We Meant Well (6 page)

Money and Our Meth Habit

We lacked a lot of things in Iraq: flush toilets, fresh vegetables, the comfort of family members nearby, and of course adult supervision, strategic guidance, and common sense. Like Guns N' Roses' budget for meth after a new hit, the one thing we did not lack was money. There was money everywhere. A soldier recalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up off the runway by forklifts (operated by soldiers who would make less in their lifetimes than what was on their skids at that moment). You couldn't walk around a corner without stumbling over bales of money; the place was lousy with it. In my twenty-three years working for the State Department, we never had enough money. We were always being told to “do more with less,” as if slogans were cash. Now there was literally more money than we could spend. It was weird. We'd be watching the news from home about foreclosures, and I'd be reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks, while signing off on tens of thousands of dollars for stuff in Iraq. At one point we were tasked to give out microgrants, $5,000 in actual cash handed to an Iraqi to “open a business,” no strings attached. If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball, it was no matter. We wondered among ourselves whether we shouldn't be running a PRT in Detroit or New Orleans instead of Baghdad.

In addition to the $63 billion Congress had handed us for Iraq's reconstruction, we also had some $91 billion of captured Iraqi funds (that were mostly misplaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority), plus another $18 billion donated by countries such as Japan and South Korea. In 2009, we had another $387 million for aid to internal refugees that paid for many reconstruction-like projects. If that was not enough, over a billion additional US dollars were spent on operating costs for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. By comparison, the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion, respectively.
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While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire, at the local level money was spent via two programs: CERP and QRF. CERP was Army money, the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Though originally provided to address emergency humanitarian needs and short-term counterinsurgency costs, this nearly unlimited pool of cash came to be spent on reconstruction. The local US Army Commander could himself approve projects up to $200,000, with almost no technical or policy oversight. Accounting was fast and loose; a 2009 audit, for example, found the Army could not account for $8.7 billion in funds.
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It might have been stolen or just lost; no one will ever know. The Army shared its money with us at the ePRTs, partly out of generosity, partly out of pity, and partly because individual military units were graded on how much cash they spent—more money spent meant more reconstruction kudos on evaluation reports.

The PRTs lobbied State for their own funding source for their own projects, separate from the mother Embassy's adventures and independent of the Army. State's original idea was that the PRTs would use Army money in the field while the Embassy pursued its own course. Success depended on how well we could convince the military to use its money for our goals. Of course only when goals overlapped would that plan work. Often it did not work and the effectiveness of the early PRTs was limited.

In summer 2007, State gave in and created the Quick Response Fund (QRF). QRF was the Surge's signature civilian resource. It was PRT-directed development money, independent of the massive financial resources of the military. The problems began almost immediately, when the Embassy's Regional Security Office sought to extend its control to vetting all PRT assistance to Iraqis. But Iraqis, wary of who would have access to their personal information, would not consent to a complex security review. PRTs thus lost much of their initiative, missing opportunities during early lulls in violence. A change was necessary, vetting was loosened in line with practicality, things picked up, and as of late September 2008 QRF had approved 2,065 programs and disbursed almost 50 percent of its funds. Between 2007 and 2010, QRF spent over $152 million. That relatively small sum doesn't tell the whole story. Army CERP outfunded State QRF roughly ten to one throughout the war, with many of the projects directed by or turned over to the ePRTs. Overall, billions were spent.

Despite the common wisdom that spending money was easy, our work was encumbered by two unconnected problems: the ever-changing mandate on what to do and the cumbersome procedures that accompanied QRF.

The Embassy, isolated in the Green Zone, was obsessive in insisting on its ability to shape events in Iraq through our project work. It tasked the PRTs with broad goals, or LOEs (rhymes with Lou, Lines of Effort), such as “building a civil society,” as if we were playing a freakishly long version of
The Sims
. The ePRT then had to make up local projects to show efforts were being made in each Line of Effort. Sometimes it was simple, as with an agriculture LOE: we would pay for pesticide spraying on date trees like Saddam used to do. With vaguer themes such as “empowering women,” the LOE was a harder target to hit and we flopped around with conferences and small-business funding. Added to the LOE issue was the constantly changing guidance on scope, where the rules seemed more compulsive than obsessive. One fiscal quarter the emphasis from the Embassy would be on limited, immediate-impact projects, while three months later we'd be told to shift to long-term efforts. We would abandon our date spraying to focus on a derelict water plant, until a blast from above would flip us back to smaller stuff like buying school supplies. Somewhere in Foggy Bottom this all came together in the form of bar charts and PowerPoint widgets and made sense to people far removed from the dust and grit.

Every one of these project ideas had to be funded, and because they were local initiatives that usually meant Embassy approval for QRF money. Most QRF-funded projects entailed three stages of review. After the ePRT completed a multipage grant application and a multipage summary, the proposal was entered into a database to be reviewed by a committee at the Embassy. From there, proposals went to Washington, where a separate committee reevaluated them. The review committee's questions illustrated the blind-leading-the-blind style of management. Instead of asking why an ePRT wanted to spend $22,000 to produce a stage play in Iraq, the committee asked why the play's director needed five production assistants. Project budgets in dollars might get sent back for the ePRT to do the simple conversion into Iraqi dinars, adding weeks to the processing time. Rarely was a project rejected for lack of merit. The ePRTs quickly learned to focus on form, knowing little would be said about substance. The review process substituted petty corrections for any semblance of broader policy guidance. Such guidance came in the form of nested series of reports, murky documents we combed through for clues. Here's one:

QRF proposals must be tied to the recently updated PRT Work Plans, per OPA and QRF policy. Proposal themes in the database are based off the old PRT Maturity Models and will continue to be used as broad indicators of targeted impact. The QRF Team will coordinate with the OPA Plans Office to ensure proposals fall in line with PRT strategic objectives.

New regulations in late 2009 required 50 percent Iraqi participation in any project that benefited the government of Iraq, when paid for by State (the military had no such restrictions somehow). The change came after our own Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that the government of Iraq had posted a $52 billion budget surplus between 2004 and 2009.
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The new policy was implemented to create local buy-in and also to lessen the burden on the American taxpayer. The State Department determined this 50 percent cost share could be “in kind.” The Iraqis wouldn't need to come up with actual cash for their half but instead could contribute goods or services. It would be like, when your HMO asks for a co-pay, your offering to wash dishes in the cafeteria instead. A better analogy would be your telling the HMO your time is worth $40 an hour and your co-pay is already covered by time spent in the waiting room.

Since the Iraqis had no intention of paying for the things we wanted to do, the State Department grew increasingly creative in deciding what constituted an in-kind contribution. This was not out of a desire to help Iraq; waiting for the locals to pony up cash or supplies made it difficult to complete projects neatly within one's twelve-month tour of service, a real bar to getting pats on the head from one's boss. For example, my ePRT proposed spending $22,705 to purchase a set of legal reference books for the Mahmudiyah courthouse.
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The Iraqis needed to come up with about $11,000. Since getting the courthouse to hand over actual cash proved impossible, we accepted in-kind payment as follows:

The Government of Iraq will provide an equipped library room with electricity, bookshelves, furniture, a computer, a heating and cooling system and an expert librarian. The life expectancy of the books is at least ten years. Although the amount contributed in housing, utilities, etc. for the books is difficult to quantify, an average salary for a librarian is $400 a month. The salary for a year is $4,800 and thus the salary for ten years without a pay increase is $48,000. At a minimum, the GOI is contributing $48,000 to this project.

By quickly calculating the books would last ten years, adding in the value of an existing unused room actually built by Saddam, and multiplying the fictional salary of a librarian who never would exist, we discovered that the Iraqi “contribution” was $48,000, or roughly four times what we had asked them for. But of course the only money spent was American. It was almost as if we ended up owing them money.

In another case, we identified the need to train the water plant operators of the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works.
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Textbooks were expensive, and the cost was over $38,000, including $50 a week per student for lunch (we could never get people to show up without a giveaway of some kind). That meant the Iraqis owed us $19,000 for their co-pay. Instead of cash, the ministry agreed to continue to pay its employees their full salaries while they attended our training. Cost to the US, $38,000; cost to Iraq, salaries they were going to pay anyway. This satisfied the cost-share requirement. Plus we bought lunch. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), in a report to Congress entitled
Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience
, showed that it at least retained a sense of humor about our spending, quoting Dickens's
Great Expectations
: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.”

There were other absurdities. We were not allowed to order things through the Internet. When we needed something not available in Iraq, such as veterinary supplies, we had to pay an intermediary to order it through the Internet, for which he charged a 30 percent fee. QRF also did not allow shipping via diplomatic pouch or the military postal system, so our 30 percent vendor tagged on a 100 percent markup for shipping and local customs costs, including bribes. The QRF rules thus increased the price of Internet-bought goods by 130 percent. Iraqi businesses sprung up just to make a profit ordering things for us off the Web. A meth habit might have been cheaper.

Then there were the work-arounds. During the month of Ramadan devout Muslims fast during the day, with an Iftar, a big meal, after dark. People often turned this into a social affair, and businesses hosted Iftars for their clients. It seemed like a decent idea that we at the ePRT might host an Iftar or two. Here's the guidance on using QRF money for such a purpose:

Regulations prohibit the use of QRF funds for entertainment and religious purposes. An Iftar would be considered both an entertainment and a religious event and not an allowable QRF project.

Iftar expenses would be allowed, however, if QRF funds were incidental to a programmatic activity (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). For example, if a speaker gave a lecture during the Iftar event, the meal expenses would be allowed. With a little thinking outside the box, QRF could fund an Iftar.

QRF rules contained other such work-arounds. For example, we could not give more than $3,000 to a company or contractor. We could, however, give an unlimited amount to an NGO. If I wanted to rebuild a school, I couldn't hire a contractor. If a contractor registered himself as an NGO, say “Mr. Contractor's NGO,” I could give him as much money as he could swallow. A tsunami of corruption overtook the previously sleepy NGO registration office, run by the government of Iraq—you had to pay to play and registration was not cheap.

Transparency International, in its 2010 ranking of the world's most corrupt countries, gave Iraq the number four slot (beaten only by Somalia, Myanmar, and Afghanistan). Pre-2003-invasion Iraq was ranked only twentieth worldwide in corruption, so it was obvious all of our money had contributed something to the country.
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Caring about Trash

Heat in Iraq was like opening the door of the oven to peek at a pizza,
whoosh
, right in your face, making you close your eyes against it. Breathe in too fast and it rolled all the way down like a hot drag off a joint. The light was bright, bleaching color from most things. Stepping outside, you couldn't see anything for a moment as your eyes struggled to adjust. The high one day was 111 in the shade, only there was no shade. The next day it spiked to 125. It was the heat, oh Christ, yes. In the shower, the water from the cold tap was almost too hot to stand under. You wished there were batteries that could soak it up now and parcel it out in cold places later. Sliding from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned building was much like our stay in the country, boarding our armored vehicles on one base and getting out at another, passing through Iraq long enough to feel the heat but not long enough to have to do more than tolerate it. They lived with the stench of piled-up garbage and fetid water. We lived with our AC. Outside was Iraq, hot and sharp; inside it was cool and dark.