After pressure from the military and inquires from The Washington Post, USAID told military commanders last week that it will ensure there is no stoppage of agriculture assistance.
“AID feels bullied into this,” the senior official said. “It feels powerless to say no to the military.”
IRD officials said they have not been told that their program will be extended. So they have started to lay off staff members and shut down activities in Helmand and will begin doing the same in Kandahar over the next few weeks. Restarting operations, Slocum said, could take six to eight weeks.
Communication gaps
In the case of its program to bolster local governments, USAID’s problem stems from a failure to communicate.
The agency designed a $140 million initiative last year to help stabilize areas in the south in the wake of military operations to clear out insurgents. The new program, which was supposed to begin this spring, was aimed in part at coordinating what have been disparate and overlapping efforts to train local officials and fund small reconstruction projects. In one part of Kandahar city, USAID recently discovered that it had several contractors “doing the same thing,” one senior agency official said.
In November, USAID released an outline of the new program and solicited bids from contractors. It publicly identified the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development as its partner for the program.
But it was only after the release of that outline that USAID presented the program to senior leaders at the ministry — to ask for a single person to participate on a team evaluating bids.
The Afghans balked, saying that they had not been consulted in a substantive way during the design of the program, despite repeated declarations from senior U.S. officials that they want to work in partnership with the Afghan government. Fearful of an angry reaction from President Hamid Karzai, USAID withdrew the solicitation and spent weeks working with the ministry to revise the program.
“This delay was 100 percent preventable,” said the development specialist, who recently left USAID. “They could have reached out and worked with the ministry much, much earlier.”
The do-over will postpone the start of the program by at least four months, according to agency documents. Although USAID officials insist they will be able to expand other projects to fill the gap between the new stabilization program and an existing local-government program, which is in the process of shutting down, development specialists said the lack of a seamless transition between the two initiatives could lead critical Afghan staff members to quit, taking with them valuable institutional knowledge.
“If you’re looking at this in terms of counterinsurgency, and trying to partner and plan with the military, the civilians aren’t doing their jobs properly,” the specialist said.
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