NEW YORK TIMES Book Review: ….[David] Rohde quotes one veteran of the United States Agency for International Development as estimating that the country today employs one-tenth as many foreign service officers as it did during the Vietnam War. Between 2001 and 2010 alone, Rohde notes, Congress cut U.S.A.I.D.’s staff by 30 percent. Over the same period, it doubled the agency’s budget. The result: foreign policy by contractor. Suddenly required to spend vast sums bringing democracy and prosperity to Afghanistan and Iraq, America’s emaciated civilian agencies could do little more than write huge checks to the megacontractors that grew fat off the “war on terror.” The contract to train the Iraqi police went to DynCorp, which, according to Rohde, enjoyed a “cost-plus” arrangement under which it spent as much as it wanted and charged the government a set fee above that. At one point, two government employees and one contractor in Baghdad oversaw 500 DynCorp trainers spread throughout Iraq. ..
Rohde briefly retells the now familiar story of how the Bush administration defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — contemptuous of the Clinton administration’s experiments in “nation building” — spurned efforts to plan for governing Iraq after Saddam Hussein. But Rohde usefully extends this account by noting that it wasn’t just Bush officials who undervalued the civilian elements of American foreign policy; Washington had been doing so for decades. Thus, even when the Obama administration took office determined to empower the State Department — and put Richard C. Holbrooke in charge of a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan — the effort failed. Part of the problem was bureaucratic infighting. But Holbrooke also found it difficult to reduce the government’s reliance on large contractors: U.S.A.I.D. simply didn’t have the staff… (more)
