Yesterday, the US House of Representatives voted for a USD 6.4 billion aid package for Afghanistan through 2010. According to yesterday's Reuters report, the House also stipulated that Afghanistan's aid should not go to provinces where officials are involved in drug trade or aiding insurgents. Reports on province-by-province governance will now be required for Congressional Hearings, as well as information about Iran's role in supplying weapons and aid for the insurgency. This has good and bad points.
What might work about this:
1. Aid may yet flow into regions where reconstruction dollars might be more well spent. It forces USAID and others to consider reconstruction projects in areas where they are less likely to be blown up by subsequent insurgent operations, and start producing prosperity where there is peace.
What won't work about this:
1. One wonders what will be used as an indicator of provincial compliance. If it is poppy growth, or numbers of attacks by province, then the indicator is too crude. Yet there is little or no other way to judge this. Local Afghanistan banking records? There aren't any. Increased surveillance of officials? Being in the same room with a drug lord? I’d wager that none of us could withstand a trial by association under those conditions. Telephone records? It's just not like DC out there, with banks, newspapers, and Cray computers.
2. More money spent on oversight means more paperwork and more dollars diverted from actual on-the-ground projects to desk work.
3. There's a difference between gathering intelligence and targeting intelligence. Like any research, in intelligence one has to “read” before one can “apply technique”. Pushing for targeted information/results too early can disrupt the gathering of the small pieces of information and the sense of the prevailing environment that makes a targeted effort more liable to yield good results.
What these stipulations are really about:
Congress hasn't practiced enough oversight in the past and is trying to hold the Executive branch accountable. What will ensue, however, is more gyrations on the part of the Administration rather than less. Small wonder Afghanistan keeps asking for more say in the disposition of its aid. That however, is not likely to happen so long as insurgency and narcotrafficking remain rampant. It's just not a virtuous circle here.
