Afghanistan: lessons for Indigenous policy

 

How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er

In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!

Julius Ceasar, Act three, Scene one.

 

The following extracts are taken from two articles on the Statecraft Substack (link here), a project of the Institutre for Progress (link here), a US based thinktank focused on innovation policy.

 

The first article is an interview with Laura Thomas, a former CIA case officer and chief of base in Afghanistan. It is titled How to Run a CIA Base in Afghanistan (link here). The second article is an interview with Kyle Newkirk, a former Deputy Director of Procurement for Afghanistan with USAID; the article is titled How the Government Loses a Road (link here).

 

Both articles are perspicacious and offer many more insights than I have chosen to highlight here. The extracts I include here are particularly fascinating because of the striking parallels and resonances with aspects of the formulation and delivery Commonwealth Indigenous policy, and in particular its enmeshment within a broader bureaucratic and political system. While I draw some high-level conclusions at the end of the post, I leave it to readers to discern for themselves the parallels that struck a chord.

 

The following text is from ‘How to Run a CIA Base in Afghanistan’:

Are there particular cultural challenges in Afghanistan that are difficult for CIA officers to get up to speed on?

Yes, the vast history of the country and the breakdown of tribal dynamics. Not every officer, I think, is poring over every historical book and reading everything they possibly could before they deploy. They should be, but there's just not the time. That's a real challenge. Being able to talk about the history of a person’s country, tribe, or religion with them is very valuable to building a relationship. When I could cite an obscure event that happened in their country in 1920 and ask them how they think it affected the course of their own history, there is often a real appreciation from them that I’ve taken the time to try to understand…

And this is a big challenge for any government agency. Being a generalist can be great. And sometimes it's good to take someone who's worked on one area, and move them over to another because there's a lateral thinking that goes with that.

“And now this cross-collaboration and sharing is going to make us all stronger in some cases.” Sure. That's helpful. But in other cases, you're losing a level of expertise. 

When you learn a language and you're living with people, it’s very hard not to authentically care and want to understand their way of seeing the world. Some people think case officers are only transactional: “I'm going to recruit this person, I'm going to write up an intelligence report, I'm going to give them some money, and then we're going to call it a day, and I'm going to advance in my career.” But there's usually a real personal bond and relationship that forms, and the best case officers are incredibly authentic, and authentically want to know someone else from a true curiosity standpoint, not just, “How can I leverage this for the US’ gain and for my own career gain?” 

What kinds of training are missing in foreign policy? Do folks need more history? Political science? Literature? You're saying that ideally, everyone would have this in-depth sense of the history of the country they're going into. Are there ways those kinds of trainings could be better implemented at CIA? 

Yeah, study abroad. Getting people even just paid to live and learn a language overseas. Nothing beats being in a location that you're supposed to be developing expertise on.

And having seen it, there's certainly the ivory tower. Book learning is great. I think everyone should endeavor to read and truly take in a culture, a history, religion, the people. But books, seminars, and thinkpieces will only get you so far.

It takes real human interaction to truly develop expertise. Again, you're always making trade-offs because you're trying to move quickly. You're trying to get the job done. You can't afford to give everyone this ideal training. 

This is a point of frustration at times between CIA officers on the ground and those in the policy establishment in D.C., who maybe have studied a country at the graduate and PhD level, worked on a campaign, and worked in a think tank, but have never been “on the ground” for any meaningful period of time. There wasn’t much more frustrating than a call with someone on the National Security Council (NSC) who had jumped from campaign to think tank and back, who believed they were the foremost expert on a topic. 

CIA does not make policy, it only reports the facts on the ground and makes assessments. But a number of times in my career, it was a real challenge to watch people in D.C. get things so wrong and not be able to do anything about it. 

We are facing a dearth of people who truly have knowledge on topics nowadays, because we're surging people to different areas. We're trying to cross-pollinate and that's to our detriment most of the time. 

The biggest challenge, however, is mediocrity in bureaucracy.

That all goes back to how do we restore trust in government? If anyone can give you a concise answer to that, I think they're probably lying because there's no one way. This is a multivariable problem, but I think the first step would be how do you rid a bureaucracy of mediocrity? 

And I think that all goes to, what's your reward structure? How do you incentivize people to move up the ranks? How do you hold back people who aren't really contributing? Agencies have to reform themselves in that way – or you can have Congress do it, but Congress is completely dysfunctional too these days, so that's not going to work either. 

The CIA needs fresh thinking at the mid and senior levels. Growing risk aversion is natural as one moves up through the ranks in any bureaucracy. Granted, judgment can also grow as a function of experience, but not always. The challenge is to find and promote officers at the mid and senior levels who can combine both smart risk taking and judgment…

The way to address this challenge at CIA is to implement an incentive structure that pushes quality of source/agent recruitments and operations involved in over quantity…

At CIA, the level of quality and the recruitment of human assets should be downright surgical. CIA does not need to run a lot of human sources to have outsized and exceptional insight. It takes an incredibly long time to establish such networks and the growing world of ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS) makes it exceptionally hard. But it’s doable, and there are strong officers who can navigate these challenges.

Addressing this challenge will help limit intelligence failures, but it won’t stop 100% of them. No intelligence service can, especially one that operates with democratic principles. CIA always gets the blame and rarely gets the credit – its mistakes are visible and its successes are not, mostly by design.

 

The following text is from ‘How the Government Loses a Road’:

Given that sense that this [the development of Afghanistan] was going to be a really long-term project, why did USAID and other agencies keep shelling out money for projects they couldn't oversee adequately? 

With USAID in particular, nobody ever won any awards in the government by making their budget smaller. We would just think, “We will be better next year.” …

So you've got the institutional trajectory of, “If a lot of money is good, more money is better,” and nobody gets to the end of the fiscal year without spending every bit of money that they've got. Everybody was wanting to grow programs….

… It’s all politics to a certain extent, right? Everything is really driven from the president down through the executive branch and depends on the administration. Everybody wants to show taxpayers the results, and they think, “More money will make it better and we'll be able to show more results.”

It’s not big enough and it's not sexy enough for congressional oversight committees to really dig into….

… Audits frequently identify weaknesses in planning that impair the effectiveness of USAID programs.” Talk to me about some of those failures. 

Yeah, I think that is generally true of the government's approach to foreign aid, and probably for any region or geography….

We don’t have a 10-year development roadmap, it's all on 2 or 4-year cycles, really tied to our election cycles….

The decision making is not strategic, it becomes extremely tactical. The programs that get funding largely depend on whoever the ambassador is or whoever the mission director is. USAID does not actually implement the programs, it’s a contracting organization….

…. At the end of the day, USAID doesn’t do any of the work they program the money for. We’re either hiring contractors or NGOs to go out and execute these programs. All that USAID really is, is a contracting organization that tries to funnel money into things that they think will possibly affect American foreign policy. Often the linkage between the programs and our foreign policy isn’t very clear. Every time you get new leadership, things can change. 

And the contract periods are not very long…. So often when things don't get completed, it's because we're not actually taking a long enough view. 

The 2008 GAO report on road construction talks about the Afghan government’s inability to hold up its end of the bargain on maintaining roads, the DoD's inability to locate roads, and USAID's inability to fund useful road projects… Why did we keep funneling American taxpayer money to multi-year projects that we knew were bad places to park it? 

You're right. It was obvious that this wasn’t working very well by the second term of the Bush administration, but they were so invested in it that they weren't going to take their foot off the gas. When Obama was elected, it became, “Iraq: bad war. Afghanistan: good war. We’re gonna do the surge.” We had the surge in troops, but there was also a diplomatic surge, so more money, more foreign aid.

By the end of the Bush administration, they thought it would be someone else’s problem, and then Obama doubled down in his first term. They pared it back a little bit in his second term, but he was committed for eight years. So now you have 16 years of, “I'm not willing to say that my choices were wrong.” Until Trump, nobody really asked if it was working.

Then you got this amazingly idiosyncratic presidential administration that was really skeptical about what we were doing internationally. You wouldn’t have expected it, but they ended up asking a lot of the right questions.

From Bush to Obama, there was politics and inertia. It was just easier to keep doing the same thing than to ask difficult questions and do major course correction. 

You’ve given some good reasons for suboptimal procurement. Could things have gone differently or were we always doomed to have rampant corruption and inability to locate roads and oversee projects? 

I tend to be maybe more positive about this than maybe I should be. I think things could have gone differently if we had a clear sense of what we were trying to accomplish, a rational sequence for doing it, and, frankly, a lot less money…

If we had clear aims and a slower ramp and didn’t also have to manage Iraq as well, we could have prioritized what we thought were the key things, because there was so much to do. We were trying to rebuild the government, provide some stability and coalesce around Karzai, redo the banking system, redo land tenuring, build the ring road, the Kajaki Dam hydroelectric project, all at the same time. We undertook too much. 

 

Conclusion

The parallels between the bureaucratic processes that operated in Afghanistan and some aspects of Australian Indigenous policy are obvious to anyone with any familiarity with how Australia’s federal and state and territory bureaucracies operate. The trade-off between the need for process to ensure effective delivery and hopefully accountability, and the propensity of process to stifle innovation and a focus on substantive outcomes is very real.

There is scope for agency level reforms, and indeed wider cross agency reforms such as we see in the Priority Reforms at the core of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. But this potential is not being grasped in relation to the Priority Reforms, and nor is it happening more broadly. This suggests to me that we have a deeper and more important problem that resides within our system of politics.

Any attempt at a diagnosis of the problems besetting our political system would inevitably be partial. The symptoms are clear: mediocre and deeply ineffective oversight of the Executive arm by the Parliament (due to influence of political parties within our electoral system), extraordinary levels of influence by interest groups, shallow levels of oversight by the media, and virtually non-existent levels of substantive transparency by Governments.

The solutions are to fix the problems listed above, but feasible pathways through the self-serving systems that dominate our public policies are less obvious. It is time we tried innovative approaches given that the present structures are not working. For example, if we truly value democracy, we would (as Nicolas Gruen has long argued link here) make much greater use of deliberative democracy at all levels of our public decision making.