Last week my 5-person U.S. Army Reserve team arrived at the site of a devastating landslide in Bududa, Uganda. At the request of the Ugandan Government, we were diverted from our normal mission in the northern Karamoja region (where we have worked for 6 months) to respond to the disaster. While the U.S. Embassy had allocated $50,000 to the Ugandan Red Cross for relief efforts, we ourselves had no resources or funding as such to contribute upon arrival. Our mission would be a limited one: we were to support our counterparts, the Ugandan People’s Defense Force, in our capacity as civil-military relations specialists, and to determine opportunities for future military-to-military disaster support.

But if there is one thing that we have learned in Uganda, it is that it is difficult to limit expectations or manage perceptions – especially in uniform. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan: our ACU uniform does not help us blend in with the landscape or with thousands of other soldiers. We are often the sole representatives of the U.S. government (and certainly the powerful U.S military) in the areas where we work – and by this virtue and others, we are a spectacle everywhere we go. This does not put us in danger, but it means that we must limit the time we spend on the ground assessing a potential project, for example, so that our presence does not start to raise expectations as well as eyebrows. Read the rest of this entry…

I had a great idea after listening to Secretary Clinton’s speech on internet freedom. I wondered whether it would be possible to use mobile phones to improve governance in Africa. Today I found out that not only is the answer yes, but that someone is already doing it.

Seems like my skepticism was justified.

Technically speaking, a plane trip. I am off to Tanzania tomorrow to do a Democracy and Governance assessment for USAID. Basically, I’ll be spending the next three weeks in Tanzania talking to politicians. I sense some good stories coming out of this.

This is a little scary. According to General McChrystal, the post-capture plan for Marjah, the Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, is government in a box. The Guardian editorial page has looked inside the box and is unimpressed:

So what is in the box? Once the fighting has ended, Isaf has dedicated “district development teams” to move into Marjah. A US team is working alongside a group of Afghan civil servants which the Karzai government is allegedly meant to deploy. To encourage them to serve in what must be a highly risky secondment, their average monthly salary is being quintupled to about $300. Once all this is done, the plan is for the US Agency for International Development to help farmers plant crops by opening up the canal network, a project started by the US half a century ago, but which it has yet to complete. As if that were not enough, Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, urged elders from Marjah’s main tribes to give him their sons so that he can recruit 1,000 local police officers, whose job will be to keep the Taliban out.

I can see why the editors at The Guardian are skeptical. I am as well. So is Joshua Foust – a real Afghanistan expert – at Registan.net:

Which brings us back to the discussion about civilian casualties above. Considering how ISAF was embarrassingly unable to figure out why or how it was going to handle the civilians in Marjeh, right up to their inability to postbelievable or consistent population estimates, I’m left with the same thought I had two weeks ago, when ISAF signaled they were really serious about Marjeh this time: what’s the end game? Simply throwing an expatriate Helmandi who lived in Germany for 15 years into the mix – which is the current plan – doesn’t actually address the serious shortcomings the military-led governance issues have had.

Meanwhile, the civilians continue to bear the brunt of this offensive: the Coalition is destroying the barely functioning Taliban “shadow” government in the area, and so far their plan for a viable replacement haven’t moved beyond the vaguest of platitudes. Please, I am begging the readers here: if you know of some plan to leave something functioning in ISAF’s wake, something Afghan-led with a realistic chance of lasting once the 10,000 (or whatever) troops have to leave this tiny area, please let me know about it. Because right now it looks like they’re fighting with no end game in mind. And that’s pretty scary.

I guess there’s always luck…

Barak and I end up talking quite a bit about the misperception that states such as Somalia and Afghanistan are failed.  As Barak likes to point out, the problem isn’t that there is NO governance, but rather that it is not the Westphalian statehood model of governance we have all grown accustomed to in the US.  Here, now, almost as it was written just for us, is a blog post about similar ‘ungoverned’ areas of Yemen.  According to the authors, the correct term is ‘alternatively governed’, which I agree with, although it is close enough to late ’90s PC terminology to make me giggle.

As I have written before, I am a fan of Al Jazeera. However, a recent report criticizing US aid efforts in Haiti made me pretty angry. The report criticized the US for “taking over,” “deciding who lands in Haiti,” and turning back aid from other nations. The US is pushing its own agenda and is not taking the needs of Haitians into account, according to a former defense minister.

Excuse me, what possible agenda could the US have in Haiti other than aid and reconstruction? It has no natural resources, is one of the poorest countries on earth, and is strategically irrelevant for US national security. What on earth does the US have to gain from aiding Haiti at this moment? Perhaps you say praise. Well, this may be true, but how does the US gain praise if it is turning away aid from other countries? Maybe the US is doing it because it fears mass exodus of Haitians to the US. This is plausible, but if this is the reason, the US agenda is to improve governance in Haiti to reduce demand for emigration. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps you argue the US is attempting to assert its dominance over Haiti. Sure, the US has a history of doing this, but usually for a reason. Why does the US care if Haiti is on its side or not? What does Haiti have that the US wants?

Moreover, I agree that the Government of Haiti should lead the relief efforts. The only problem is that the government doesn’t exist. The president is using a police station as his headquarters because all government buildings have been destroyed. There is no telecommunication infrastructure and Haiti has no army – not a weak army, but no army at all. Sadly, very sadly in fact, the earthquake destroyed the capacity of the Government of Haiti to lead the relief efforts. The UN is a bit better off, but it is in no position to lead the efforts, either.

Finally, I know its not pleasant to hear, but it is important to have infrastructure in place before starting large-scale relief efforts. Currently, the US military is probably the most well-equipped organization on this planet to be able to do this on a moment’s notice. I don’t like the militarization of humanitarian relief efforts and I don’t agree with it, but that is the world we have. Save the moral high ground talk until after the crisis. Just sending food onto the street without some plan for how you are going to distribute it would simply cause chaos.

This report was a gratuitous shot at the US. I am sure the operations are far from perfect, but look at the scope of the disaster. Expecting perfection not very realistic. I haven’t seen any other country offer anything close to the level of assistance the US has and if any other country wants to, let it come forward. Save the criticism for a worthy cause.