This is the second installment of our weeklong series marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, March 20, 2003. See all of the stories here.
I was part of Iraq 2.0, heading two embedded civilian provincial reconstruction teams (ePRTs) in 2009-2010 and wrote a book critical of the program, “We Meant Well,” for which I was punished into involuntary early retirement by my employer of two decades, the U.S. State Department.
The working title for the book was originally "Lessons for Afghanistan from the Failed Reconstruction of Iraq" and was meant to explain how our nation building efforts failed to accomplish anything except setting afire rampant corruption, and how repeating them nearly dollar-for-dollar in the Afghan theater was just going to yield the same results. After all, isn't one definition of madness doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results?
The title of my book changed to something less academic sounding, coming out as it did in fall of 2011. It is important to look back accurately. At the time of publication conventional wisdom was that the Surge of 2007-2008 was eventually going to catch up with us and work, and that the final push of soldiers and civilian reconstructors (me) would break Al-Qaida in Iraq. Obama was withdrawing combat troops and ISIS had not yet surfaced so the jury was still out.
I wondered whether my editor was secretly hoping there would be more action so we might sell some books. Personally, I knew we had something to worry about — not that the war would fail to drag on, it sure did (with the U.S. forced to return to help the Iraqis roust ISIS in 2014) — but that the failures would be so obvious no one would see the need to read a whole book about them.
Reconstruction during the war in Iraq worked like this: Washington would determine some broad theme-of-the-month (such as women's empowerment) aimed at a domestic American audience. The theme would filter down to us at the ePRT level and we were to concoct some sort of "project," something tangible on the ground, preferably something that showed well to the media we'd invite to see our progress. It wasn't hard because corrupt organizations arose like flowers from the desert to take our money. Usually run by a local Tony Soprano-type warlord, the organization would morph in name alone as needed from “local activist group” to “NGO” to “women’s association” to “entrepreneur incubator” depending on the project.
We'd give them mountains of dollars (nobody wanted Iraqi money, a clue) and perhaps some event would occur, or a speaker might be brought in. We funded bakeries on streets without water, paid for plays on getting along with neighbors, and threw money at all this only because no one could find a match to just set fire to it directly. Little was expected in the end outside a nice Powerpoint celebrating another blow for democracy. In shopping for hearts and minds in Iraq, we made bizarre impulse purchases, described elsewhere as "checkbook diplomacy."
As Iraq morphed into a subject we were just not going to talk about very much (one journalist who read an early draft of my book opined, "So you're the guy who is going to write the last critical book on Iraq before Petraeus takes a victory lap") attention turned to Afghanistan. I knew this because suddenly I was flooded with requests to write professional recommendations for the same people who had failed so completely in Iraq to work in Afghanistan. As part of some escalation or another, the military was rehiring most of the civilians who had failed to reconstruct Iraq into exactly the same roles in Afghanistan, presumably to (fail) to reconstruct that sad place quicker.
I dutifully answered each personnel inquiry accurately, fully, and as a patriot, with the hope that someone would see what was going on and put a damn stop to it. I was very wrong. The key element of the fantasy was the reconstruction effort, the idea that rebuilding Afghanistan via $141 billion in roads and schools and bridges and hardware stores, would gut the Taliban's own more brutal hearts and minds efforts. That was the same plan as in Iraq only minutes earlier, where between 2003 and 2014, more than $220 billion was spent on rebuilding the country.
Nonetheless, the Iraqi failure on full display, the United States still believed economic and social development programming would increase support for the Afghan government and reduce support for the Taliban (the log line for the war script.)
However, as had its sister organization in Iraq, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) wrote "the theory that economic and social development programming could produce such outcomes had weak empirical foundations." Former Ambassador to Afghanistan Michael McKinley noted, “It wasn’t that everyone, including conservative rural populations, didn’t appreciate services… But that didn’t seem to change their views."
As the Army War College wrote, “This idea that if you build a road or a hospital or a school, people will then come on board and support the government — there’s no evidence of that occurring anywhere since 1945, in any internal conflict. It doesn’t work.” A former adviser to President Ghani told SIGAR, “Building latrines does not make you love Ashraf Ghani.”
But that was indeed the plan and it failed spectacularly, slow over its own 20 years then all at once last August. SIGAR summed up: “U.S. efforts to build and sustain Afghanistan’s governing institutions were a total, epic, predestined failure on par with the same efforts and outcome in the Vietnam war, and for the same reasons.”
No, wait, nobody said any of those things during the Afghan war, only afterwards when it was time to look around and assign blame to someone other than oneself. The Iraq reconstruction failed to account for the lessons of Vietnam (the CORDS program in particular.) The Afghan reconstruction failed to account for the lessons of Iraq. We now sit and wait to see the coming Ukraine reconstruction fail to remember any of it at all.
"It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth,” President Zelensky said, boasting that BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.” The New York Times calls Ukraine "the world's largest construction site," and predicts projects there in the multi-billions, as high in some estimates as $750 billion.
It will be, says the Times, a "gold rush: the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over. Already the staggering rebuilding task is evident. Hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and factories have been obliterated along with critical energy facilities and miles of roads, rail tracks and seaports. The profound human tragedy is unavoidably also a huge economic opportunity."
We did worse than nothing. Iraq before our invasion(s) was a more or less stable place, good enough that Saddam was even an ally of sorts during the Iraq-Iran War. By the time we were finished, Iraq was looking closer to a corrupt client state of Iran. Where once most literate Americans knew the name of the Iraqi prime minister — a regular White House guest — now, unless he's changed his name to Zelensky, nobody cares anymore. And that's what the sign on the door leading out of Iraq (and perhaps into Ukraine) reads: tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars later, no one cares, if they even remember.
