Money as a Weapon

INTERACTIVE

CERP Spending in Iraq

Search individual projects from the Commander's Emergency Response Program recorded in the Iraq Reconstruction Management System.

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In the violence-prone city of Ramadi, Army Capt. Nathan Strickland and his battalion used CERP money to hire day laborers to clear away trash and rubble. The military strategy: Get young men to pick up shovels instead of guns.

Strickland and his fellow soldiers offered Iraqis $8 a day -- comparable to what a garbageman for the city would make but not more because Iraqi officials said that if the United States paid more, none of their workers would show up for government jobs. But when few showed up for one of Strickland's work programs, others figured out why. Another U.S. military unit was offering $10 because it didn't want to bother counting out one-dollar bills. "It wasn't synced together," Strickland said. "Everyone was trying to figure out how to do it on their own."

The largest jobs program began in 2007. Sons of Iraq, as it is now called, has paid more than 100,000 Iraqis $5 to $26 per day to guard checkpoints and patrol neighborhoods. The United States has spent more than $250 million on the program so far, records show.

Petraeus has told Congress that "the salaries paid to the Sons of Iraq alone cost far less than the cost savings and vehicles not lost due to the enhanced security in local communities."

But members of Congress, military strategists and government auditors said the problem is that there is no obvious way to end the program.

In their latest report, auditors at the special inspector general's office said the program is considered a "temporary security measure" but that only 14,000 Sons of Iraq members have transitioned to become part of the Iraqi Security Force.

"The Iraqi government should be stepping up to the plate to pay them," said Raymond F. DuBois, who is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and was a top Pentagon official under former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "You've got to figure out a way to keep them on your side with the payroll, or you inject uncertainty into the situation and some of them will find employment elsewhere on the black market."

Lawmakers have begun to question CERP's seemingly endless funding. They say Iraq has failed to spend enough of its budget, which consists mainly of oil revenue, on its own reconstruction. In May, the House of Representatives proposed capping future CERP funding at twice the level the Iraqi government pitched in.

In a Senate hearing this spring, Levin recalled a recent trip to a base near Diyala. He said a senior U.S. military officer told him of a successful garbage-collection program, paid for with CERP money, and the thanks he received from an Iraqi official, who added, "As long as you are willing to pay for the cleanup, why should we?"

Will the 'Rush' Last?

David Kilcullen, who has advised Petraeus on counterinsurgency strategy and who examined CERP last year, said the payouts are like dealing heroin -- "easy development money that undercuts our efforts to improve their financial governance." He warned that the projects are a "rush" that often doesn't last.

After spending more than $270 million in CERP money on schools, hospitals and health clinics, the U.S. government cannot say how many are in use and how many have been abandoned or attacked again, according to the Government Accountability Office.

One Ramadi health-care clinic became an al-Qaeda weapons cache, according to a senior officer in the region, whose unit found enough small arms, machine guns, IED components, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds at the clinic to fill a small SUV. In Baghdad, soldiers recently hired Iraqis to rebuild a school in the violent Dora neighborhood for the third time after it was repeatedly attacked.