Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
Was progress being made? Certainly everything I had heard said that it was, albeit very slowly (which, BTW, I consider to be quite promising ). I hope that progress in Haiti can continue to be made.

Cheers,

Marc
Marc:

Progress? Hmmm.

It has been said that one should never underestimate the ability of an armed force to make a bad idea seem good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. I can't think of any reason to believe the armed forces are unique in this.

Do we have any reason to believe that the people reporting progress weren't cherry picking? Or that their information gatherers weren't "finding" the information their superiors most wanted to be found? Perhaps even massaging it a bit, here and there? Or that they didn't, humanly and understandably, turn away from indicators that they were failing?

I mean, can you imagine the following TV ad, replete with pictures of starving children: "Hi, I represent Save the Children. We want your money and we want it even though the majority of what you give us will be siphoned off by kleptocrats and the little that remains will do no good whatsoever except to ensure that there will be a few more children starving in ten years than there are today. Trust us; you'll feel better after you write that check."

Nah.

So color me skeptical that there has been any real progress in places where the objective realities say there ought not be and where sundry NGOs stand to make a fair chunk of change from disseminating that there has been progress.

To go back to Haiti, for example, is there any evidence that the average age for beginning sexual activity has gone up from 12 to, oh, I dunno, maybe 12 and a half? That would be real, grassroots progress, and on a truly key matter affecting the long term prospects of the place. Don't think it happened. Have the police and bureaucrats become more honest? Can't imagine how they'd measure that one. "Ah, oui, monsieur; I have reduced my schedule of bribes by 43% under the influence of your wonderful NGO/MTT/the bribes your organization paid me." We've had evidence here (the police taking off at 16:30 while the looters did not) that the police are fundamentally indifferent to meeting their core function. What's that say about them? And what does what it says about them say about the rest of the society? How, indeed, do we measure that they became more self-reliant? Why would we expect it when they're under the influence of organizations for whom it would be corporate death if they ever actually became self-reliant?

There's another old Army saying: All the really measureable things aren't very important and all the really important things aren't very measureable. I think it's true.

There is an analogy I've had cause to use from time to time on the subject. Imagine a jungle, the real triple canopy deal. Almost nothing grows at ground level except very large trees. Those trees have been there a long time. Their branches are intergrown and intertwined. What happens when you cut a tree down at the base? Nothing soon, because it is held up by the others with which it has intertwined. Okay, but imagine you have somehow gotten rid of the tree; what happens? Another one grows in about the same spot and, under the influence of the other trees, to about the same shape as the previous one. In short, you can't change the jungle piecemeal; rather, you must raze a very large section of it and, even then, there are objective factors - soil, sun, rain, terrain - that made it a jungle in the first place and about which you can do precisely nothing. And the moment you stop cutting, the jungle begins its return.

By comparison, human societies are much more complex than mere jungles, and much harder to change. Moreover, while the jungle is non-sentient - the trees will not actively and cleverly thwart you - the people who make up societies, and are doing fairly well in their own, are sentient and will thwart you.