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.
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