Dear Colleague,
Earlier this month, the Center’s study group on U.S. development strategy in Pakistan reached a milestone Molly Kinder, Wren Elhai and I have been working towards for many months – with many of you who are receiving this letter. Our report, Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan, was released in front of a full house here in Washington, D.C. I encourage you to watch the launch event on video. David Sanger (of the New York Times) and David Rothkopf (of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) moderated great discussions on the U.S. aid program and on non-aid tools to promote shared economic growth in Pakistan. Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani delivered compelling and entertaining closing remarks.
I and my colleagues have been gratified with the reception our report has received so far, and have signs already that its visibility will add to the potential for our proposed approach and our specific recommendations to take root. In this blog post, Wren Elhai rounds up some of what people have said about it, including USAID’s public response. Of course, if you have not yet read the report for yourself, I invite you to do so and let us know what you think.
Last Friday, we bid a fond farewell to Molly Kinder, who very ably managed CGD’s work on Pakistan beginning in late 2009. She has moved on to a position at USAID, where we hope and trust that she will be as effective an advocate for good development policy from within government as she has been from the outside. Wren Elhai, a co-author of the report and the pen behind much of CGD’s written output on Pakistan over the past 18 months, also plans to depart in late July. Wren has been an invaluable member of our team, and we are sad to see him move on to his next project.
With the departure of Molly and Wren, I asked Milan Vaishnav to take on Molly’s responsibility for managing our Pakistan work, including continuing, though at a lower level of intensity, to bring together the Pakistan Study Group, and leading the effort to ensure our ideas and the recommendations receive a broad and influential audience. Milan will rejoin CGD as a post-doc fellow; his work on Pakistan will be in addition to his broader research on political corruption in South Asia.
Moving forward, we here at the Center will continue working to shed light on U.S. development policy in Pakistan and will strive to see some of the recommendations we make in our report implemented. In the coming months, we plan on developing some of the study group’s ideas in greater detail and turning those ideas into practice. Please contact me or Milan on any communication on this work—Milan can be reached at mvaishnav@cgdev.org or (202) 416-4021.
Meanwhile, my thanks to all of you who have contributed so much to our work already.
Sincerely,
Nancy Birdsall
PS—If you live in the D.C. area, on June 15 we will be hosting a screening of the 2010 film Bhutto, together with a discussion with Mark Siegel, a long-time friend and advisor of Benazir Bhutto and the film’s producer. Please join us if you can!
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