they needed to do what we needed to do in Ebola. And frankly, the same happened in Haiti. Again, The president turned to the secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said, you make it happen logistically, and support for this USAID and others to get the job done. So I have seen that work beautifully. And my take away from Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the interagency is where we each best play to our comparative advantage. Then our entire government works best.

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:12:27] One of the things that I've learned over the last ten years since being out of government is that the world has really changed in so many different ways. And the traditional structure of the State Department, as is the traditional structure of USAID, has to change. It's not subordinating anymore. The things that are going on in some of these countries are beyond our ambassadors today. You need the expertise of the aid people that really understand what's really happening, where the government's comparative advantage is and what we need to do from a development perspective. And I'm concerned that this report and I don't know the inspector general, but I think we're going back to our father's Oldsmobile. The world has changed, the requirements have changed, and I think Jim eloquently stated that with SARS and with Ebola, there was a different approach. There are going to be different situations for different times. Maybe in this situation, maybe this State Department leads the next time. It may be that's not state's role. We need to let aid be in charge of this. When you look at this pandemic piece, I mean, we're going to be dealing with this in southern Africa and Asia.

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:13:35] Two thirds of the world's population is in Asia. This is not over. I mean, you go back and read cables ten, 15 years ago, this was all being talked about pandemics, pandemics, pandemics. It was a National Security Strategy in 2000, 2005. I mean, all of this stuff is there. So I just want to be careful that we just don't diplomatically tiptoe around this. The expertise that our government once had to take on these kinds of problems is not there anymore. And we have to rebuild that. But we also can't put the kind of responsibilities that we would put on a Tom Pickering on some of these young ambassadors who don't have the depth and the knowledge. And also the problems are much more different. There are a lot more aid centric people like to beat up on USAID and talk about, Oh, they haven't done this, They haven't done that. If you were to get rid of aid today, you'd have to reconstruct it again tomorrow.

Deborah McCarthy: [00:14:19] One of the triad of national security tools defense, diplomacy and development, the stepchildren are diplomacy and development in fiscal year 20. As an example, the defense budget was roughly $721 billion, and the combined budget of the Department of State and USAID was about $56 billion. How is US global leadership undermined by this lopsided allocation of resources?

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:14:49] This is one of those great moments in our history where we have to really take a look at where we are, and we have failed miserably at public affairs because of the fact that we have not put the kind of money that we need to put in to public diplomacy. And what do I mean by that? The Chinese, I read somewhere has put like $4 billion into blogging. Into the face time, all these social media aspects. And we're still. Going around thinking that the Voice of America or public entity that we use for publications is working. It's not working. So we're being out outplayed by China.

Jim Bever: [00:15:28] So I've always felt God bless our military. Thank heavens they are our military. However, at the margin, I think in terms of the overall budget of the American people's money, we might want to move some funds more in the direction of diplomacy and development. It is, in my view, out of balance. One of the things that really struck me, two things I'll just give you again, these are examples from Afghanistan when we were building the highway and again, it was US military who escorted me from Kabul to Kandahar, and I was in north of Kandahar having lunch hosted by a governor there in that province who was later assassinated. As I was leaving the lunch, one of the local leaders, black turban, gun belts across his shoulders, came up to me and grabbed my wrist. And my security guys started to lunge at him. And I said, no, no, it's okay. What do you have to say? And he said, "You Americans remember, you have all the watches we Taliban, we have all the time." And that was an epiphany for me as a Foreign Service officer. I thought to myself, oh, my, it's a long, long, long fight and it's only going to be won when we work together as a government and we get the balance right between our military and our diplomacy and our development. And so that stuck with me. And the other was, why are we in this foreign assistance business in the first place? It's to make sure that the world is a better place, not only for everyone else in the world, but also for us Americans, for our prosperity, for our security and for our values. And my vignette there, we were visiting a clinic that we were building north of Kabul with that health minister, with our security patrol and everything else.

Jim Bever: [00:17:26] We went out there and the village elders came up to us, greeted us and thanked us for our contributions that helped to match their labor. They put into the construction of the clinic. When the village elder leader came to us and asked us if we could also work together to build a school for the children of that village, both the boys and the girls who, as we could see about 100 yards away, were meeting on the ground underneath a big tree. That's when the minister said, Well, our government of Afghanistan does not have a lot of money, so we will only be able to build a school for the boys. And that's when the village leader sat down with his other fellow elders to discuss this over hot tea and then come back to us with their response. They came back and this village elder, a wizened old man with a beard just as he was about to speak, the clouds above us opened up. I can't make this up. The shaft of light came down from the heavens. And this village elder, he said that if God can bless all of us with the light from heaven above to all of us equally, we will either have a school that will benefit our girls as well as our boys, or we will continue to do it ourselves. Underneath this tree, these people in Afghanistan understood the same values as we did about education and girls and boys, and that this is why we're in this for the long haul in our own national interests as well. So getting that balance right is profoundly important today.

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:19:14] Say the issues that we're dealing with and our enemies are often the conditions of poverty, infectious disease, political instability, corruption, global warming, which generate the biggest amount of threats that we're dealing with as a nation. And so that's why I made the passion argument about the fact that public diplomacy, how do we get our messaging out, as you talked about earlier, how are we talking to young people? Because the population in most of these places, 65% are under 25 years of age. How are we communicating with them? And then USAID is going to deal with all those issues that I just laid out, or some parts of the US government is going to be dealing with those. So if we're having these meetings in the Situation Room talking about how we're going to combat these problems, if we don't have somebody from a public diplomacy perspective, we're going to miss the messaging. And if you don't have the development expert in the room talking about how we're going to combat this with our programs and how we implement. All we're doing is basically having the secretary of state go to those meetings or the deputy secretary, then come back and tell the administrator what he thinks we need to be done. That's not a way to do business anymore. That's what I meant by we've got to change the paradigm. We've got to change the way that we do business in the 21st century because it demands that. And that's why the 1947 Act needs to be looked at.

Deborah McCarthy: [00:20:34] Well, Alonzo, Jim, I want to thank you. Thank you not only for taking a lot of your personal valuable time, but most importantly for adding an extremely important perspective on the critical importance of development in the national security tool kit. It is something that is not often focused on, as you gentlemen have both have noticed, and going forward to face the new challenges, it's going to be even more critical. So thank you.

Alonzo Fulgham: [00:21:00] I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you for doing this and elevating this issue. I really appreciate it. And I enjoy your professionalism and I enjoy all the hard work we're doing on the other committee we're working on as well. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Jim Bever: [00:21:13] Massive Thanks.

Deborah McCarthy: [00:21:14] This has been a new episode in the series, The General and the Ambassador, A Conversation. Thank you so much for listening. Our series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites and on our website. We welcome all input and suggestions and you can email us directly at General.Ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.