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Holbrooke Calls for 5-year USAID Effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan

FrontLines - April 2009

U.S. Special Representative Richard Holbrooke came to USAID headquarters and met with Acting Administrator Alonzo Fulgham and the Afghan-Pakistan Task Force March 16 to plan for a new U.S. foreign aid approach to help end violence in the two countries.

“Four Americans were killed yesterday in Afghanistan. This is a war,” he said. It is quite a different task for USAID than fighting poverty and disease across the developing world, he added.

“Our aid programs have to reinforce our overall goals [and] advance our strategic objectives,” Holbrooke said.

The Taliban recruits fighters and suicide bombers by offering cash and guns to youths who are not ideologically committed so U.S. aid should try to “drain the swamp” by creating opportunities and giving alternate livelihoods to those youths.

“I greatly admire USAID—it was my first assignment as a Foreign Service Officer,” said Holbrooke, who was stationed in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in the 1970s as part of the CORDS program.

In a wide-ranging discussion with about 50 USAID specialists in Afghan and Pakistan programs— as well as officials from the Departments of State, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Treasury, and Defense on the USAID task force— Holbrooke called for a push to improve agriculture.

Agricultural aid has a chance to create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Afghans and wean them away from the Taliban, said Holbrooke.

He feared crop eradication to fight opium production might drive people to join the Taliban, but he praised USAID’s “alternate livelihoods” program—boosting agricultural production of non-drug crops.

Holbrooke also called for training Afghan civil servants so that the rule of law will replace corrupt and uneducated officials.

Furthermore, he said information is a battleground where “a gang of mass murderers living in a cave” should not be defeating the United States.

“It is important to say [to Afghans and Pakistanis] that we are not there to stay as some kind of neo-colonial power—we are there to help prevent the return of the bad old days,” said Holbrooke.

“I want to move AID to the top of the agenda—I have great respect for Jim Bever,” he said, indicating the chief of the USAID Task Force and a former mission director in Afghanistan.

“At the NSC [National Security Council] Jim plays an indispensible role—when he talks, everyone in the room is listening.”

Holbrooke served in the Clinton Administration as U.N. Ambassador and negotiated the end to the Yugoslavia civil wars by bringing Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and other leaders to the agreement known as the Dayton Accords, at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

For the past eight years he worked with the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. “I’m absolutely committed to these issues,” he said.

His greatest worry, he said, was “the dependency trap” in which USAID builds schools, clinics, and roads but they are not maintained once turned over to local control. “We can succeed only if the government of Afghanistan succeeds,” he said.

After Holbrooke asked for examples of successful Agency programs, he was told about training of Islamic clerics in Bangladesh on women’s rights, and using Kyrgyz law students to train Muslim communities on legal rights.

Holbrooke asked why health programs in Afghanistan seemed to be less corrupt and more successful than other programs. Bever told him that local leadership by the health ministry was key.

As the meeting, which ran more than twice as long as scheduled, drew to a close, Holbrooke said he expected “at least five years” would be needed to complete the job of calming and developing the Afghan-Pakistan region. ★

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