The Foreign Service Journal, January 2010

22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 the lives and work of aid workers by “stigmatizing them as participants in a military effort.” Francisco Zamora, AFSA’s USAID vice presi- dent, says the militarization of de- velopment work should not be taken lightly. “The question is, can we actually have long-term devel- opment when the country we’re working in has not been normal- ized?” An anecdote shared by Phil Christensen, a former as- sistant USAID administrator, before the House Foreign Af- fairs Committee last March, makes the point plain. He described the challenge faced by a USAID employee in Kabul who, when he went to visit an Afghan contact a few miles from town, was accompanied by guards in an ar- mored vehicle. They were followed by another car filled with armed guards. When they got to the man’s house, Christensen said, the USAID employee was told to stay in the car while the sol- diers secured the scene. The guards even pointed their guns at the man’s family and dog, Christensen said. Only then was the USAID employee allowed to do his job. “This is no way to win hearts and minds,” Christensen said. “We would have been better off staying at home.” The Struggle for Relevance But to leave USAID out of such efforts risks further erosion of the agency’s relevancy, says Natsios. “If you are going to run a counterinsurgency campaign, like General [Stanley] McChrystal is in Afghanistan, part of that has to be stabilization. You need USAID officers to do that.” And speaking last year before the House Appropriations Committee, acting USAID Deputy Administrator James Kunder said that the experience of the provincial recon- struction teams in Afghanistan— joint development teams made up of representatives from the State Department, USAID and Defense — made it clear that development experts were needed. Still, he acknowledged, in other ways USAID person- nel were ill-prepared for the mission and needed to be equipped for their jobs as soldiers are. “We ought to look at these folks as special forces troops that need to be max- imally equipped with the best technology America has to offer,” he said. To say that there was ever a golden age for USAID, when it had the full support of Con- gress and the White House, would be a stretch. After all, foreign aid has always been a tough sell to a skepti- cal public. But if such a period ever existed, it came in the first years after USAID’s creation in 1961, when the Kennedy administration put a pre- mium on assistance to developing nations. In sharp contrast to the cur- rent, balkanized state of U.S. development efforts, Pres. Kennedy championed USAID as a uniter of then-disparate government efforts. Its early programs focused on spurring development in Latin America and on combating commu- nism in Asia, particularly in Vietnam. In 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, the agency employed 4,300 perma- nent U.S. staffers and engaged in hands-on infrastructure work, digging wells and building bridges. But even by the early 1970s, Congress was losing in- terest in foreign aid, failing repeatedly to pass authorizing legislation to direct USAID’s mission. Opposition to the Vietnam War and concerns that development work was too tied up in military initiatives were to blame. And like today, many members of Congress simply felt they could not justify a big foreign aid budget to their constituents, who saw little direct benefit from it. The need to maintain Cold War allies kept the agency going until the early 1990s, when — absent the strategic threat posed by the Soviet Union— its funding collapsed. That was also when efforts to incorporate USAID into the State Department gained momentum. In 1994, Republi- cans in Congress (backed by Vice President Al Gore) pro- posed merging USAID, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into State. Four years later, the Foreign Affairs Reform and Re- structuring Act of 1998 abolished USIA and ACDA, bring- ing most of their functions into the State Department. USAID remained independent but was placed under the authority and guidance of the Secretary of State. The revival of foreign aid after the Sept. 11, 2001, ter- rorist attacks boosted USAID’s program budget to $13 bil- lion by 2007, up more than 60 percent from a decade earlier. But the failure of staffing to keep pace left USAID overburdened. The agency, for instance, would like each of its contracting officers to manage between $10 million and $14 million in projects per year; but in 2008, the av- C O V E R S T O R Y Many members of Congress feel they can’t justify a big foreign aid budget to their constituents, who see little direct benefit from it.