Wednesday July 6, 2016
Kabul (BNA) In 2012, Washington State University’s Oumarou Badini reported for work at an agricultural-research center in eastern Afghanistan that has benefited from millions of dollars in international aid. Yet Badini found acreage set aside for test plots covered in trash, rather than crops. Irrigation ditches, crucial to farming in such an arid climate, were clogged with weeds, “It was a mess,” Badini recalled in a recent interview on a visit back to Pullman. “Nobody took care of these lands.” So Badini recruited some Afghan colleagues and devoted 10 days to a massive cleanup. This was a downbeat debut for Badini’s aid work in a troubled region where opium poppies are one of the most lucrative crops, and the ranks of insurgents have expanded to include contingents of fighters from the Islamic State group as well as the Taliban, who control large swaths of territory.
Yet four years later, this African-born, Pullman-trained soil scientist is still on the job even as most of the U.S. military troops have withdrawn and many expatriates involved in aid work have left, too. His mission is fixed on boosting the skills of dozens of Afghan agriculture extension agents and introducing conservation-cropping techniques. Badini, 57, has achieved some success, expanding the outreach in Nangarhar province to two neighboring provinces where Afghan staffers have demonstrated new approaches to more than 7,000 farmers. The work is part of a $33 million project to improve Afghanistan agriculture undertaken by a consortium of WSU and four other universities that operate in different regions of the nation. Initially the work was funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which honored the universities with the Agriculture secretary’s Global Food Security award. Now, the consortium is backed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the work is scheduled to continue at least through 2017.
The project is a sliver of the more than $110 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars — flowing largely through the Defense Department and USAID — spent to rebuild Afghanistan since the 2001 fall of the Taliban. The effort has ranged from erecting schools and clinics to training soldiers and introducing new crops to farmers. Some of the biggest gains have been made in improving health and education. But some U.S. spending has been questioned by audits and other investigations detailing waste, incompetence and corruption. In congressional testimony in March, John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, reported that his staff reviewed 45 Defense Department-funded construction projects worth $1.1 billon. It found 16 so poorly built that deficiencies “threatened the structural integrity of the buildings and the safety of their occupants.” “We built too much, too fast, with too little oversight,” Sopko told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Obstacle to efforts
Agriculture programs, although a relatively small slice of the U.S. assistance, also have involved some dubious spending. USAID bankrolled a $360 million project to provide wheat seed and fertilizer for more than 290,000 farmers. A 2010 agency audit found lists of “nonexistent beneficiaries” as well as other irregularities that suggested a “systemic problem with the distribution effort.” That agency has headquarters within the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in Kabul, with staff that cycle through on a yearly basis. Staff members can only venture out under heavy security, so it can be difficult for them to actually see the projects funded around the nation. And auditors have noted that turnover among aid officials can sometimes be an obstacle to success. By the third year of one five-year project to persuade farmers to grow alternatives to poppies, they found the USAID staff in Kabul had gone through six agricultural directors while the contractor in charge of the project had racked up five leadership changes.
“Each change brought a different vision with different priorities and a different operating style,” the auditors wrote. In Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, Badini cites another problem with the years of spending. When he first arrived, he found the money had created a sense of entitlement among some government agricultural staffers who seem to equate foreign aid with lucrative handouts. Badini has tried to set a different tone, refusing to pay any state employee who fails to show up for his training sessions. “We came in and said we’re not bringing money. What we bring is knowledge, and knowledge is power,” Badini said. “For some time, there was some fighting. But now people understand what we’re about, and I think there is change.”
