New Year, New Start

I wanted to wish you all a happy New Year, and to apologize for the lack of action in the past few weeks. This month I left my position at The Century Foundation in order to work with a startup technology company that is making solar energy more accessible, reliable, and efficient. I am still committed to Afghanistan, and I plan to continue managing Afghanistan Watch -- though the website will undoubtedly evolve.

I have already had a number of excellent discussions with people about what shape and direction the new Afghanistan Watch will take. There are a lot of possibilities, and I'm excited about the opportunity to make this a more expansive and collaborative forum, and I welcome your feedback in this regard... 

Having said this, I may not be able to offer a quick reply to your email -- I am travelling for the rest of the month and will have only intermittent access to email.

If all goes well, we plan to launch the new Afghanistan Watch this March. In the meantime, Bipasha Ray will be curating Afghanistan Watch during my absence. Bipasha is a fine journalist and longtime editor of The Project on Defense Alternative's "War Report" -- an indispensible resource. She's great at finding useful data and separating the wheat from the chaff. In the coming month I hope you appreciate her keen eye and thoughtful commentary. Her brief bio is below:

Bipasha Ray is research associate and web editor at the Project on Defense Alternatives, where she works with issues related to Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism and U.S. military and defense policy. She edits War Report, a web compilation of news, reports, analyses and official documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Occupation Distress on the impact of the wars on U.S. armed forces. Previously she was a reporter at The Associated Press in Boston, where she covered issues ranging from post-9/11 airport security to the Boston Catholic Church clergy abuse crisis. She has a MA in International Politics from Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Thanks to everyone for all your support over the years -- and be in touch. Sincerely, Carl

State to cut 10% of diplomatic posts worldwide

Citing strains from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has announced it will cut diplomatic posts by 10% next year. State has had trouble filling 250 foreign service jobs in Iraq and another 100 "high priority" jobs in Afghanistan. It has finally brought these embassies to 100% occupancy -- but at the cost of leaving other posts vacant.  Shortfalls result because State's operating expenses come out of the supplemental, but the correlated increase in personnel costs must come out of State's regular budget. 

Ironically, the most vocal supporter of boosting State's regular budget has been none other than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. On Nov. 26, he noted that "funding for nonmilitary foreign affairs programs . . . remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military. . . . The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department . . . is less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone."

We've repeatedly highlighted this disparity, and argued that it is deeply undercutting our chances of success in Afghanistan. America is engaged in a "struggle of ideas" that it cannot afford to lose. Amidst a half trillion dollars in military spending this year, does it make any sense to cut critical (and cheap) diplomats? MORE

U.S. to Cut 10 Percent of Diplomatic Posts Next Year By Karen DeYoung (WP) Thursday, Dec 13: Diplomatic posts at the State Department and U.S. embassies worldwide will be cut by 10 percent next year because of heavy staffing demands in Iraq and Afghanistan, Director General Harry Thomas informed the foreign service yesterday.

Video: Interview with Gen. McNeill, Rashid, MacDonald

Yesterday, the NewsHour with Jim Leherer ran a good segment on Afghanistan featuring commentary by Gen. Dan McNeill, Ahmed Rashid, and Norine MacDonald (from Senlis Council). The transcript, along with streaming video, is available here.

Center on Public Integrity updates its contractor database

The Center for Public Integrity has just updated its Windfalls of War report, an investigation of US contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The original report, published in 2003, won the George Polk Award for journalism. It took six months to complete and involved a research team of 20 (along with  73 Freedom of Information Requests!)

The updated report, which lists the top 100 contractors, has some striking findings:

• "U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006."
• "Iraq remains the clear priority of the U.S. government, the Center's research shows, with more than seven times as many contracting dollars designated for spending there as for Afghanistan."
• "Of the $13 billion awarded through cost-plus contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2004 to 2006, 30 percent was awarded through simple cost-plus, fixed-fee arrangements that offer no incentives for performance or cost savings."

The Center for Public Integrity website includes a search engine that crawls hundreds of budget documents, including reports, audits, testimony, project site inspections and correspondence. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively difficult to disaggregate spending in Afghanistan from that in Iraq in the current format (this is, in part, a function of the way many of these expenses are deliberately melded in budget documents.) I have contacted the folks at CPI, and will see if we can compile a list of the top contractors (and contracts) in Afghanistan.

Leaked map shows much of country a "no go"

A revealing map from the Times of London:

 The Times, Dec 5, Nick Meo in Kabul: Almost half of Afghanistan is now too dangerous for aid workers to operate in, a leaked UN map seen by The Times shows. In the past two years most foreign and Afghan staff have withdrawn from the southern half of the country, abandoning or scaling back development projects in rural areas and confining themselves to the cities or the less risky north....

The unpublished map, acquired by The Times in Kabul, is for UN staff and aid workers and illustrates risk levels across the nation. It shows a marked deterioration in security since 2005, when compared with a similar map from March of that year. Then only a strip along the Pakistan border and areas of mountainous Zabul and Uruzgan provinces in the south were too dangerous for aid workers. Now nearly all the ethnic Pashtun south and east is a no-go zone categorised as high or extreme risk and there are even pockets in the north of the country that are becoming dangerous for aid workers.

Assessing Afghanistan: NATO's 63 new metrics

Reuters reports yesterday that NATO has drawn up a "standardized system" of 63 metrics it will use to track progress in Afghanistan. U.S. Army Gen. John Craddock said that "I would submit to you that, to date, most of the assessments of progress have been against anecdotal information," or measured in terms of outputs such as schools built or roads paved. "All good things," he notes, "But the question in my mind is: What's the effect it's produced?" Were the roads blocked? Were the classrooms empty?

I find it more than a little bit troubling that NATO is only getting to this discussion six years in to the intervention. This sort of thinking should have been integrated from day one. In their defense, they probably had metrics, and are now revisiting them to make them meaningful.

It is, of course, a devilishly complicated undertaking. Which metrics to choose? How to weight one against another? And how to gather reliable data from the multitude of unverified sources that include donor countries, the UN, GOA, NGOs? Everyone is keeping score, but based on a different set of rules. Just thinking about it makes my head spin. I would love to see the 63 metrics NATO settled on, and hear how it plans to measure them (if anyone has insights on this, drop a line or a comment...)

NATO revamps measures of Afghan progress, by Andrew Gray (Reuters) 5 December 2007: WASHINGTON -- NATO has developed a standardized system for tracking progress in Afghanistan because the war so far has been judged largely using anecdotal evidence, the alliance's top commander said on Tuesday.

             

Quoteboard

"I'm not in the business of turning down jobs I haven't been offered."
  - Paddy Ashdown

"I can put a guy out on a ridge with an AK-47 and have him take a couple of shots. The Americans will shoot back with their big guns and disrupt the whole valley...Being an insurgent would be so easy."
  - Sgt. Jacob Stockdill

"All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans."
  - Capt. Chris Rowe
MORE

Ashdown headed to Kabul as "super-envoy"?

According to new reports, Paddy Ashdown, the former EU-UN High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been offered a newly created position in Kabul as a "super envoy" that would head Afghanistan efforts by NATO, the UN, and perhaps the EU as well.

According to a NATO diplomat quoted yesterday in the Financial Times, “Ashdown’s name seems to be the only one in play. I understand that Karzai is comfortable with that and it seems as if the ball is now in Ashdown’s court.” Other names floated for the position have included Joschka Fischer and Hikmet Cetin, former foreign ministers of Germany and Turkey.

Ashdown's name has been bandied about since June, but he was reluctant to consider the job unless he had the endorsement of the United States. Then recently the dual-hatted position was championed by Nicholas Burns, the number three man in the US State Dept. There remains disagreement over the nature of the role, according to Karzai spokesman Hamayun Hamidzada, who notes in The Scotsman that "Britain wants a Kabul-based envoy, who would co-ordinate people here, and also in the capitals. The US thinks you need a roving envoy going from capital to capital." 

Will Ashdown accept? In June, he said there was the need for such a post:  "My view, for what it is worth, is that there needs to be a single figure out there pulling all the strands together. At the moment there is little or no co-ordination and the country is starting to work against itself." 

The change could greatly improve coordination and elevate the status of the UN in Afghanistan. It would require a tremendously skilled  manager and coordinator to make it all work -- something Ashdown was able to do quite well in Bosnia. In a WSJ op-ed last month, Hans Binnendijk argued that "a new, high-profile European High Representative under U.N. auspices should be appointed to pull together the diverse national contributions in Afghanistan and to coordinate military and economic approaches into a comprehensive and coherent whole. Paddy Ashdown provides a good example with his work in Bosnia. Such a High Representative could also help convince European publics to stick with the Afghan effort." The challenge will be coordinating with the US and with the Afghan government, which as a sovereign state would never grant Ashdown the level of authority he had in Bosnia.

Photo: Paddy Ashdown (aka Jeremy John Durham Ashdown, Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon...)