Today the Center for American Progress held an event with National Security Adviser James Jones and a panel of experts to discuss U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jones essentially reiterated the administration's strategy of a whole-of-government approach to foreign policy problems. While the Obama team's smart power approach is a nice change of pace, panelist Paul O'Brien of OxFam presented a useful theater-of-the-mind for understanding the challenges of implementing this strategy with the government's current institutional structure.Imagine, O'Brien says, a humvee full of Provincial Reconstruction Team members pulling into an Afghan village. A soldier sits in the driver's seat, in charge of the mission; he or she is not trained in development but has access to extensive resources and a nimble institutional culture. Riding shotgun, a Foreign Service Officer who is trained to protect U.S. interests abroad also has a good deal of influence on the mission. There are three seats in the back: One for a USAID officer who is experienced in international development, one for a US Department of Agriculture representative who knows about American agriculture but less about international farming, and a member of the National Guard's Agribusiness Development Team, which sends Guardsmen with agricultural experience to Afghanistan to help with development. When they get into the village, the USAID officer talks to the people and analyzes the development situation, arguing that in three to four years pest control measures and other sustainable development initiatives can improve yields and help reinvest farmers in their work -- "success is measured by what we can convince them to do for themselves," as O'Brien put it. Meanwhile, the FSO and the soldier in charge of the PRT meet with local political leaders, who ask for funds to build cold storage units to keep crops until they can be sold. But the site for the cold storage unit they want just happens to be adjacent to land owned by those same local political leaders. Maybe that project will help out the village, but it's not broad-based, sustainable development and it enhances the perception of corruption. The soldier and the FSO both report directly up the chain of command to the local American potentates, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and General Stanley McChrystal, giving greater weight to their analysis of the situation -- guess which development strategy has a better chance of being executed? As long as the voices in the back of the humvee are relegated by structure to second class status, O'Brien argues, then development operations can't succeed. That puts our whole strategy in Afghanistan -- and Obama's work on a smarter foreign policy -- at risk. -- Tim Fernholz
