.....Provincial reconstruction is no longer about physical construction, although PRTs have supported a lot of construction. It is about reconstructing Iraqi life in the provinces from Saddam’s centralized dictatorship to decentralized governments that people accept as legitimate, from the rule of violence to the rule of law, from ethnic/religious antagonism to accommodation, from government-run business to private sector growth, from rampant corruption to accountability, and so on. It is about fundamental, qualitative change.
Moreover, the diversity among Iraq’s provinces is so great, and the opportunities for effective foreign engagement vary so much among the provinces, that PRTs cannot deliver a single set of policies and programs as instructed from Baghdad. Each PRT must draw up province-specific plans, priorities, and levels of resources to achieve its goals. While the general principles of counterinsurgency, economic development, and institutional reform do apply throughout Iraq, they involve policy choices, and each PRT must adapt them to address the unique circumstances prevailing in each province. Efforts to create a single “provincial doctrine” for Iraqi PRTs tend either to be inapplicable to some parts of Iraq or hopelessly vague. Likewise, efforts to contrive a single set of measurements to compare the performance of all the teams can only occasionally be useful because the provinces in which they serve will progress or regress at different rates, and the PRTs’ performance will usually not be as decisive as the Iraqi efforts. Moreover, many of the changes we want are not readily measurable......
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