NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION: "A New Plan for Afghanistan: The U.S. pursues another way to rebuild the war-torn country," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, 29 June-12 July 2009.

Unfortunately, as this article details up front, we will go through some of the same sad lessons about how to create economic connectivity.

But the more pain we feel, the closer we come to further instantiating the SysAdmin function and creating a bureaucratic center of gravity for it inside the USG.

USAID says it's accomplished a lot with its almost $8B since 2001, but Richard Holbrooke, who notes he started out with AID in Vietnam, says "this was the single most wasteful, most ineffective program that I had ever seen."

The biggest hurdle: more than 80% of working-age males are small farmers.

My problem: watch us spend billions more trying to keep them small farmers--frozen in time.

Development is revolution, not maintaining the status quo--but better. Show me development programs that reduce the labor footprint in ag and free it up for something else, like manufacturing, and I will show you change with internal momentum. Ah, but that will unseat ancient ways (which work so well).

Ply everybody with seeds and fertilizer (most of which will get sold next door in Pakistan for cash) and I'll show you a temporary bump in production and then everything back to the way it was in five years time, after the money runs out and the interest wanes.

USAID's counter: ag investments take many years.

New thinking abounds!

Meanwhile, the only industry (soup to nuts) in the country remains poppies. Day-labor projects won't dent that reality.

Better notion from USAID project director that spent four years in Guatemala connecting farmers to buyer-chains linked to Wal-Mart: only plant stuff that outsiders want. The key? Line up buyers before farmers--as in, market connectivity. Key component: brokerage for ag products, because no one in the world knows about Afghani pomegranates.

This is the same logic that led Enterra to sign up 1,000-and-counting Iraqi businesses to our business-to-business exchange portal on the web: if no one knows what you have to sell, then you'll sell to no one.

We are told that if USAID wasn't eviscerated over the past years, it would be more able to manage such things.

Our reply: yes, a stronger USAID would help, but why not turn to real businesses instead of USAID contractors to make such connectivity happen?

You know, involve actual businesspeople.