Leadership Vacancy Raises Fears About USAID's Future

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

NAIROBI, Aug. 4 -- As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton begins a seven-country African trip with a visit to Kenya, the main U.S. foreign aid agency is in limbo, entering its seventh month without a permanent director despite pledges by the Obama administration to expand development assistance and improve its effectiveness in poor countries.

Clinton has backed the use of "smart power" -- employing a full range of economic, military, political and development tools in U.S. foreign policy -- but many aid experts are questioning whether the U.S. Agency for International Development could lose clout under her plans. While Clinton has championed additional personnel for USAID, aid groups worry that the once-autonomous agency could be swallowed up in the State Department, with long-term development goals losing out to short-term political aims.

"Both President Obama and Secretary Clinton have said how important development is. Increasingly, it's a painful contrast between their rhetoric and the reality of having no leadership" at USAID, said Carol Lancaster, interim dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, who served as deputy administrator of the aid agency under President Bill Clinton.

The Obama administration inherited a foreign aid system starved of civilian experts and burdened by a bewildering array of mandates. USAID's full-time staff shrank by 40 percent over the past two decades, but the assistance it oversees doubled, to $13.2 billion in 2008. The agency has a skeleton crew of technical experts, with four engineers for the entire world, Clinton noted recently. Increasingly, USAID has become a conduit for money flowing to contractors, who have limited supervision from the agency.

As USAID has weakened, foreign assistance programs have proliferated across government agencies, especially the military, causing duplication and confusion. Meanwhile, aid budgets have been saddled with presidential directives, "buy America" provisions and congressional earmarks that raise the cost of aid and reduce its effectiveness, development specialists say.

"In the USAID budget, every dollar has three purposes: help build an Air Force base, support the University of Mississippi, get some country to vote our way," said the Rev. David Beckmann, president of the aid group Bread for the World, describing the plethora of political claims attached to aid. The development program, he said, "is a mess."

The waste of billions of U.S. reconstruction dollars in Iraq and the growing role of development in the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have given new urgency to long-running debates about reforming the aid system.

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to double overall U.S. foreign assistance to $50 billion and build a "modern development agency." His campaign literature said that "no single person . . . (is) responsible for directing and managing what should be one of our most powerful foreign policy tools."

While development groups and experts have welcomed Obama's boosting of the assistance budget, many are "very, very disappointed" with the lack of progress in reforming the aid system, said Brian Atwood, who headed USAID in the 1990s. The frustration of USAID employees bubbled up at a town hall meeting at the agency that Clinton held last month.

"When will we be getting political leadership in our agency?" an employee asked Clinton. "And I think we'd also like to hear from you why it's taking so long. I think you know we're very concerned about this."

Obama administration officials say the lack of a USAID leader does not indicate a lack of attention to development. The administration has requested in next year's budget 350 new positions for the agency, which currently has a full-time staff of 2,200.

In the next few weeks, the White House plans to bring together the roughly two dozen government agencies involved in assistance in an effort to shape development policy, a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

And during the recent Group of Eight summit in Italy, Obama secured pledges totaling $20 billion for food and agricultural aid for the world's poorest countries.

"It's a landmark initiative. It happened during the first six months of this administration, working with the existing USAID leadership," said Mike Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, referring to career staff members.

Many aid organizations endorse Obama's campaign idea of a single point of contact for development programs. Before the election, a coalition of prominent experts called for the creation of a Cabinet-level department to coordinate development, as many other Western countries have. Two of them, Mike McFaul and Gayle Smith, went on to key jobs on Obama's National Security Council staff.

But Clinton, who has a deep interest in development, has moved to keep USAID inside the State Department. She recently launched a quadrennial review, modeled after the Pentagon's strategic-planning exercise, to draw up a blueprint for more closely integrating diplomacy and development.

With no permanent USAID leader in place, however, some development experts are concerned that the agency has little say in the blueprint. Fears of being absorbed into the State Department run deep at USAID, which lost control of its budget and its policy office under President George W. Bush's administration.

"AID and State are like oil and water," said Andrew Natsios, a USAID administrator under Bush. He and two other former directors of the agency wrote an article last fall in Foreign Affairs saying that the "semimerger of USAID and the State Department has not worked." They cited differences in missions, personnel systems and timelines, with development workers focused on longer-term goals and diplomats on shorter-term political crises.

"State doesn't realize it, but the more they absorb AID, the more dysfunctional it [AID] will become," Natsios said.

He and another development expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty over the fate of USAID within the State Department had discouraged some candidates from pursuing the agency's top job.

At the town hall meeting last month, Clinton said, without giving details, that the position had "been offered." But she said some qualified individuals were so put off by the arduous White House vetting process that they dropped out. "The clearance and vetting process is a nightmare. And it takes far longer than any of us would want to see," she said. "It is frustrating beyond words."

Several development experts said the top candidate in recent weeks appeared to be Paul Farmer, a charismatic doctor who has built hospitals for the poor in Haiti, Rwanda and other countries.

Senior State officials say the concerns about USAID being swallowed up by their department are overblown. Greater integration of diplomacy and development will give the aid mission more importance, not less, they said.

"This is not about subverting development to diplomatic ends," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department's director of policy planning. Instead, she said, Clinton sees development as central to solving political problems such as those surrounding Iraq, Sudan or global epidemics. "Those issues can't be addressed without a really strong development component, because they have to be bottom-up. You can't negotiate a treaty and think that's going to stop a global epidemic," Slaughter said.

Atwood, who led USAID under President Clinton, said Hillary Clinton was a major ally when she was first lady, working behind the scenes to help the agency's top officials.

"That's why I have so much confidence in her doing the right thing at USAID," he said. But without a director, he said, "she's had her hands tied behind her back."

In Fighting Radical Islam, Tricky Course for U.S. Aid

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Three years ago, while working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan, Clifford H. Brown came across an idea that he thought could help stem the spread of radical Islam in the Central Asian nation.

The University of Montana had proposed translating Islamic writings from Persian and Arabic into the local Uzbek and Kyrgyz languages. Brown hoped the translations could have a moderating influence at a time when a conservative Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, was expanding its influence in the region.

"Islam has a large body of moderate literature saying, for example, that suicide is a sin against Allah," he later wrote in a paper describing his efforts to fund the initiative. "Not a bad idea, I thought at the time."

But USAID lawyers rejected the proposal, saying that using taxpayer funds would violate a provision in the First Amendment barring the government's promotion of religion. The agency also prohibited Brown from publishing the opinion piece, which laid out his case for the proposal, according to Brown and a senior USAID official. A USAID lawyer said publication of the paper would have violated government restrictions on disclosure of privileged information.

The role of religion in overseas assistance has long been highly sensitive for a country founded on the principle that state and religion should be separate. But as U.S. policymakers seek to curtail the influence of radical Islam, they are being increasingly hamstrung by legal barriers, some experts say.

USAID does provide funds for faith-based organizations -- mostly Christian groups -- in instances in which it says the aid is strictly for secular purposes. But the line between secular and religious is often blurry.

Last week, the USAID inspector general's office raised concerns about the agency spending more than $325,000 to repair four mosques and adjoining buildings in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was once an insurgent hub. USAID argued that most of the money went to repair facilities that provided jobs, social services, food and other basics for the needy. The agency noted that it had withheld payment of more than $45,000 for mosque repairs because the contractor could not demonstrate that the work served a secular purpose.

Still, some scholars say that restrictions on USAID and other American civilian agencies have undercut the United States' ability to win the hearts and minds of Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where Islam plays a central role in public and private life.

Karin von Hippel, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said military commanders have been given much more freedom to fund Islamic causes -- such as rehabilitation of mosques and assistance for religious schools. She argued that U.S. civilian agencies need to be given the same flexibility.

Von Hippel said many officials have simply steered clear of Islamic charities because they do not understand how they function and fear that their careers could be harmed if they inadvertently support an entity that later turns out to be linked to militants. "We can't just sit on our hands, which is what we have been doing for the past eight years," von Hippel said.

At the heart of the debate is a dispute about the intent of the First Amendment's establishment clause, which bars Congress from establishing a state religion or prohibiting the free expression of religious thought. Brown, who served as a USAID lawyer for more than a decade, said he thinks that the First Amendment does not apply to overseas assistance.

"Our legal position is too conservative. We've got a war on terror," Brown said. "The lawyers are concerned about excessive entanglement with religion. Well, we're already entangled."

Brown maintains that U.S. efforts to promote democracy and build schools, roads and clinics in the Islamic world will not succeed unless American officials help foster the spread of moderate Islam and its a message of peace.

Gary Winter, USAID's legal counsel, said the agency would never fund any program with a religious purpose. He added, though, that "the legal test goes beyond that to [include] endorsement of religion, indoctrination of religions, excessive entanglement with religion. We have to try to accomplish our secular purpose while still not violating these legal principles."

Winter said there are ways that USAID can provide assistance to Islamic institutions without breaking the law. For instance, he said, the USAID could finance mathematics textbooks or English classes for students in Islamic schools in Afghanistan, while leaving it to others to pay for Koranic studies programs. Or if the agency selected a local religious leader to support an AIDS-prevention program, it could try to minimize the religious content of the charitable work. "If you're talking about sexual behavior, you don't necessarily have to get into the scriptures," he said.

Little USAID funding has gone to Islamic groups in recent years. From 2001 to 2005, more than 98 percent of agency funds for faith-based organizations went to Christian groups, according to figures obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Boston Globe newspaper in 2006. Winter said most of the faith-based groups applying for aid have been Christian. He added that the agency is eager to reach out to Islamic moderates.

Some experts, meanwhile, have urged caution on that front. Jonathan Benthall, an anthropologist at University College London, said there are serious risks of outsiders interfering in the theology of Islam.

He noted that when the U.S. government extended support to guerrillas who opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, money in one case supported a journal promoting militant jihad.

Brown recalled that the agency once learned that a program it had supported in Afghanistan in the 1980s used primary textbooks that dealt with the life and views of the prophet Muhammad.

To highlight the sensitivity of the issue, a senior USAID lawyer pulled an Afghan prayer rug from his safe and showed it to his colleagues, Brown said. A USAID emblem was sewn onto the back.

In Refugee Aid, Pakistan’s War Has New Front

By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

QASIM PULA, Pakistan — Islamist charities and the United States are competing for the allegiance of the two million people displaced by the fight against the Taliban in Swat and other parts of Pakistan — and so far, the Islamists are in the lead.

Although the United States is the largest contributor to a United Nations relief effort, Pakistani authorities have refused to allow American officials or planes to deliver the aid in the camps for displaced people. The Pakistanis do not want to be associated with their unpopular ally.

Meanwhile, in the absence of effective aid from the government, hard-line Islamist charities are using the refugee crisis to push their anti-Western agenda and to sour public opinion against the war and the United States.

Last week, a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered here in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad.

“The Western organizations have spent millions and billions on family planning to destroy the Muslim family system,” said the aid director, Mehmood ul-Hassan, who represented Al Khidmat, a powerful charity of the strongly anti-American political party Jamaat-e-Islami.

The Western effort had failed, he said, but Pakistanis should show their strength by joining the fight against the infidels.

The authorities’ insistence that the Americans remain nearly invisible reveals the deep strains that continue to underlie the American-Pakistani relationship, even as cooperation improves in the fight against the Taliban, and public support for the war grows in Pakistan.

Yet Islamist and jihadist groups openly work the camps.

“Because of the lack of international agencies, there is a vacuum filled by actors that are Islamist and more than that, jihadist,” said Kristele Younes, a senior advocate with Refugees International, a Washington group established in 1979.

One of the most prominent jihadist charity groups, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, had been barred from the camps, according to Lt. Gen. Nadeem Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani Army’s disaster management group. The group was designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council in December.

Nonetheless, it set up operations in Mardan under a new name, Falah-e-Insaniyat, according to Himayatullah Mayar, the mayor of Mardan. After the order to leave the area, Falah-e-Insaniyat went underground but still appeared to be operating to some extent, Mr. Mayar said.

Signs of the organizational strength and robust coffers of Islamist charities were easy to see around the camps, often in contrast to the lack of services offered by the government.

For example, Al Khidmat, Mr. Hassan’s group, arranged to bring in eye surgeons from Punjab to staff a free eye clinic for the displaced, offering cataract operations and eyeglasses.

“Government hospitals are nonexistent here, and we are able to treat not only the displaced but the whole community,” said one of the surgeons, Dr. Khalid Jamal.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hassan was busy checking new temporary schools, health clinics and four ambulances on 24-hour service that Al Khidmat had set up.

Every day, he said, he personally supervised the distribution of food at three different places — sometimes at a home, sometimes in a camp. So far, he said, he had covered 400 of 450 villages near the city of Swabi. Always, he said, before the food is distributed, he delivers his exhortation to jihad.

By contrast, although a substantial amount of American aid is getting through, it is not branded as American, and Pakistani authorities have insisted that it be delivered in a “subtle” manner, General Ahmad said.

The general said he had told American officials that there would be an “extremely negative” reaction if Americans were seen to be distributing aid, particularly if it was delivered by American military aircraft.

“I said they couldn’t fly in Chinooks, no way,” General Ahmad said, referring to American military helicopters. The United States, he said, was seen as “part of the problem.”

That is not what American officials had hoped for. At first, the exodus of people from Swat, many of whom had suffered from the brutality of the Taliban, seemed to present a chance for Washington to improve its image in Pakistan.

“There is an opportunity actually to provide services, much as we did with the earthquake relief, which had a profound impact on the perception of America,” Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who serves as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said at a hearing attended by the Obama administration’s special envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, at the start of the exodus.

In an effort to highlight American concern for the refugees, Mr. Holbrooke visited the camps in June, sitting on the floor of a sweltering tent and talking to people about their plight. “President Obama has sent us to see how we can help you,” he said. One result of the trip was an effort to send Pakistani-American female doctors to assist women in the camps.

According to the State Department, the United States has pledged $110 million for food and logistical support. In late May, the Defense Department sent several flights to Islamabad carrying ready-to-eat meals, environmentally controlled tents and water trucks. But ideas of winning back popularity with a big show of airlifts of American assistance on the scale of American earthquake relief to Kashmir in 2005 were rebuffed, and not only by the Pakistanis.

American nongovernmental organizations in Pakistan discouraged high-profile deliveries of United States government aid because anti-American sentiment was too widespread and the security risk to Americans in the camps was too high, said the head of one of the groups, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. There were many Taliban in the displaced camps, and they believed the Pakistani military was fighting against them in Swat on orders from Washington, the official said.

The restrictions on American assistance are clear in the camps and in villages like this one deep in the countryside around Mardan and Swabi, where Pakistani families have opened their homes to large numbers of displaced people.

American officials and their consultants were barely able to move beyond the highly visible refugee camps set up along the main highway between Islamabad and Peshawar, said Mahboob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American businessman who has visited the area to help find ways to bring additional aid.

“They have been almost completely neutered,” he said.

Honduras Targets Protesters With Emergency Decree

By William Booth and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 2, 2009

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, July 1 -- The new Honduran government clamped down on street protests and news organizations Wednesday as lawmakers passed an emergency decree that limits public gatherings following the military-led coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from office.

The decree also allows for suspects to be detained for 24 hours and continues a nighttime curfew. Media outlets complained that the government was ordering them not to report any news or opinion that could "incite" the public.

A dozen former ministers from the Zelaya government remain in hiding, some hunkered down in foreign embassies, fearing arrest. News organizations here remain polarized. Journalists working for small independent media -- or for those loyal to Zelaya -- have reported being harassed by officials.

Before emergency measures were tightened, thousands of protesters rallied Wednesday to urge Zelaya's return. They were answered by counterdemonstrations in support of the new government. Local radio reported that several bombs were found but safely defused.

Zelaya vowed that he would come back to Honduras over the weekend, while the newly appointed interim president, Roberto Micheletti, repeated in a news conference Wednesday "that when he comes into the country, he will be arrested."

Asked whether Honduras could withstand international isolation and risk losing the foreign aid that keeps the impoverished nation running, Micheletti said, "You know that the Europeans are not going to cut the aid to our country, nor will the Americans."

But on Wednesday, the Inter-American Development Bank did suspend aid, after a similar move by the World Bank. As the impasse continued in Honduras, diplomats at the Organization of American States struggled to organize a mission that would restore Zelaya to power and avoid a clash between him and the military that ousted him.

After nearly 12 hours of debate, the OAS approved a resolution shortly before dawn Wednesday that called on its secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, to undertake every effort to reinstate Zelaya. If Insulza did not succeed within 72 hours, Honduras would be suspended from the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere.

The passage of the resolution prompted Zelaya to postpone a trip home he had scheduled for Thursday, which diplomats had feared could sharply escalate tensions in the Central American country.

"I am going to return to Honduras. I am the president," Zelaya told reporters Wednesday. But he added that he did not want to complicate the diplomatic efforts of the OAS over the next few days.

Insulza faces an unusually complex task in trying to reverse the coup. Normally, he would negotiate with the de facto government for the return of the deposed president. But OAS members, furious about the military ouster, do not want him to talk to Micheletti, for fear that would legitimize the new regime.

Even hard-core coup backers here say they were surprised how quickly and forcefully the Latin American countries condemned their actions.

"This coup is a mess," said the outgoing Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Magno. "Mistakes have been made on all sides, and the only solution is for a compromise. We hear that different parties are talking among themselves. That is good. The solution has to come from the Hondurans themselves. It cannot be imposed on them."

Honduras is finding itself increasingly isolated. France, Spain, Italy, Chile and Colombia began recalling their ambassadors Wednesday. The Pentagon suspended joint military operations with Honduras.

"What provoked an enormous indignation among Latin Americans, above all, was the military coup," said one diplomat involved in the planning at the OAS, referring to the way soldiers seized Zelaya at dawn and bundled him onto a plane bound for Costa Rica.

Insulza, of the OAS, is trying to establish contact with people who are not closely allied with either Zelaya or Micheletti to build a compromise, the diplomat said. It was not clear when he would fly to Honduras.

The coup is the first big test for the Obama administration's policy of seeking a more diplomatic and collegial role in a region traditionally dominated by the United States. The military action has been roundly condemned internationally, including by President Obama. But U.S. diplomats have sought to prevent a response that is so tough it leads to bloodshed.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that they would hold off formally designating the Honduran military action a "coup" until Insulza reports back to the OAS on Monday. Such a move is significant, because it would lead to the cutoff of millions of dollars in military and development aid.

However, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it had decided to reduce military contact with the Honduran armed forces. "We're still reviewing and making decisions" about what cooperation would be affected, said a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command, José Ruiz.

The U.S. military also has cut off contact since Sunday with those who orchestrated the coup, officials said. The United States has a contingent of about 700 military personnel at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, focused on disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and counternarcotics activities in Honduras and the region.

Honduras also is facing a freeze on petroleum exports from Venezuela and a halt in trade from other Central American countries.

"In the 21st century, these kinds of coups don't last long. It is very hard for a country like Honduras to maintain this kind of position in the face of overwhelming rejection by the world, and especially the region and its major trading partners," a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Zelaya is a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who led a bloc of leftist governments in pressing the OAS to suspend Honduras immediately and support Zelaya's quick return to the country -- even at the risk of his being arrested. The governments believe that unless there is a tough response to the coup, their own leftist governments could be threatened, diplomats said.

Venezuela's ambassador to the OAS, Roy Chaderton, described the approach as "diplomatic asphyxiation." The Venezuelan government provided a plane for Zelaya's trips Tuesday to the United Nations and the OAS.

Sheridan reported from Washington.