Episode 48. Development as a Tool of National Security in Conflict Zones Part I: The Case of Afghanistan with USAID Senior Leaders Alonzo Fulgham and James Bever

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00): From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is The General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in discussions about their partnerships overseas in tackling some of our toughest national security problems. You can find all our podcasts, information on our guests, and much more on our website, generalambassadorpodcast.org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, and I'm the producer and host of the series. Today, our conversation will be on how development is used as a tool of national security, especially in conflict zones, such as Afghanistan. We are joined by two senior former leaders of the United States Agency for International Development. Alonzo fulgham and James Bever Alonzo Fulgham was appointed by President Obama as the Acting Administrator, or CEO, of the United States Agency for International Development in 2009. Previously, he was the Chief Operating Officer of the agency. During his long career in the foreign service, he served as the Mission Director to Afghanistan, as well as in Swaziland, Serbia, Montenegro, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. He is currently the Executive Vice Vresident at ViaTech corporation in McLean, Virginia, Jim Bever served for 35 years as a Foreign Service Officer with USAID. In Washington, his senior positions included being the Acting Administrator for Legislative and Public Affairs, Director of the Task Force for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Middle East. Overseas, he was the Mission Director to Afghanistan, Egypt, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and Ghana. He is currently a consultant in international development. Alonzo Fulgham, Jim Bever, welcome to a new episode of The General and the Ambassador. Today, we're going to take a different approach to looking at how our diplomats and our military work together overseas. Previously in this series, we've focused on how ambassadors and US military commanders use diplomatic and military tools to advance US national security interests. Today, we're going to talk about how our senior leaders use another tool in the national security toolkit, that is development assistance. We'll spend some time exploring how this tool is used in particular in conflict zones, such as Afghanistan. Our guests today are leading US development experts who are veterans of the United States Agency for International Development, Alonzo Fulgham and Jim Bever. As I noted in my introduction, they served in leadership positions, both in Washington and in many missions overseas. The US Agency for International Development or USAID is an agency of the US government which administers development and disaster assistance around the globe. It has a budget of approximately $20 billion and operates in over 100 countries. The agency reports to the secretary of state, and USAID officers are Foreign Service Officers who are development experts. I want to start with some basics, Alonzo and Jim, can you explain to our listeners how USAID fits within the US national security strategy, and can you describe in general the work that USAID does around the world?

Alonzo Fulgham (03:35): Absolutely. First of all, Deborah, I want to thank you for your leadership and providing the United States Agency for International Development an opportunity to talk about its role as the third leg of the stool of our national security. And I think a lot of our compadres go without a lot of recognition about the work they do, especially in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. And this is a great opportunity today to showcase the work that we do in support of our national security. Most of our work has been, over the years, in health and education. We spent quite a bit of time working on violent extremism, disease threats, transnational crime stabilization, fragile states. We've done it all. We've worked directly with governments. We've done a lot of work with the private sector, but more than anything else, we are the frontline when things go wrong in countries. We don't always get the credit for it, but our people, whenever there's a situation where our country's in a situation where instability is creeping in, our people are called to the front line.

James Bever (04:35): I would just add to what Alonzo said specifically with the case of Afghanistan, for example. It was literally in mid to late December, after the US military went in and dispersed the Taliban that USAID officers flew in to the North of the country, literally on the heels of our Green Beret equivalents up in the North, and immediately started working with the local communities and figuring out in our own national security interests and in the prosperity and development interests and stability interests of the Afghan people, how to get school children back into schools. They had been banned by the Taliban and it was our US Foreign Assistance Agency that got in there and miraculously, together with the publishers next door in Pakistan, we were able to produce literally millions of textbooks and get those school children back into schools right away in the winter after the Taliban were dispersed. A simple and pragmatic example of what we did immediately to start getting things back to normal.

Alonzo Fulgham (05:43): When we were asked to come into Afghanistan as part of the national security strategy for our country, we were asked to do some simple things. One is, at the time, we were trying to figure out how to build a free society. So we talked about the rule of law. We wanted to support the Loya Jurga, which we helped set up. We had the constitutional convention, then elections, and then we had to help stand up the new ministries. And then as Jim articulated, we wanted to get girls back in school. We wanted to help women, accelerated learning programs, the textbooks, the teacher training institute, and then free press and media. We set up radio stations. So I think people talk about USAID, they don't understand the complexity of what we're doing. A lot of people think foreign aid, we're throwing some food off the truck, then we're feeding people. But when you start talking about standing up these types of programs, and from a policy standpoint, we're trying to create stability within the country. So yes, we have great diplomacy. Yes, we have the best military in the world. But without the stability of the things that Jim just laid out, you can't begin to build a society. And so you need technicians. You need people who have the capability and the skills to be able to help the government start to develop those components in order to start to move forward. And as Jim said, in 2001 to 2002, with Jim Kunder, our fearless former Deputy Administrator went over as part of the initiating team. Those are the things that they laid out that we should be working on from a policy standpoint, to complement what the military was doing as well as the diplomacy effort that was underway.

Amb. McCarthy (07:13): I just want to put in perspective where the Afghanistan, massive program, fits. As I understand it from the latest consolidated data from 2018, the Middle East and Africa, are the two regions, which received the most assistance today from USAID. In the Middle East, Jordan is now at the top followed by Afghanistan, then Syria, then Yemen, and Iraq. In Africa, for example, it's Ethiopia followed by South Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Congo, and Somalia. When you both served as Mission Directors in Afghanistan, you were asked, as I understand, to do incredible work on a very short term basis, can you give us a sense of the enormity of this challenge that faced the agency and how it adapted to it?

Alonzo Fulgham (08:03): I wanted the audience just to imagine walking into a country like Afghanistan and think of it as a classroom experience. We've got a population of 28.5 million, $4.8 billion GDP. The GDP per capita was $250. They had been in isolation from the rest of the world for 25 years. The infant mortality rate was the highest in the world. The literacy rate was 50% for men and 20% for women. The government operating budget was basically about $600 million, and that was all donor support. Labor force by sector, 80% was agriculture, 10% was industry. And the average wage was about $240 a month. A shopkeeper made $131 and the farmers made about $50 a month. So I give you that data just to give you a sense of what we were up against as an agency and what we were being asked to do in regards to implementing probably one of the most complex development programs in the history of the agency.

James Bever (09:07): Once our military had dispersed the Taliban and began to establish some ground rules in the major cities that would provide some force protection for the population, we were able to start branching out and working with those who we had returned, Afghans, who had returned from the diaspora, as well as some leaders who were still there in the country to map out a strategy with them, it was their strategy, for how to get themselves back on their feet. And we were there to support them. There were some very basic challenges, again, just to take Alonzo's description. This was a country which had the highest risk in the world of a child dying within the first 30 days of being born, among the highest rates in the world of a child dying within the first five years of life, a country in which to become pregnant as a woman was a serious risk for her life, among the highest maternal death rates in the world. Simple basics like that. We had a famine early warning system underway, tens of thousands of Afghans ran the risk of starving to death because they lived above the mountain passes, and the roads, there was no way to keep them clear when the snows came, it's a very mountainous region, especially in the North. So we had to implement, simultaneously, immediate humanitarian assistance operations. Remember this was like December, January, February, March, and then into the next year, people had used up their grain, their seed grains. So we had to get them seed grain so they could plant wheat for the coming season. I mean, we had to think six days ahead, but also six months ahead, simultaneously, and get them the equipment and the supplies that they needed so they could at least minimally feed themselves. The highway, the main highway for the country, which was called the ring road that we originally built in the early 1960s, and frankly, the Soviets also helped build part of it, mostly for future use by their tanks, went about 1000 miles around the country. That ring road had been bombed out, blown up, washed out from culverts and lack of maintenance during those 20 and 30 years. There was hardly any trade in the country. If a woman got ill and needed to get to a hospital, if the hospital even had supplies, she was probably going to bleed to death within the first four hours because she couldn't get to a decent road to get her to the local, even local secondary referral hospitals. I'll finish by just saying, oh, by the way, during 20 years plus civil war, almost every warlord in the country, major warlord, had come up his own currency. So one of the very first things we did was to come up with a national Afghan currency, the Afghani, print them, secure them, and then in collaboration with our friends in the military, helicopter, literally, bags of cash around the country to secure the banks again so they could function. So commerce could get started again, and people could exchange their warlord currency for now basically US-dollar-backed Afghani national currency. So this just gives you a range of the kinds of challenges we were up against.

Alonzo Fulgham (12:30): I think the most important thing for the audience to recognize is that there were three stages, once the policy had been set, that we were going to go back in as part of the US government effort to rebuild Afghanistan. So from 2001 to 2005, we were in what they call relief and stabilization. So basically trying to get the lights back on, stop people from freezing to death, as Jim mentioned, and then create the humanitarian assistance. You've got your infrastructure and your reconstruction, you're getting social services and provisions. The health system was in a shambles as Jim talked about. And then we started talking about what economic reconstruction would look like and then support for the Bonn process. Once again, you've got to be a part of the political process in order to make sure the other donors are supporting the efforts that we're involved in and the country as well. And then we went to stage two, which is reconstruction. When you start talking about stabilizing environments for development, democratic governance, broad citizen participation, and better education. And then hopefully what we were dreaming about at that point, as Jim talked about, was how do we get to sustainable development? Which means we have a secure and stable society, effective legitimate government and a market-based licit economy. That's what we were all thriving for back in 2002, three, four, five, and six, as we started to put together the program that was going to be needed in order to get us to stability in the country.

James Bever (13:47): Yeah. Let me just add one other element to what Alonzo just noted. No country is an island unto itself. Every nation has to have trade. It has to have exchange with its neighbors; neither disease nor environmental pollution, nor terrorist elements, respect boundaries. And so one of the other dreams we had with the Afghan leaders was to be able to rebuild that connective tissue with their neighboring countries in all directions, but especially in our case for foreign policy perspective, with Pakistan, as well as we Central Asian republics in the North with whom they traditionally traded in oil and other commodities, and eventually get them to be able to receive electricity from countries to the North or through Pakistan for their power system. The other is to be able to plug in eventually to the international financial community so that they weren't dependent just on American taxpayer largess, which of course is in our interest as well. So they could eventually start borrowing on subcommercial terms from the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, and then eventually receive International Monetary Fund loans and eventually commercial borrowing just like every country does and to be able to issue bonds, so it could financially stand on its own feet. And it has made remarkable progress over 18 years in that regard.

Amb. McCarthy (15:11): I wanted to ask in terms of the stabilization programs, particularly at the beginning, how did this work in practice on the ground with the US military? How did you coordinate with the military in order to be able to start the initial basic humanitarian projects that you carried out?

Alonzo Fulgham (15:29): It was a process by which we learned by doing. It was our first time, I think, in theater with our military in an active of war zone, which is very difficult because as they started to get into the clear build and hold, they were in places that we weren't able to expand them as quickly because we didn't have the personnel. So I think it kind of frustrated the military, rightfully so, because they felt like they were doing their jobs and the civilians were not. I think, in the places where we were able to provide our assistance and get our people in place, I think it went very, very well. And I think one of the conversations that I had with General Freakley at the time who was the commanding general on the ground, and also General Dave Barno, another fine military officer, they understood our issue. And that's why they started to come back to Washington, from a policy standpoint, and said, we've got to get the civilians more money, which is what our fearless leader, Andrew Nazionale Natsios, had been telling everyone, that if you want USAID to expand quickly, we need more money because we don't have the personnel. We're not on a war footing. I think overall, when you look at the things that got done, as Jim talked about, the electricity grid, when you looked at the things we were doing in regards to getting schools and clinics built, I think we were able to be moderately successful early on and work directly with the military in a very hands on way. And I think our work in the PRTs gave the central government more reach to provide services. Things were getting done and giving the Afghan people a sense that the US government had not abandoned them.

Amb. McCarthy (16:56): And to jump in here, I want to explain that the PRTs are the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. We did a podcast on PRTs, so I just wanted to explain, because we always go back to our lingo, and I always have to jump in.

Alonzo Fulgham (17:06): It doesn't take long.

James Bever (17:09): So just to give a feel for how we can operate through our US foreign aid agency, in these kinds of situations. We were embedded with the US Marines, literally from almost the beginning, as soon as they established control in Kabul, for example, our Acting Deputy Administrator at the time, Jim Kunder, who Alonzo mentioned, and for whom we both worked, he was there in early January. Now remember, the Taliban were dispersed around the 10th of December. Within about three weeks, not only did we have people up north starting the schools up again, but we had Jim in Kabul, sleeping in the bunker shelter with the US Marines, underneath the ground because they were taking sniper fire, rockets, and so on. When I got there, even a year later, we were sleeping on the embassy compound in the bunk house with highly armed security guards for President Karzai. Every man had his special machine gun under his pillow, except me, the AID guy. So I felt pretty safe as long as I didn't snore too loud. But, uh, when we would base our people then in these Provincial Reconstruction Teams, they started out being based at the US airport in Kandahar, for example, in the South, which was the center of the Taliban. We actually, USAID had built that airport 40 years earlier. When I took the Administrator out there, Andrew Natsios, we came across a pile of rubble. And when we looked down in the rubble, there was the sign, "Kandahar Airport, built by the people of the United States," signed Dwight David Eisenhower in 1959, 1960, something like that. And our guys were there sleeping, literally in hammocks, inside the military tents in order that we could have the closest coordination with our military colleagues and our State Department and other US government agencies. There were challenges at times because of the pace, as Alonzo said, for our military, they were into what's called kinetic action, and we were into recovery action and humanitarian action and preventive action, and eventually found a way to get that rhythm together. By the time I got there, and I think it had been continuing before I got there, our new ambassador, Ambassador Zalmay Khalil,zad who went on to be our Ambassador to Iraq later. I was a direct report to him every morning at 7:45 or 8:00. We had a country team, and I'm sure our audience knows what a country team is by now, but what really impressed me was that our US military leaders were there along one side of that table, a three-star or four-star, usually three-star general, in my time, David Barno was one of them, to the two-star and one-star, and then behind them were one-stars and colonels to fully coordinate with the civilian side of the American government in country on the other side. And that was the Deputy Chief of Mission and then myself, in rank, and then down the table. So we coordinated for about an hour, 45 minutes or so every single morning, that's where the tone and the policy got set in the field was right there that morning under the plenipotentiary of the President of United States in the form of our ambassador.

Alonzo Fulgham (20:20): The reason that the relationships went so well in the early years, and we were able to work out differences, because clearly as Jim pointed out, there were differences, but that meeting in the morning where you have an ambassador that is making your civilians a part of the team, in essence being able to sit up the grownup table and understand their pain, and you're sitting there telling them what you can or cannot do, oh, by the way, we can't do this, but let us get back to you. So there was a real interface and a real understanding, and that's why I mentioned General Freakley. In the beginning, we had a bit of a difference about a couple of things, and then I just finally said to him, I said, "General Freakley, if you don't tell me how to do development, I won't tell you how to do targeting." And we had a big laugh about it. Ever since we had that little brush up, he came to me and said, "Look, Alonzo, I'm having some problems in this particular province. If you can get a couple of your development guys, just to go up and talk to them and find out what their problems are and see if we can get some resources moved to that particular area," or "We're thinking about drilling some wells," and we'd say, "No, that's probably not a good idea in that particular area, because you're going to have this problem later on when the rain comes." So there was really more of a compassionate kind of, we don't know what we don't know, but we trust our AID colleagues, and we were able to build up that relationship because of the interagency work that was being done on the ground.

Amb. McCarthy (21:34): Though at senior leadership levels, it's perhaps easier to work out differences, I think below that there were tensions and differences. And then, my understanding is that DoD also had the Commander's Fund, which was funding some stabilization projects. How were tensions and differences resolved? And if you can give an example of where things almost went awry, but they were brought back together or they were not brought back together, and how you coordinated this flow of funds from another agency whose expertise is not in development?

Alonzo Fulgham (22:10): That fund was set up specifically to allow the commanders to do projects on the ground, in the moment. It was more or less walk-around money. And in that environment, it created a bit of distortion from a development perspective because we were trying to get projects in place that could be sustained. Meanwhile, they were trying to placate the villagers or the Afghans in those villages, so they wouldn't feel as though they were being abandoned. And that's where the friction came in. The issue that I always had with this was that I thought the military was trying to do what they thought was best at the time. And we didn't have enough planning on the front side to talk to them about why this was a bad idea, because if we had gotten to the table two years before or a year before we went into Afghanistan and started working through all the channels saying why the commander's fund is not a good idea without running it through a development prism, it would have made all the difference in the world. And that's why timing is everything in this business. I made the comment, and it wasn't a flippant comment, but you've got to have the people who are going to be responsible for doing these kinds of things at the grownup table, from the beginning, because they can get, meaning AID could get their apparatus up and running and in place so that when the military did move out or they were going to do things in some of these places, we could tell them upfront, here's what we can do. Here's what we can't do. Or we could mobilize ourselves quickly in order to be able to keep up with the rhythm, or the tempo as they like to say, of the actual operations that are going on in the middle of a war.

James Bever (23:36): And usually our military only had funds where they could go into an area and rebuild what had been there before. Our military colleagues were so frustrated by that. Let's say an old bridge had washed out in these steep mountain valleys, in order to continue to demonstrate with gravitas to the local people that we were here to stay, this was an operation of resolve, our military would go in and they would rebuild that bridge, but they were not allowed to rebuild the bridge anywhere, upstream or downstream, even if it made better sense to build it upstream or downstream because of the water flow at heavy times. And it was maddening to them. So I, as the AID guy said, well, we could do an interagency transfer of USAID funds to the Department of Defense. There are ways to do that and we'll try to help you out. When the commander's response program funds started up, our military officers and, you know, we understood this, they had to make quick decisions to win the trust and the support of local populations. And it of course earned them a lot of benefits in the sense that what they were starting to find is people would come up to them, children and others, and start to tell them where the caches of secret ammunition and artillery shells being used for improvised explosive devices, IEDs, were being stored. What was frustrating for them and frustrating for us is they would meet with a number of village leaders and they would decide to build a school there and maybe they'd spend $50,000 or more, $100,000 to build a school. And that military leader would finish his deployment and go home. And a new one would come. And when the new one came, they found that the school wasn't being used for the purposes to which it was intended, it was being used by a relative of the village chief who had gotten married and brought his new wife and their farm animals and everything else, and that's what they were using the school for. And we would explain to the new military leader, the reason was because your local commander that was here before you did not know that it's important to coordinate with us because we're working with the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Health, in the case of clinics, if they built a clinic, to make sure there were nurses or they were teachers, or there were supplies, there were medicines, there were refrigerators for the vaccines and it all worked into a system that can then be maintained. And I have to give our military credit, once those light bulbs went off and they started to understand, they started teaching their own military to pay attention to these USAID guys and gals to coordinate for better planning, because they may have lost a soldier or two's lives or limbs trying to get that stuff done. They wanted to make sure that it made a difference to the Afghan people in the longer run as well. So we eventually figured out how to begin to work together for the American and Afghan common good. It took a while.

Amb. McCarthy (26:29): This concludes part one of our discussion with Alonzo Fulgham and Jim Bever on the use of development in our national security toolkit. Stay tuned for part two. This has been a new episode in the series The General and the Ambassador: a Conversation. Thank you so much for listening. Our series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites and on our website. We welcome all input and suggestions, and you can email us directly general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.