Be skeptical. Be very skeptical. Make each proposed effort justify itseld in the actual circumstance.

Reconstruction, in the real world, means fixing things that are broken, putting the shelves back up and the dishes back on them. In Iraq and WWII, physical infrastructure damage (accumulated from Iran/Iraq, embargos, us (but not just us)) was huge, complicated and expensive. Not so in most Afghan areas.

Development is making some thing happen that has not happened before. Especially when applied to Afghanistan, the burdens and challenges of any success must be incrementally built on a solid foundation, Doing so while security, corruption and lack of framework/context is almost spitting in the wind, and with very little reasonable expectation for bug strides.

Oneof my first bewilderments in Tikrit was arequest for scads of generators. So I asked, how many generators have been deleivered to that little village in the last five years. The answer: Who knows? That went out at the last Riptoa. All we know if that we are here now and these folks say they need generators, and you have funds for that.

The answer was: the village needed a generator, but had no mechanism to "own it," maintain it, keep it in fuel. So when the fuel went out or it broke down, somebody sold it for scrap, and they came back for another.

The solution to a sustainable generator was for some identifiable party to take responsibility for it, and the government to agree to maintain, supply it. Otherwise it was a waste of time.

Dayuhan only gave a piece of the Phillipine-style story. Load them with fancy amercian projects that cannot be sustained, or even afforded, by local government, and you make the local government look incomptent, by default. In large part these places have limited development, infrastructure and services because there is no system to male them valuable and sustainable. The trade-off will not always be the same if the choice is "give up your traditional ways and customs so that you can become prosperous enough to use/support new and expensive infrastructure." Some will just teach you what they told the Russians" Nyet!

The first big lesson of Appalachian Redevelopment---the Kennedy Plan to revive the Appalachians, involved building great new roads into the Appalachians to stimulate trade by linking them to city regions. It never occured to them that it was easier, and more successful, to follow the road to the city than to try to develop the Appalachians (a US version of the same constraints faced in Afghanistan). How many of these big projects create substantial unintended consequences---like shifting rural poor to urban poor.

Yesterday was a conference at CSIS, and a British and Norwegian Ambassador explained the upcoming London Summit. Security aside, an hour is assigned to SUBNATIONAL Governance.

In theory, the Afghan gov is expected to deliver it's proposal to the nations for creating and implementing subgov structures in Afghanistan. Although many at the national level are skeptical about creating subgov (and especiially effective subgov) is that it diverts their power.


Back up the truck a sec. There is no effective sub-national governance structure, and, if needed to be built, you can do the math as almost as big a separate effort as training police and soldiers---let alone the hundreds of offices, desks, cell phones, bicycles and bongo trucks needed for that. Now, we have an hour scheduled to hear how (if) the new Afghan government wants to pursue this objective, and whether int'l aid will accept/support their plan.

An ineffective national government, no effective sub-national governance structure, or credible plan for one, and, at the bottom of that pyramid, soldiers are supposed to build local governance to hand off to the national system that does not exist.

Two things are missing. If there was a subnational gov plan, us civ/mil could synchronize efforts to focus on support for implementation, but there is none, and there is no entity to either link or hand it over to.

A district with a $6 budget, no staff, and no cell phone is hardly going to be able to accept a hand-off of responsibility for an island of villages "redeveloped" by the US, and certainly cannot sustain or support any level of infrastructure/projects.

Same in Iraq. The US declared provincial governments, but did not provide the road maintenance shops, equipment and staffs to make them so. Without an independent tax base, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, all local governance is small and ineffective.

The US cry was about "Taxation without Representation." Afghanistan has no resources except those we give it, and those it chooses to distribute...

What's Schmedlap's rap: With a plan this compicated and full of wholes, success is assured?

Steve