The reality of the SysAdmin's supremacy in this COIN go-around
Monday, July 13, 2009 at 2:21AM 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.
Reader Comments (3)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/middleeast/10kurds.html?scp=1&sq=kurdistan&st=cse
Precisely. USAID's Contractors were/are being paid to experiment and fail, for all practical purposes . . No use having the Contractor work themselves out of a job . .
Back to basics . . Security, then Economy . . And of course, the small farmer who is now growing poppies, needs to know two things . . he's not going to be shot for growing grapes or pomegranates and he's going to have a reliable market for them . . We also might involve REAL Farmers as advisors to the agency, who have a better feel for the soil than a contracted bureaucrat.
Historically, we cannot show much success from the same efforts and techniques used in the past . . Again, we're doing the same things over and over, hoping for a different outcome . .
As for the Poppy Industry, it will always resemble the Coca Industry in Columbia . . as long as there's a market for the end product.
Ironically, I'm playing with a new venture, seeking out indigenous weavers of baby alpaca, its all about the connectivity. Why not a 'weaving' village being borne out of this all. Think DiB, Kiva, Wal Mart, entrepreneurs, etc.