A promising program involving mineral wealth exploration and job-creation in Afghanistan, being underwritten by a Pentagon task force, is now an object of a bureaucratic turf war between USAID and State Department on one side and the Pentagon on the other. That’s just too bad. When a government agency would rather be territorial than support the good work of its neighbor, public service loses its meaning.
At issue is the US Congress’s cutting off of funding for this DOD task force -- composed largely of folks who have worked in the private sector and are now engaged in business development projects in Afghanistan -- and transfer their functions to USAID. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Brinkley, director of the program, has quit in protest. Key members of his group have done the same.
USAID and State want more accountability from these projects and the people that run them. They complain about the group’s sense of independence and the secretiveness behind their work, just going about doing things their ways.
But such is the virtue of capitalism! It thrives when it is not restricted!
As Brinkley puts it, “We do capitalism. We’re about helping companies make money,” and ‘shifting his group’s work to USAID will smother an entrepreneurial organization in a risk-averse agency that is more oriented toward providing development assistance than brokering business deals.’ Indeed. Let the market flourish in Afghanistan. To the folks who make this happen, let’s leave them alone and let them do their work!
A good test of whether a US agency is contributing towards achieving results in places like Afghanistan is for it to ask itself this question: am I part of the problem or part of the solution?
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