Every one of these project ideas had to be funded, and because they were local initiatives that usually meant Embassy approval for QRF money. Most QRF-funded projects entailed three stages of review. After the ePRT completed a multipage grant application and a multipage summary, the proposal was entered into a database to be reviewed by a committee at the Embassy. From there, proposals went to Washington, where a separate committee reevaluated them. The review committee’s questions illustrated the blind-leading-the-blind style of management. Instead of asking why an ePRT wanted to spend $22,000 to produce a stage play in Iraq, the committee asked why the play’s director needed five production assistants. Project budgets in dollars might get sent back for the ePRT to do the simple conversion into Iraqi dinars, adding weeks to the processing time. Rarely was a project rejected for lack of merit. The ePRTs quickly learned to focus on form, knowing little would be said about substance. The review process substituted petty corrections for any semblance of broader policy guidance. Such guidance came in the form of nested series of reports, murky documents we combed through for clues. Here’s one:
QRF proposals must be tied to the recently updated PRT Work Plans, per OPA and QRF policy. Proposal themes in the database are based off the old PRT Maturity Models and will continue to be used as broad indicators of targeted impact. The QRF Team will coordinate with the OPA Plans Office to ensure proposals fall in line with PRT strategic objectives.
New regulations in late 2009 required 50 percent Iraqi participation in any project that benefited the government of Iraq, when paid for by State (the military had no such restrictions somehow). The change came after our own Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that the government of Iraq had posted a $52 billion budget surplus between 2004 and 2009.9 The new policy was implemented to create local buy-in and also to lessen the burden on the American taxpayer. The State Department determined this 50 percent cost share could be “in kind.” The Iraqis wouldn’t need to come up with actual cash for their half but instead could contribute goods or services. It would be like, when your HMO asks for a co-pay, your offering to wash dishes in the cafeteria instead. A better analogy would be your telling the HMO your time is worth $40 an hour and your co-pay is already covered by time spent in the waiting room.
Since the Iraqis had no intention of paying for the things we wanted to do, the State Department grew increasingly creative in deciding what constituted an in-kind contribution. This was not out of a desire to help Iraq; waiting for the locals to pony up cash or supplies made it difficult to complete projects neatly within one’s twelve-month tour of service, a real bar to getting pats on the head from one’s boss. For example, my ePRT proposed spending $22,705 to purchase a set of legal reference books for the Mahmudiyah courthouse.10 The Iraqis needed to come up with about $11,000. Since getting the courthouse to hand over actual cash proved impossible, we accepted in-kind payment as follows:
The Government of Iraq will provide an equipped library room with electricity, bookshelves, furniture, a computer, a heating and cooling system and an expert librarian. The life expectancy of the books is at least ten years. Although the amount contributed in housing, utilities, etc. for the books is difficult to quantify, an average salary for a librarian is $400 a month. The salary for a year is $4,800 and thus the salary for ten years without a pay increase is $48,000. At a minimum, the GOI is contributing $48,000 to this project.
By quickly calculating the books would last ten years, adding in the value of an existing unused room actually built by Saddam, and multiplying the fictional salary of a librarian who never would exist, we discovered that the Iraqi “contribution” was $48,000, or roughly four times what we had asked them for. But of course the only money spent was American. It was almost as if we ended up owing them money.
In another case, we identified the need to train the water plant operators of the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works.11 Textbooks were expensive, and the cost was over $38,000, including $50 a week per student for lunch (we could never get people to show up without a giveaway of some kind). That meant the Iraqis owed us $19,000 for their co-pay. Instead of cash, the ministry agreed to continue to pay its employees their full salaries while they attended our training. Cost to the US, $38,000; cost to Iraq, salaries they were going to pay anyway. This satisfied the cost-share requirement. Plus we bought lunch. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), in a report to Congress entitled Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, showed that it at least retained a sense of humor about our spending, quoting Dickens’s Great Expectations: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.”
There were other absurdities. We were not allowed to order things through the Internet. When we needed something not available in Iraq, such as veterinary supplies, we had to pay an intermediary to order it through the Internet, for which he charged a 30 percent fee. QRF also did not allow shipping via diplomatic pouch or the military postal system, so our 30 percent vendor tagged on a 100 percent markup for shipping and local customs costs, including bribes. The QRF rules thus increased the price of Internet-bought goods by 130 percent. Iraqi businesses sprung up just to make a profit ordering things for us off the Web. A meth habit might have been cheaper.
Then there were the work-arounds. During the month of Ramadan devout Muslims fast during the day, with an Iftar, a big meal, after dark. People often turned this into a social affair, and businesses hosted Iftars for their clients. It seemed like a decent idea that we at the ePRT might host an Iftar or two. Here’s the guidance on using QRF money for such a purpose:
Regulations prohibit the use of QRF funds for entertainment and religious purposes. An Iftar would be considered both an entertainment and a religious event and not an allowable QRF project.
Iftar expenses would be allowed, however, if QRF funds were incidental to a programmatic activity (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). For example, if a speaker gave a lecture during the Iftar event, the meal expenses would be allowed. With a little thinking outside the box, QRF could fund an Iftar.
QRF rules contained other such work-arounds. For example, we could not give more than $3,000 to a company or contractor. We could, however, give an unlimited amount to an NGO. If I wanted to rebuild a school, I couldn’t hire a contractor. If a contractor registered himself as an NGO, say “Mr. Contractor’s NGO,” I could give him as much money as he could swallow. A tsunami of corruption overtook the previously sleepy NGO registration office, run by the government of Iraq—you had to pay to play and registration was not cheap.
Transparency International, in its 2010 ranking of the world’s most corrupt countries, gave Iraq the number four slot (beaten only by Somalia, Myanmar, and Afghanistan). Pre-2003-invasion Iraq was ranked only twentieth worldwide in corruption, so it was obvious all of our money had contributed something to the country.12
Caring about Trash
Heat in Iraq was like opening the door of the oven to peek at a pizza, whoosh, right in your face, making you close your eyes against it. Breathe in too fast and it rolled all the way down like a hot drag off a joint. The light was bright, bleaching color from most things. Stepping outside, you couldn’t see anything for a moment as your eyes struggled to adjust. The high one day was 111 in the shade, only there was no shade. The next day it spiked to 125. It was the heat, oh Christ, yes. In the shower, the water from the cold tap was almost too hot to stand under. You wished there were batteries that could soak it up now and parcel it out in cold places later. Sliding from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned building was much like our stay in the country, boarding our armored vehicles on one base and getting out at another, passing through Iraq long enough to feel the heat but not long enough to have to do more than tolerate it. They lived with the stench of piled-up garbage and fetid water. We lived with our AC. Outside was Iraq, hot and sharp; inside it was cool and dark.
In our air-conditioned iso
lation, it took years to realize we needed to think about things like garbage and potable water. What had happened all around Iraq since the chaos of 2003 was a process of devolution, where populated areas lost their ability to sustain the facilities that had constituted civilization since the Romans—water, sewage, trash removal—things that made it possible for large numbers of people to live in close proximity to one another. Shock and awe had disrupted the networked infrastructure that allowed cities to function. What had been slow degradation through neglect under Saddam became irreversible decline by force under the United States.
The collapse of civil society left a void that the bad guys had rushed to fill. Stories circulated of neighborhood militiamen commandeering shuttered power plants and private generators for the public’s use, turning the militants into local heroes. In some poor areas, especially in the south, Iranian charities were a primary source of propane, food, and other services that people expected the government to provide, as Saddam had more or less done. It had finally dawned on us that providing reliable basic utilities was critical to a successful counterinsurgency. The PRTs were put on the case after earlier efforts by megacontractors like Bechtel and then the Army Corps of Engineers had failed.
Almost daily my team and I would go out into the field. We’d strap on body armor and helmets and load into armored vehicles for the soldiers to drive us out of the FOB. We rode in either armored Humvees or large monster trucks called MRAPs, mine-resistant, ambush-protected carriers. These sat high off the ground and were covered in antennas and crazy electronics designed to thwart the battery-powered triggers that set off IEDs and mines along our route. The best thing about the MRAPs was that they were hermetically sealed against nonexistent chemical weapons and thus possessed near-nuclear-powered air-conditioning. You could crank that stuff and form frost. The MRAPs were so high off the ground that the turret often tore down the spaghetti web of pirated electric lines strung over most streets, lessening our popularity every time we drove in. Our parade of four or five vehicles, armed with nasty-looking machine guns and tough-looking soldiers, would nonetheless roll through small towns and slums to arrive at whatever dilapidated building served as the center of US-appointed local government. (By common consent no one was allowed to comment on the paradox of creating a democracy by appointing local leaders. It just wasn’t done.) As we drove, trash was a fact anywhere we looked, like the sun and the dust. The MRAPs specifically equipped to look for roadside bombs even had giant blowers welded to their front bumpers to whip garbage aside and expose the IEDs. For a poor country, everybody seemed to have a lot of things to throw away. Even though the trash was rarely collected, there were huge dumps filled with acres of it. You couldn’t help but be reminded that for all the counterinsurgency ideals about living among the people, we still lived near Iraq but not in it; on the FOB you couldn’t drop a Snickers wrapper without two people telling you to pick that shit up.
My team and I met with Yasmine, the local municipal services director, to ask about the status of trash collection in the area. The central market posed the most difficult challenge because of the volume of daily trash, the limited equipment to haul it away, and security. Concrete T-wall barriers located on either end of the market served as security checkpoints, making access for collection vehicles difficult and thus unpredictable. Without daily removal, there was both a danger to public health and increased risk, because garbage was a prime location for hidden explosives. The accumulated trash everywhere also signaled the utter lack of concern by the US-supported Iraqi government for the welfare of the people it ruled since the departure of the evil dictator who, officially, was better off gone. Freedom for sure, but unfortunately it was the freedom to not care.
Yasmine described the lack of experience among officials and corruption as further impediments. What the country needed, she said, “was educated, honest technocrats.” She mentioned officials who underspecified and then overpriced equipment so they could skim money. She lamented the lack of budget preparation. Without local input, the Baghdad-based Ministry of Municipalities developed the budgets for all the regional areas. This was especially galling for a long-term resident like Yasmine, who sincerely cared about the place she had grown up in. While she noted the frequency (and unproductiveness) of her meetings with US-appointed politicians, it disappointed her that fellow municipal directors never even bothered to show up for the coordination sessions she tried to schedule. This was all in spite of a multiyear, $250 million contract let out by the United States to hold good-government classes for these same Iraqi officials to teach them to be better bureaucrats. The contract was held by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which, while a part of the US government, did not report to the State Department. So, although I knew from talking to Yasmine that such a program was running in my area, I had no way to influence it or learn more about it except if Yasmine told me things or I happened to find some information on the Web, management by Google. The USAID representative would not tell me what he was working on. He would report to his boss, who would write a summary for my boss, who often remembered to forward it to me. We did not play well together.
Like USAID and State, the Army and State also had a hard time getting their vision for what we were doing in Iraq synchronized. The Army can be hard to understand. They often did things their own way for their own reasons, a bad idea when you were talking about the coordinated conduct of foreign policy and reconstruction of Iraq in support of our national security goals. While the State Department saw its mission as trending toward bigger picture stuff, the Army often focused on more immediate things. The argument was not a simple one—was it right to focus on a five-year water plant rebuilding project while local children suffered from dysentery that could be relieved by bringing in truckloads of bottled water daily? In an ideal world one could do both, satisfy the short-term need while working in the background on the long-term solution. We, however, worked in rural Iraq one year at a time, not an ideal world, and so couldn’t agree on what was best to do.
Everyone did agree garbage was a problem, and it was obvious the solution was for someone to pick it up. But trash pickup was the archetypal example of everything that wasn’t working with reconstruction. “If the trash isn’t picked up soon,” said the Brigade Commander, “somebody will plant an IED in it and one of my boys will die. I’m going to pay people to pick up the trash now rather than wait for the Iraqi government.” It was a pragmatic approach to security but one that provided a disincentive for municipalities to discharge their responsibilities. As long as the United States would pay for trash pickup, why should the municipality? Using Coalition cash rather than Iraqi institutions set back efforts to foster self-reliance. Many small towns gave up lobbying the central government for money, knowing the Americans would pay for everything. Instead of encouraging growth and capacity of civic functions, our massive hemorrhaging of cash discouraged them. When we grew weary of paying or were diverted by some other shiny object, there was no one around to pick up the problem, and the trash piled up.
Complicating matters further, the contractors we employed often distorted local labor markets. The USAID inspector general found wages paid for trash pickup by its Community Stabilization Program were higher than the average for even skilled laborers. It was more lucrative to be overpaid by the United States to pick up trash than it was to run a shop or fix cars. Possibly people went out and found more trash to throw around so that they could be paid by us to pick it up. We overpaid for everything, creating and then fueling a vast market for corruption. It wasn’t so much that we were conned, it was as if we demanded to be cheated and would not take no for an answer.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush that after invading Iraq he would assume responsibility for thirty million people, it is doubtful anyone thought that years later the US government would be worrying about trash pickup in the central market of a rural town outside Baghdad. The maps consulted in dark, air
-conditioned bunkers with blue arrows indicating an armored thrust had no strategy to offer for getting the garbage picked up. Had anyone known that nearby Baghdad produced eight thousand tons of trash a day, most of it now left uncollected just like in Yasmine’s town, would we still have invaded? It was unlikely that anyone in the United States knew trash collection was now a major front in the Global War on Terror. To be honest, who cared about garbage in Iraq, except maybe the Iraqis who lived around the central market? They, after all, stayed in our war while we only visited.
There was no AC in Yasmine’s office. One window had only busted-out glass, there was no electricity most of the time, and any AC unit would be stolen within the day. Near the end of our visit, Yasmine looked out the broken window at the garbage being picked over by goats in the heat and let out a sigh. Though Iraqis will shout their opinions at you in the street and wave their hands like a crack-crazed aerobics teacher to make a point, it was hard to sort out what they said from what they meant from what they thought you wanted to hear. Add in a bad translator who reduced three minutes of rapid speech to “He disagrees but loves all Americans and Obama president” and you often had no idea what was going on.
Yasmine spoke carefully, making sure the translator got it right. She was of an age, she said, where all she could remember were the wars with Iran in the 1980s, the long years of sanctions in the 1990s, and the US occupation from 2003. She asked when her daughter would lead a peaceful life. I thought she was talking to me, so I told her I didn’t know and it was time for us to leave, as our security team said we had been in one place too long. Good-byes in these situations were always hasty and awkward, as the traditional final greetings and handshakes were hard to negotiate when everyone was pulling on their helmets and body armor, with the scratch of Velcro cutting through the exchange of formalities. Wearing that gear outside made a hot day even hotter, so it was nice to get back to the air-conditioning. Nothing was resolved with the trash pickup, but in the AC it seemed far away, for us at least, though maybe less so for Yasmine. She’s still out there, we’re still in here.
We Meant Well Page 5