Some of you may have caught the New York Times opinion piece by Glenn Zorpette, who has been covering electrical power issues for two decades, urging that a USAID power project in Afghanistan be turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers. Zorpette is right that the project is troubled, but he is wrong about the solution.The story of woe he recounts is not limited to electricity. Just talk to AED, Louis Berger, or Deloitte. But arguing that Afghanistan is a tough environment does not absolve U.S agencies from repeated errors.The problem isn’t USAID per se, although the agency may lack the capacity to run large infrastructure projects in conflict areas. The problem is that political imperatives consistently trump development objectives. The State Department, Congress, and the Afghan government pressure USAID to undertake certain activities and to do them in prescribed ways, i.e., get electricity up here and roads built there, and do it through Afghan organizations and government ministries with all their reported corruption problems.Zorpette is correct that the Army Corps is shielded from these political pressures and consequently has been able to complete its projects faster. But that does not mean that the Army Corps should do development. USAID may not be an infrastructure agency, but the Army Corps isn’t a development agency.The problem is not a particular agency or a particular type of project. Rather it is letting politics trump sound professional judgments about what can work and what’s appropriate. This seems to be a greater risk in countries that are in conflict or of perceived high strategic value to the United States.A better remedy would be to free USAID to pursue the type of development that fits the country and U.S. foreign policy objectives without micromanagement from State, Congress, or even President Karzai. (I’m not rejecting country ownership, but development agencies need to be free to reject projects that are either unsound, not viable, or better-suited to other domestic or international actors.)I’d like to see USAID’s new evaluation system take a good look at what it’s being called to do in Afghanistan. If it concludes that doing infrastructure projects in Afghanistan is too risky from a development perspective, AND that decision doesn’t get overruled by other U.S. government actors for political reasons, well…hell will have frozen over.
