A Knight Ridder story about infrastructure in Baghdad gives another glimpse of the pitfalls of the U.S.'s top-down big (American) contractor approach:
With about $2 billion already invested, Baghdad should be sparkling, said its mayor, Alaa Mahmoud al Timimi. He hasn't been consulted on American projects, besides signatures for completed developments, and has threatened to resign if he doesn't get a larger budget to solve his city's problems. The $85 million he was allocated can't keep up with the city of 6.5 million, he said.
He's already playing catch-up. Over 12 years the city was allocated about $3 per person per year, he said.
"Baghdad is an ignored city," said Timimi, who's a civil engineer. "The people, they blame me. I need money to rebuild the capacity of water (supply) and ... (for) sewage, garbage collection, power."
Electricity lines are tangled above the streets like strands of spaghetti, supply machinery dates to 1958 and fuse boxes have been ripped from the walls in electricity stations.
"It's too slow. If I had $2 billion I would have done three to five times more," Timimi said. "The Americans told me this is our money and we will spend it towards our plans. They do it their way."
As the piece mentions, there's plenty of blame to go around--Saddam, current government corruption, etc. But the U.S.'s knee-jerk top-down non-local approach to reconstruction has hurt it. I don't have the time to get into the details at the moment, but the suffice it to say that I agree with Anthony Cordesman's assessment, reconstruction is the "forgotten dimension of the war." He went on to say:
While there were many people in individual project areas many significant contributions—and often as considerable personal risk—I saw no picture that the U.S. has a meaning plan for using the aid money it is providing, that the system is improved or become more efficient, that it is becoming more secure or less corrupt, and that we have any idea what we as a nation are doing to solve the economic and security problems of Iraqis.
There is another way--or at least an opportunity to change our emphasis on reconstruction: the Iraqification strategy. I'm not saying the U.S. should simply hand over billions to Baghdad and call it day. But giving Iraqis control of the purse-strings should be a priority.
Should there be checks to guard against corruption? Yes. Will there be plenty of corruption anyway? Yes. That's part of the cost of the strategy. But the potential gains are also big. Consider the former insurgent stronghold of Qabr Abed, where no GI has been killed for five months. The military there has capped the rebellion by being deeply engaged, doing things like creating a police force staffed by residents, and... engaging in grassroots reconstruction (or what on a bad day might be called bribes):
The American soldiers helped empower the mayor by funneling some reconstruction contracts through him, including $400,000 for a jobs program and $200,000 for a new fire station.
"We pump dollars through him as one way to give him leverage," said Maj. Tim Vidra, the battalion's departing civil affairs officer. After the mayor threatened to withhold money for jobs from neighborhoods harboring makers of roadside bombs, the bombings stopped, Major Vidra said.
This approach has complications: American officers suspect that some money was siphoned off. American officers have not confronted the mayor about their suspicions, partly out of fear of muddling a relationship with someone crucial to restoring stability in this area. "This isn't Mayberry," Colonel McCaffrey said. "There are different cultural norms here. It doesn't make it right or wrong; it just makes it reality."
Maybe I'm being too reductive or maybe I'm just ill-informed, but I see parallels with the World Bank-type follies of, say, a generation ago. Big, often bloated projects that aren't wrong in and of themselves but do poorly in opporunity cost terms. In Iraq, some big engineering projects are no doubt needed and enormously helpful. Build those. But let's also remember the potential massive benefits of something more modest: involving Iraqis and then letting them decide what needs fixing and how to do it.*
* I plan on making some actual phone calls about this, including to development specialsts who have experience with, you know, what actually works. In any case, I'd welcome any feedback or further thoughts.
