U.S. Pursues a New Way To Rebuild in Afghanistan

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Obama's New Strategy for Afghanistan

After three years of USAID-led Afghan reconstruction, the Obama administration plans to implement a new approach to help resuscitate Afghanistan's deteriorating agricultural economy, aimed at producing more food to improve quality of life and reversing a sense of hopelessness that has contributed to Taliban recruitment.

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Officials at USAID, which has spent almost $7.8 billion on Afghan reconstruction since 2001, maintain that their programs have been effective. They note that they have funded the construction of 1,600 miles of roads, the building or refurbishing of 680 schools and the training of thousands of civil servants. In the agricultural sector, the agency has pointed to a number of achievements: the transport of Afghan pomegranates to markets in Dubai, the opening of rural farm-supply stores and the restoration of pistachio orchards. "This program has had a remarkable success," said Bill Frej, the agency's director in Kabul.

But Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama's point man for Afghanistan policy, has a less sanguine view. The new administration, he said, needs "to fix what we have inherited."

Holbrooke intends to revamp the entire U.S. reconstruction effort, starting with agriculture aid and counternarcotics. He has decided to curtail campaigns to eradicate poppy crops -- which he believes have driven poor farmers to support the Taliban -- and restructure USAID's alternative employment programs, which together have cost the U.S. government almost $3 billion since 2004.

"In my experience of 40-plus years -- I started out working for AID in Vietnam -- this was the single most wasteful, most ineffective program that I had ever seen," he said in a recent interview. "It wasn't just a waste of money. . . . This was actually a benefit to the enemy. We were recruiting Taliban with our tax dollars."

Although farm projects lack the cachet of building schools and roads, Holbrooke and other administration officials believe that assisting Afghans in improving food production must be at the top of the U.S. reconstruction agenda. More than 80 percent of working-age males in the country are small-scale farmers. Helping them grow more food will improve the quality of their lives and -- administration officials hope -- reverse a sense of hopelessness that has contributed to Taliban recruitment.

Holbrooke's aides are still drawing up a detailed strategy for how to restructure the agriculture program. But it is already clear that there will be far more money: Congress agreed yesterday to add $100 million for agricultural reconstruction, and the administration has asked lawmakers for an additional $235 million for fiscal 2010, a more than fourfold increase from 2008.

There will also be a fundamental realignment of power in Washington when it comes to shaping development policy. Holbrooke has wrested control of the program from USAID, making it clear that the agency will now be just one of several players involved in Afghanistan. He has reached out to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has agreed to send more experts from his department to Afghanistan, and is seeking to more closely coordinate with the Defense Department, which has 350 National Guard members with farm experience serving on agricultural development teams in six provinces.

The new plan, according to officials involved in the process, will involve smaller contracts, more involvement of Afghan development organizations and more money funneled through the Afghan government. USAID's private-sector development policies will be realigned, the officials said, to include a greater focus on helping farmers increase production.

"They need the kind of soup-to-nuts agricultural support that Roosevelt gave the farmers during the Great Depression -- roads, markets, irrigation, seeds, fertilizer, educational materials," Holbrooke said. "Afghans are smart farmers. . . . They just need the right kind of help from us."

'Alternative Livelihoods'

Soon after the U.S. military overthrew the Taliban government in 2001, a debate broke out among senior Bush administration officials over the best way to rebuild a country so impoverished from decades of strife that its rates of malnutrition, illiteracy and infant mortality were among the highest in the world.

Officials at the White House and the Pentagon favored projects with a quick impact, such as schools, roads and health clinics that could be completed in a year or two and build the goodwill among the Afghan people that they believed was necessary for the American public to support a continued military deployment.

Some development specialists at USAID preferred a longer-term approach. Focus on agriculture because it is the key to economic sustainability, they said, and on "capacity building" -- training the Afghans to do things themselves. But the White House and Pentagon prevailed.