War and Aid

ast fall, as U.S. troops launched a war on Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, a battle of an entirely different sort was being waged in the White House and across several federal agencies. This campaign didn't get as much attention, but it was no less important, because it involved winning new allies in the war on terrorism with economic support, providing humanitarian relief to millions of refugees and trying to convince the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world to support the fight against terrorism.

After the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal officials rewrote the book on how the United States should use economic, humanitarian and development aid to advance its interests.

The draft of that new book was shaped over 10 weeks by a team of crisis managers working in the marble halls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., at the Defense Department's Central Command operations center in Tampa, Fla., and in hastily expanded U.S. offices in Kazakhstan and Pakistan.

Afghanistan itself was closed to the outside world-except, of course, for the U.S. troops and intelligence agents who were prosecuting the war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But U.S. civilians waging the aid war walked through camps teeming with tens of thousands of Afghan refugees on the country's border with Pakistan. They watched as local truck drivers lurched along treacherous mountain roads in one of the most isolated regions on earth, ferrying U.S.-bought food to people in grave need.

Shortly after Sept.11, President Bush decided to mount a major humanitarian assistance campaign at the same time planning began for the military campaign in Afghanistan. He specifically directed the Defense Department to drop packets of food in the country, according to a senior administration official. On Oct. 4, the President announced the United States would send a total of $320 million in humanitarian and economic aid to address food shortages in Afghanistan and in neighboring countries.

Billion Dollar Plan

Meanwhile, administration officials reached out to other heads of state to convince them to join a coalition to battle terrorism. Foreign aid became an essential part of that effort, too.

The first concern was Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan's entire southern rim and contains critical access routes to the country. The problem was that virtually all U.S. aid to the country had been cut off after the Pakistanis revealed they had conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1998 and after Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized power in a coup in 1999.

So it surprised many when, on Sept. 20, Musharraf announced he would support the U.S. effort. It was a risky course, since some of Pakistan's 142 million people supported the Taliban, and many more hated the United States. Musharraf's decision quickly sparked anti-American riots in Pakistan.

On Sept. 22, the Bush administration asked Congress for blanket authority to waive economic sanctions against countries whose help is needed in the anti-terror coalition. Congress quickly granted a limited form of such authority.

Four days later, the International Monetary Fund approved a $135 million loan for Pakistan, which had been woefully behind in paying off its staggering $37 billion national debt. The Treasury Department then announced it would ease terms on $379 million of Pakistan's debt to the United States, setting the stage for other nations to follow suit.

On Oct. 15 in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States would provide $600 million in aid to the country in fiscal 2002, a figure that later rose to $673 million. On Nov. 10, President Bush said long-term aid for Pakistan could total as much as $1 billion.

The funds for the Bush administration's foreign aid initiatives in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 came from the $40 billion supplemental appropriations bill Congress passed on Sept. 18. The administration quickly pulled together a $1.06 billion aid package out of those funds, covering the aid packages for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and millions more for the four former Soviet states on Afghanistan's northern rim: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

While a $1.06 billion aid package doesn't compare with the $88 billion in today's dollars that the United States spent under the Marshall Plan after World War II to rebuild western Europe, it does mark a significant increase in the United States' foreign aid budget, which was an estimated $9 billion last year.

'In Permanent Session'

Last spring, Agency for International Development officials found that 10 of 12 preconditions for wide-scale famine were present in Afghanistan. In late September, as rumors that the United States was about to attack Afghanistan mounted, millions of Afghans fled their homes.

With the harsh Central Asian winter just weeks away and the prospect of a massive refugee crisis looming, federal officials swung into action from the top of the Bush administration down through the ranks of the foreign affairs bureaucracy.

"We had government in permanent session," says a senior administration official. At the top was the President, who met daily with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other members of the National Security Council. Also meeting every day, by videoconference, was a deputies committee, consisting of the deputy secretary of State, the deputy Defense secretary, the deputy national security adviser, and No. 2 officials at other key agencies as needed.

After each deputies' meeting, a one-page summary of the group's deliberations was sent to the White House. With the deputies meeting daily at 11:30 a.m., and top-ranking officials usually meeting at night, "it was possible to do things that were needed and follow up in real time," says the senior official. "Decisions that might take three months to get through took three days or less."

As the scope of the crisis in Afghanistan became clear, the administration set up a cross-cutting Interagency Coordination Group for Humanitarian and Refugee Assistance, chaired by Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary of State for global affairs. The group, which met twice a week starting on Oct. 2, included representatives from the Defense Department, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Agency for International Development.

In late October, Dobriansky began holding weekly conference calls with her counterpart in the United Kingdom and representatives of international relief organizations, such as the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program. This was crucial in keeping Washington players abreast of international aid efforts.

Meanwhile, at the headquarters of Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., officials formed what they called a "humanitarian cell," borrowing the lingo of their terrorist foes. It included representatives from the State Department's refugee office, AID and other agencies that needed information about how to coordinate aid efforts with military operations. Another "cell" in Pakistan kept civilians who knew what was happening on the ground in close contact with the military.

Members of the Bush administration's crisis response teams describe them as a set of powerful, efficient, temporary cross-cutting groups working in a tidy chain of command. But as a former ambassador with experience in crisis management notes, "the government resorts to task forces whenever there's a crisis. The issue with them is the quality of decisions they make and whether they carry them out effectively."

Supply Surge

Many of those decisions involved getting relief supplies to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Representatives of non-governmental organizations criticized the U.S. military's efforts to drop yellow-packaged humanitarian rations into Afghanistan at the same time they were dropping bombs on the country.

Delivering meals is a very inefficient way to feed people, and it met less than 1 percent of the need. The ration packages looked somewhat similar to unexploded cluster bombs, and some had Spanish labels.

By early October, what refugees really needed were wheat supplies. Millions of people were at risk of famine in the winter. And the country was still mostly closed. But getting the wheat-a staple of the Afghan diet-to where it was needed would require some political maneuvering.

The President's $320 million aid package for Afghanistan included $95 million for wheat purchases. U.S. wheat growers groups expected that American farmers would get all of that money. But AID Administrator Andrew Natsios pushed to buy some of the wheat in Pakistan, where it could be moved much more quickly to where it was needed. The administration ultimately decided to purchase 15,000 tons of Pakistani wheat and ship more than 100,000 tons purchased from farmers in the United States to Afghanistan.

By late November, as the Taliban retreated into southern Afghanistan and the borders loosened, food ferried by trucks that made the perilous trek into the country was reaching about 4 million people, according to the World Food Program, which managed the deliveries. Many observers credit Natsios with keeping the humanitarian and foreign aid machine moving during the first 10 hectic weeks. "He is passionate and thinks a lot about moral issues," says a friend who knows Natsios from his stint running AID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the previous Bush administration.

Natsios' passion comes from personal experience; he is a native of Greece and he lost relatives to starvation during the civil war there in the late 1940s.

In the early weeks of the crisis in Afghanistan, Natsios flew into the country and toured refugee camps. Earlier, he had made a successful appearance with a notoriously difficult interviewer on the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera. "I was told he thought I looked like an Arab," Natsios said after the interview.

At Natsios' side as special coordinator was Brent McConnell, who had been designated to take Natsios' old job at the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. McConnell spent 26 years in the Air Force and then worked on humanitarian aid to the former Yugoslavia, eventually becoming director of the Defense Department's Balkans task force. At the end of the Clinton administration, McConnell served as acting assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs. McConnell brought perspective to the relief effort. "None of this is new," he says. "What is new is the way the pieces are put together."

On to Nation-Building

Most of the pieces of the initial aid campaign were in place within the crucial 10 weeks after Sept. 11. U.S. officials then started looking to the next phase, which is likely to last much longer and be much more expensive. On Nov. 20, Powell told a packed State Department audience that the United States would be involved in "a reconstruction program that will take many, many years." Powell said the department would have to conduct a "comprehensive needs assessment" before the details of reconstruction could be worked out. Mark Malloch Brown, head of the United Nations Development Program, said donor countries might have to spend a total of $6 billion. Others put the figure as high as $10 billion.

The question now is whether the large increases in foreign assistance already approved, and those likely to come, will be spent more effectively for development than in the past. Previous efforts to use U.S. aid to win political support for foreign policy goals have often been ineffective in helping countries develop their economies and help their citizens.

The $600 million that Pakistan has been promised represents a dramatic increase in U.S. aid to the country. The ability of Pakistan and other central Asian nations that are supporting the war against terrorism to absorb aid increases is very much in doubt. Indeed, the value of foreign aid was deeply questioned before Sept. 11.

The debate was sharpened by the publication of a devastating book by former World Bank economist William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, last July. The book holds up Pakistan as an example of how development aid fails to produce economic growth or improve the lives of the poor. Easterly notes that Pakistan, supported by foreign aid, spent $8 billion on social services from 1993 to 2000. But by the end of the period, it was spending no more on health than at the outset: the cost of one bottle of Tylenol per person per year. Easterly, from his perch at a new think tank, the Center for Global Development, is skeptical that the huge sums pledged to Pakistan in the crisis will bring better results. "All the pressure that was on them to use aid to improve social indicators will be off if they know they're going to get tons of money," he says. Easterly argues the United States should wall off its geopolitical aid from economic development programs. The latter, he says, should be awarded only after the recipient has a demonstrated track record of results and should be withheld if such results are lacking.

But former AID Administrator J. Brian Atwood says aid given for political reasons isn't wasted. Egypt won very large amounts of assistance after it agreed to a peace pact with Israel in 1979. "Without our assistance, Egypt would have been on its back now," Atwood says. "But it's doing quite well." In Pakistan, he says, "it is going to take time to get development results that American taxpayers would like to see happen right away."

As the war on terrorism and its foreign aid component continue, the stakes are high for the United States. If the funds provided to Pakistan and other countries do little to improve the lives of ordinary people, we will lose credibility in the Muslim world-the opposite of the good will that assistance is supposed to buy. And while recent aid efforts in Kosovo and Ethipoia have had some success, there is no precedent for rebuilding Muslim societies that mistrust us. That campaign may be long indeed.