We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren Read Free Book Online Page B

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. 8 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