Post-war reconstruction efforts have had dicey history
By Joe Stephens & David B. Ottaway
WASHINGTON: From Haiti to Bosnia to East Timor, the United States and the United Nations have stumbled time and again while pressing forward ambitious programmes designed to keep the peace and deliver democracy to war-pocked landscapes.
Lawlessness, spotty oversight and ethnic strife all have vexed past rebuilding efforts, according to audits and reports by public and private institutions.
In Afghanistan, where US forces intervened 18 months ago, security remains so precarious that a recent federal analysis concluded that auditors may be unable to track the spending of US tax dollars. So far, $500 million has been paid out and an additional $1.5 billion is earmarked over the next two years.
“The risks are high” for illegal spending, misleading bookkeeping and project failure, according to a March 11 memorandum prepared by the inspector general’s office of the US Agency for International Development (AID).
Similar risks loom in Iraq, where the stakes are greater. The Bush administration’s nation-building vision there is the boldest since the United States rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II. Analysts believe it may cost as much as $20 billion a year to fund reconstruction and maintain a US military presence.
A recent study by international security experts described Iraq’s reconstruction as a “test case” by which the Muslim world will judge US intentions worldwide.
Months before the US invaded Iraq, analysts began cautioning the Bush administration to avoid what one report termed “a number of consistent mistakes and pitfalls” encountered in previous rebuilding efforts.
“We have the opportunity to learn from past cases,” said the January 2003 report by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies and the nonprofit Association of the United States Army.
Afghanistan showed the essential need for security and accountability. Administrators of AID programmes in Kabul are barred from leaving their compound without high-level approval and a heavily armed military escort, the inspector general’s report noted. Even then, bandits, landmines and fractured roads make travel difficult or impossible.
One consultant recently wrote in a private assessment, obtained by The Washington Post, that security issues have made it “almost impossible” for US-backed education officials to work in 24 of the nation’s 34 provinces. An International Red Cross worker was stopped along a roadway March 26 and shot 20 times, becoming the first foreign aid worker killed since the Taliban’s fall. Continuing attacks have forced some humanitarian groups to withdraw altogether.
“These risks will remain high for the foreseeable future,” the report concluded.
“Security has yet to be achieved in Afghanistan and that’s the issue we’re struggling with in Iraq,” said Michael Delaney, humanitarian aid director for Oxfam America, which has withdrawn personnel from parts of Afghanistan. “There was an under- investment in security in Afghanistan. That’s fundamental to be able to do development there, or in Iraq.”
In Bosnia, some US mistakes involved simple dollars and cents.
Congressional audits in 1997 and 2000 found that the US Army had lost control of costs run up by its private contractor, Brown and Root Services Corporation, a division of Halliburton Company. Since renamed KBR, the contractor was hired to prepare food, sort mail, build camps, generate power, fix trucks and clean laundry for US peacekeeping forces.
The audits found that KBR contract workers were often idle and had inadequate training and oversight. Workers cleaned some offices as many as four times a day, the audits found, and Army demands for quick construction forced the contractor to fly $14 plywood sheets in from the United States, increasing each sheet’s cost to $86. The company disputed the findings.
The CSIS report lays out 10 concrete recommendations for rebuilding Iraq, each informed by what the report calls “lessons learned” in other regions.
“Certainly, none of these have been shining examples of success,” said CSIS analyst Bathsheba Crocker.
Among the recommendations:
* In 1999, one UN official alone was responsible for recruiting more than 4,000 civil servants for missions in Kosovo and East Timor. The hiring lag created an initial law enforcement vacuum. As recruitment dragged, former Kosovo Liberation Army officers seized government control, creating an ongoing problem.
* Plan to handle retribution. The first NATO peacekeepers stationed in Kosovo were unprepared for waves of “score-settling violence.”
* Reestablish the local justice system. In East Timor, a prison shortage forced authorities to free career criminals. In Kosovo, the UN’s delay in bringing in international judges and prosecutors continues to plague the justice system today, and has thwarted efforts to tackle rampant organized crime.
* Find the right power-sharing balance with the locals. Exclusion of local residents from decision-making in Kosovo and East Timor has been blamed for slowing the development of democracy. Conversely, in Afghanistan, a “light footprint” approach in support of President Hamid Karzai has been criticized as evidence of inadequate international commitment to reconstruction.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.
