Countdown to Kabul for Peace

Do Joe Biden, General Petraeus, and Obama Read Our Posts?

2009-05-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

I know I'm going out on a limb here, but it WAS just 5 days after I wrote "General Petraeus, Can You Hear Me Now?" that, well, he seems to have heard me. He said those who are simply fighting to support their families should be given an economic alternative.

I was at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard trying to crash his speech on that day, which I didn't manage to do, but I did tell everybody about the bagpipe band in my article. Then on Feb. 28th I ran my Oped News headliner "Obama-stan: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss," which also caused a minor stir (44 comments) under the title "Obama Deaf, Dumb, and Blind on Afghanistan" at the pro-Obama website DailyKos.com. The point of the article was the same as always: identify the problem correctly, and it will lead you to the correct solution:

The Taliban insurgency is growing as a result of economic conditions, not ideological ones. Most Afghans hate the Taliban, but they need to feed their families.

Lo and behold, ten days later VP Joe Biden says in Brussels:

"70 percent of [the Taliban] are there for the jobs, because they are getting paid."

That's a little better. Afghans don't like to be occupied either, and there is a reason this is called the Graveyard of Empires. But we have managed to turn a short tolerance for a short, relatively benign occupation in which we would extend real help into a full-blown insurgency, thanks to western reconstruction contractors who think of this as a money laundering operation and generals who view it as a war rather than a social problem. The generals seem to want to relive War War II, where you had two sides and two armies. Just because there are people shooting at you doesn't mean you are in a war. The other side is men coming out of their houses where they have lived all their lives, and the idea that you can "weaken" them so you'll have a better hand at the negotiating table is a cartoon. They can't give up or concede the battlefield. They live there.

OP-ED: The War That Should Have Been Over

2009-02-12T18:53:00.000-08:00

Imagine that, after World War II, instead of investing in the Marshall Plan in Europe, we allowed the region slide into decay. It is 1953, eight years after the end of the war, and unemployment across Europe is 40%. There are reports of literal starvation in the countryside. There are pockets of prosperity -- the more fortunate are getting televisions and cars -- but the vast majority of the population lives in various stages of misery. Now imagine extreme political factions -- in those days it would have been communists -- making inroads, because they will pay a small but living wage to new fighters who join, plus help with food and medicine. There is no work. This is the employer of last resort. This is exactly what is happening in Afghanistan.

In a country where yearly reconstruction assistance has amounted, in adjusted dollars, to $60 per person versus the $600 per person we spent on the Marshall Plan, 40% of the workforce is unemployed and has no means to support a family. The well-financed Taliban pays $8 a day to its fighters, a good wage in this context, and is always hiring. Go figure why the insurgency is growing. Worse yet, the policy of the new American administration is leaning towards the solution which carries the most risk: more troops. More troops means more resentment of the American presence. Probably resulting in fighting which means more civilian casualties.

As always we are focusing on the "pointy" end of foreign policy. When we are roundly hated rather than warily tolerated, as we still are, we will wonder what went wrong. One of the big talking points among the theories of what went wrong in Afghanistan is the problem of government corruption. This is a problem, but the much bigger problem is the kind of corruption which is officially sanctioned. Out of the relatively measly $60 per capita spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan, roughly 40% goes straight back out of the country in the form of profits for foreign contractors, according to a recent Oxfam report.

Need a school? Hire a foreign construction firm to design it, import materials to build it, rather than scout around for what's local, and import leased heavy equipment to do the digging and clearing, rather than give lots of shovels and picks to men who would do just about anything for $10 a day. It's like giving a man in the desert a thimble of water and taking half of it back.

The gravest misconception in American thinking on Afghanistan is that it is driven by ideology, not economics. Iraqi insurgents have been trying to eject what is perceived as an unprovoked foreign invasion, which gives that insurgency an ideological sheen. In contrast, the Americans, at first, were as welcome in Afghanistan as they were unwelcome in Iraq. The country was relatively stable until a year ago, when the people got tired of waiting for help which never arrived, and the Taliban took full advantage of it.

Unlike Saddam, who had a natural constituency in his Sunni and tribal base, the Taliban has its mysterious roots in the madarsas of Northern Pakistan, and has little popular support saves its ability to force obedience. This was related to me by an Afghan colleague who said how, "if there was a ten dollar bill laying on a street corner, you could come back days later and that ten dollars would still be there." Why? Because if you were accused of stealing it, they would cut off your hand. The Taliban insurgency is growing as a result of economic conditions, not ideological ones. Most Afghans hate the Taliban, but they need to feed their families.

Top British official Captain Leo Docherty has called Afghanistan "a textbook case of how to screw up a counterinsurgency." None other than the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry, told Congress in 2007 that: "Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families." Read that again. This is Karl Eikenberry. General Karl Eikenberry. Even our top military man in Afghanistan was saying we are focusing too much on the military side of the equation.

In a report from Helmund Province a young man told a reporter that it was either the Taliban or watch his family starve. "I couldn't find a job anywhere," said 19-year-old Jaan Agha. "So I had to join the Taliban. They give me money for my family expenditures. If I left the Taliban, what else could I do?" Herein lies the problem and the promise for the Obama administration. They'll keep joining the Taliban, unless we give them something else to do.

Ralph Lopez is the founder of Jobs for Afghans.
http://jobsforafghans.org

Sources

Per capita assistance amounts:
http://www.caps.af/detail.asp?Lang=e&Cat=3&ContID=100

Forty percent unemployment:
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/09/28/poverty-unemployment-driving-afghanistan-towards-instability.html
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=af&v=74

Taliban pays $8 per day:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/17/MNGIHL7B4O1.DTL

Reconstruction assistance recycled back out of the country, 40 percent profits:
ACBAR Report, "Aid Effectiveness in Afghanistan"
http://www.acbar.org/ACBAR%20Publications/ACBAR%20Aid%20Effectiveness%20%2825%20Mar%2008%29.pdf

Captain Docherty quote:
"Military policy in Afghanistan 'barking mad'"
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HI30Df02.html

General Karl Eikenberry Congressional Testimony 2007
http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/FC_Afghan021307/Eikenberry_Testimony021307.pdf

Jaan Agha quote:
IWPR: "Few Choices for Helmand's Troubled Youth"
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=arr&s=f&o=340496&apc_state=henh

Other Background Sources:

Bloomberg: "Obama's Afghan War Plans May Run Into Weary Public, Deficits"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20081110/pl_bloomberg/ahmpijwa6cp0;_ylt=AtaLyuu3W6D3xyB0StQXutOs0NUE

Food shortages cause grass eating, displacement
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=77195

Jobs for Afghans outline of legislation:
http://ralphlopezworld.com/smf/index.php?topic=9.0

"Job creation should be top of Canada's Afghan strategy: Kandahar leaders," Canadian Press, May 2008 http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080509/national/afghan_cda_jobs

Afghanistan Study Group Final Report,
http://www.thepresidency.org/pubs/Afghan_Study_Group_final.pdf

Starvation, Kandahar Province (YouTube)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wc6vfqdaRK8

Letter to Activists and NGOs

2009-02-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

Dear Colleague,

I am the founder of Jobs for Afghans, an advocacy group concerned with Afghanistan's 40% unemployment rate. Our mission is to encourage and assist in the creation of unskilled labor employment in Afghanistan on a large scale and in a short period of time. We believe the creation of one million jobs performing reconstruction-related tasks, which as you know there is no shortage of, at a wage of $10 per day and budgeted for a number of years, will provide the jump-start to the informal economy which Afghanistan so badly needs. We believe this is the key to deflating the insurgency.

We are lobbying for this by using the testimony of US military commanders themselves, such as Col. Tom Collins who told PBS Frontline:

"There is a low percentage of the total Taliban force who we would call ideologically driven. We refer to them as Tier 1 people who believe their ideology, that what they're doing is right. The vast majority of Taliban fighters are essentially economically disadvantaged young men."

General Eikenberry, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, told the US Congress in 2007: "Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families."

With testimony like this coming from the military establishment itself, with the recent creation of USAID's Special Inspector General for the Afghanistan Reconstruction, with the entrance of a new American presidential administration, and finally, with news of the botched reconstruction and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan becoming a regular feature in mainstream news, we believe the political climate is right for a push to correct the course. What is needed is a transformation of generalized rhetoric calling for "economic growth" and strong "pillars" of society into policy which creates real jobs for real Afghans.

As you know Afghanistan doesn't need luxury hotels and shopping malls for drug lords. It needs pipeline infrastructure for clean drinking water, for irrigation, for sewage transport. It needs rural gravel roads and other applications of appropriate technology, clinics with generators and the most basic medical supplies, and other things to alleviate the utter misery of most Afghans after a full eight years of Western intervention. People we talk to in America are shocked to learn that the Taliban pays $8 a day and is the closest thing to steady, always-available employment. The mighty United States, which can put $100 billion on the ground in Iraq every year, is being outbid for the services of young men by a Taliban which can raise perhaps $1 billion from the narco economy, not a small number but certainly not beyond the resources of the US to compete with.

We are writing to invite your comments on congressional legislation we are proposing which will govern the expenditure of USAID dollars. In addition to legislation, we believe our goals may also be obtained through the issuance of executive order from the Obama administration. The legislation or executive order shall state that:

1) Requests for proposals from vendors bidding for contracts from USAID shall require a job-creation component, in which contractors shall describe the number of jobs for Afghan nationals will be created by the project, plans for the substitution of labor for capital equipment whenever feasible, and plans for the maximization of capacity-building in skills for Afghan nationals. In bid submissions such components shall be weighted at 20 percent of points for awarding contract. Bid evaluation of pricing shall be exclusive of the additional costs of job-development components, so that aggressive job-creation components are not penalized.

2) Subcontractors to the principle contractor shall not be exempt from job-creation requirements, and shall report any data required to the office of the Inspector General of USAID.

3) Overhead for the subcontracting of work to further subcontractors shall not exceed five-percent.

4) USAID shall prioritize rural road, water, electricity, irrigation, and medical clinic projects, at the provincial and district level, in coordination with the development plans of the appropriate Afghan government ministry.

5) USAID shall set a target of the one million new jobs by June 2009, which can be performed by unskilled labor from Afghan nationals, and shall coordinate bids for work in a manner consistent with the achievement of this goal.

As congressional legislation, we believe the above language would be inserted in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, in a new section "g," governing USAID assistance to Afghanistan.

Monitoring shall be accomplished by inserting as follows into H.R.1535, section 1229 (f)(1):

(A) the oversight and accounting of the obligation and
expenditure of such funds; [INSERT: according to guidelines enumerated in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, section "g."]

(B) the monitoring and review of reconstruction activities
funded by such funds; [INSERT: according to guidelines enumerated in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, section "g."]

(C) the monitoring and review of contracts funded by
such funds; [INSERT: according to guidelines enumerated in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, section "g."]

We would also like to ask if you would be so kind as to circulate among your colleagues in the NGO community who join us in our criticism of the Afghan reconstruction. Our goal is to arrive at a draft statement co-signed as many as possible in the NGO community which will urge the US government to set policy which will create many jobs for Afghans. It is unfortunate that the political opening which now presents itself is a result of shortsightedness which now has the Taliban at the outskirts of Kabul. But as the noted scholar Ahmed Rashid said: "It is still not too late for the Americans to reverse course: the majority of the Afghan population has no desire to return to Taliban rule. What gains the Taliban have made can be attributed to fear and intimidation – and the inability of the Kabul government to provide security and economic development."

A one-million-$10-per-day job surge in Afghanistan would be the fiscal stimulus needed to put money into the hands of those who will build Afghanistan's future: the Afghan people. This would be similar to the tax rebates in the US used to stimulate growth, albeit this would be much more effective, as economic conditions in Afghanistan fall in the precise region where economists say such stimulus is most effective: excess-labor, low-inflation, slack-industrial-capacity conditions.

As we know, Afghans are enterprising people, and savers who will buy a taxi or a produce stand given a chance. They are outstanding traders and small businessmen. But to pull ones-self up by the bootstraps first there must be bootstraps. Let us change the direction of this war. If the Afghan people and the American people can come together in equal friendship, it will be an historic breakthrough in the history of this terribly troubled region, whose people have so long been tormented by war and conquest. When this happens, the world will be a much safer place.

Sincerely,

Ralph Lopez
Founder
Jobs for Afghans
http://jobsforafghans.org/

Appendices:

- Draft letter to Congress

-Link and to FY2008 legislation creating the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Office:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:h1585enr.txt.pdf

-Link to Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode22/usc_sup_01_22_10_82.html

- Recent op-ed, "The War Which Should Have Been Over"

Jobs for Afghans Letter to Congressmembers

2009-02-12T15:48:00.000-08:00

Dear Congressmember,

As the war in Afghanistan escalates and reaches crisis proportions, I would like to ask you as a constituent to work for the only approach which can win, that which emphasizes jobs and economic development for ordinary Afghans rather than merely more troops. Obama State Department spokesman Robert Wood said last month: "There is no purely military solution to the challenge in Afghanistan so there will be a significant non-military component to anything that we seek to undertake."

Jobs for Afghans, http://jobsforafghans.org a non-profit advocacy group, has researched this issue thoroughly and has proposed specific policies and legislation which I would like you to study and take active steps to translate into action, either by urging President Obama to implement by executive order or by enacting legislation through the US Congress. The agency through which most development assistance flows to Afghanistan is USAID, which is under the executive branch and thus subject to both executive order and to changes in its enabling legislation. US taxpayers are already spending billions of dollars in reconstruction aid to Afghanistan, but it has failed to stem the economic misery of the ordinary Afghan, and has mostly benefited and enriched the contracting corporations. Unemployment in Afghanistan is forty-percent, children are literally starving, and, amazingly, the only employer definitely hiring and paying a decent wage is the Taliban. This is insanity.

Jobs for Afghans has created the following policy guidelines, which may be implemented through congressional legislation or executive order.
The centerpiece of this effort is utilizing US tax dollars already being spent in Afghanistan to generate one million new jobs, so that young men are not forced to join the insurgency in order to feed their families, as they are now.

As a nation with a population of about 30 million, 8 million in the workforce, this would make a significant impact. Colonel Tom Collins, Pentagon spokesman for US forces, said: "There is a low percentage of the total Taliban force who we would call ideologically driven. We refer to them as Tier 1 people who believe their ideology, that what they're doing is right. The vast majority of Taliban fighters are essentially economically disadvantaged young men."

General Eikenberry, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, said before congress in 2007: "Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their famililies." I urge you to believe these commanders-on-the-ground. These are military men who understand the situation.

The legislation or executive order shall state that:

1) Requests for proposals from vendors bidding for contracts from USAID shall require a job-creation component, in which contractors shall describe the number of jobs for Afghan nationals will be created by the project, plans for the substitution of labor for capital equipment whenever feasible, and plans for the maximization of capacity-building in skills for Afghan nationals. In bid submissions such components shall be weighted at 20 percent of points for awarding contract. Bid evaluation of pricing shall be exclusive of the additional costs of job-development components, so that aggressive job-creation components are not penalized.

2) Subcontractors to the principle contractor shall not be exempt from job-creation requirements, and shall report any data required to the office of the Inspector General of USAID.

3) Overhead for the subcontracting of work to further subcontractors shall not exceed five-percent.

4) USAID shall prioritize rural road, water, electricity, irrigation, and medical clinic projects, at the provincial and district level, in coordination with the development plans of the appropriate Afghan government ministry.

5) USAID shall set a target of the one million new jobs by June 2009, which can be performed by unskilled labor from Afghan nationals, and shall coordinate bids for work in a manner consistent with the achievement of this goal.

As congressional legislation, we believe the above language would be inserted in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, in a new section "g," governing USAID assistance to Afghanistan. Monitoring shall be accomplished by inserting as follows into H.R.1535, section 1229 (f)(1):

(A) the oversight and accounting of the obligation and
expenditure of such funds; [INSERT: according to guidelines enumerated in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, section "g."]
(B) the monitoring and review of reconstruction activities
funded by such funds; [INSERT: according to guidelines enumerated in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, section "g."]
(C) the monitoring and review of contracts funded by
such funds; [INSERT: according to guidelines enumerated in Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516, section "g."]

Below is an op-ed submitted to various American newspapers which summarizes the nature of the problem. We are available to help you compose an op-ed to your home district newspapers. Please circulate the legislation proposed above to your colleagues, especially those in the appropriate committees. USAID budget and operations are determined by the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations of the Committee on Appropriations, chairman Senator Mitch McConnell, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chairman Rep. Howard Berman.

It is unfortunate that the political opening which now presents itself is a result of shortsightedness which now has the Taliban at the outskirts of Kabul. But as the noted scholar Ahmed Rashid said: "It is still not too late for the Americans to reverse course: the majority of the Afghan population has no desire to return to Taliban rule. What gains the Taliban have made can be attributed to fear and intimidation – and the inability of the Kabul government to provide security and economic development."

A one-million-$10-per-day job surge in Afghanistan would be the fiscal stimulus needed to put money into the hands of those who will build Afghanistan's future: the Afghan people. This would be similar to the tax rebates in the US used to stimulate growth, albeit this would be much more effective, as economic conditions in Afghanistan fall in the precise region where economists say such stimulus is most effective: excess-labor, low-inflation, slack-industrial-capacity conditions.

As we know, Afghans are enterprising people, and savers who will buy a taxi or a produce stand given a chance. They are outstanding traders and small businessmen. But to pull ones-self up by the bootstraps first there must be bootstraps. Let us change the direction of this war. If the Afghan people and the American people can come together in equal friendship, it will be an historic breakthrough in the history of this terribly troubled region, whose people have so long been tormented by war and conquest. When this happens, the world will be a much safer place.

US soldiers are counting on the congress and the president to do their jobs as well as the soldiers are trying to theirs, against enormous odds and amid mounting civilian and US casualties. In the near future I will request a report on what action steps you have taken on correcting the US course in Afghanistan. Thank you and many kind regards.

Sincerely,
(Constituent)

HOME TO JOBS FOR AFGHANS

-Link and to FY2008 legislation creating the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Office:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:h1585enr.txt.pdf

-Link to Title 22, Chapter 82, subchapter I § 7516:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode22/usc_sup_01_22_10_82.html

Open thread and Call for Papers and Contributions

2008-04-20T16:46:00.001-07:00

This is a Call for Papers on the many topics pertinent to the execution of the goals of Jobs for Afghans. The academic community in economics, public administration, and other disciplines is invited to participate, by contributing to topics and suggesting new topics which will inevitably arise in an undertaking of this size, the equivalent of a Marshall Plan or the WPA works program. Also welcomed are posts on recommended reading for topics presented here or other topics suggested by the scholarly/business expert community. The repository of knowledge presented here will provide the raw material for the expert staff of legislators to formulate and draft legislation governing the spending of taxpayer dollars to Afghanistan.

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Topic: Donor Aide and Work Generation Efficiency, a Possible Model
(please refer to title in contributions thread, papers will be compiled and all contributors will be acknowledged)

Contributor: Ralph Lopez

Question: What methodology should be adopted to maximize the employment of Afghans per donor dollar? I will attempt in this space to offer the beginnings of an analysis and simple equations which describe factors in the generation of FTEs (full-time equivalents) at $10 USD per day for unskilled labor, utilizing different technology assumptions and contractor rules.

There are thousands of individual infrastructure projects now underway in Afghanistan, run by hundreds of contractors and subcontractors. The challenge is to arrive at a simple methodology which can be applied by donor governments to measure the efficacy of each project at creating minimum wage jobs. As 90% of Afghan investment consists of donor government dollars, the efficiency of the economy at generating employment at a particular project can be described as:

FTE/D = e

where FTE is one Full-Time Equivalent position, D is the donor dollar amount, and e is the work generation efficiency factor. Thus pojects with a high e,

eD =FTE

are projects and contractors which get the most "bang per buck" per donor dollar at generating adequate wage, widespread employment.

The task then becomes for business experts and technicians to identify possible labor-for-machinery substitutions. This could be as simple as recommending that a road be maintained by using men with sweeping brooms rather than mechanical streetsweepers. Whether the project is a waterworks, a new school, or a ditch for waterpipe or telephone/communications line, an audit of outside experts will identify and certify opportunities to accomplish the same engineering operation with greater manpower. Alternately, for contracts bid upon competitively, contracts could be awarded based on criteria incorporating "e" values as well as cost and other factors.

The question will naturally be raised that this is not in keeping with the profit motive if using machines is cheaper, and that business forces will frustrate compliance with these efforts. Here the answer is simple: pay the difference between what a project manager would save by, for example, renting a bulldozer for a month to dig ditch, at a cost of only rental-plus-fuel and operator cost, and what it might cost additionally to hire 300 men at $10 USD per day. It is by no means proven at this point that the cost factor runs against human labor at all times. A contractor being able to rent machinery from itself or a partially owned subcontractor is easily imaginable as one of the mechanisms by which 40% of donor dollars presently is recycled out of the country without much trouble. The main point is that even paying the difference, the total cost of subsidies to projects is still likely to fit within the overall financial parameters of the Ten Percent of Present Cost Solution.

contributors please reference "Donor Aide and Work Generation Efficiency, a Possible Model"

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Other suggested topics

Possible topic: Audit/inspection Regimen

What audit/headcount inspection regimen would give a fair statistical result for efficiency measures actually being implemented? What example of nation-sized inspection challenges have we to draw on, in terms of methodology and organizational structure? The weapons inspection program in Iraq? What disciplinary regime will suffice to discourage rampant corruption? Inspector arrives at worksite receiving X donor dollars, no one in sight building a road, where did the money go, Mr. Y? A write-up system, three write-ups and no more money? What countries are successful at maintaining a high level of results per donor dollar? What administrative apparatus do they use?

Possible topic: Large-scale multi-project management using Excel.

Please post your contributions in the comments space provided in the blog along with your name and academic/business affiliation.