Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan
Reflections on four Statecraft interviews
Over the past month, we conducted four interviews on American nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. We gathered a healthy range of interviewees: a CIA operative, a USAID procurement officer, a State Department reformer, and a State science adviser.
We tackled these interviews with the aim of better understanding how American nation-building efforts worked, institutionally and bureaucratically, and I think we were broadly successful. Our interviewees gave honest, straightforward, and enlightening answers about their failures and missteps, as well as successes.
A few takeaways from the collection
1. Expertise is extremely rare.
We saw a couple different flavors of this problem. In Afghanistan, short rotations meant USAID contracting officers had very little time to get up to speed. As Kyle Newkirk said, “If you factor in Rest and Recuperation leave and vacation, out of 13 months you might've only had to be in country for 36 weeks or so.”
Safety restrictions meant officers could rarely personally assess the status of development projects. As a result, contracting officers often had no idea where projects under their jurisdiction even were, let alone their status. Additionally, contracting was done through primes, in part to outsource the risk of accidentally violating anti-terrorism funding provisions.
In the CIA, and the intelligence community broadly, there just aren’t enough people with expertise in the places they’re working. Laura Thomas told us, “Not every officer, I think, is poring over every historical book and reading everything they possibly could before they deploy. They should be, but there's just not the time.”
In the State Department, we don’t have a culture of learning from mistakes, which hinders the development of expertise. Says Dan Spokojny, “When you really look at the incentive structures and the behaviors of the organization, there's really not a lot of space for people to accept failure, or to admit that the policy didn't work.”
2. Money can be inversely correlated with capacity.
In Iraq, Alex Dehgan stood up a major science funding project with $2 million in cash, brought back in installments from Kuwait in his backpack. Although he and his team had to problem-solve creatively, they were effective on a limited budget.
By contrast, USAID’s budget was constantly growing, which became a problem. As Newkirk highlighted, “We didn’t have the capacity to manage billions of dollars in a very complicated environment… If we had clear aims and a slower ramp and didn’t also have to manage Iraq as well, we could have prioritized what we thought were the key things, because there was so much to do… I think the ring road project was probably the right call, the whole country needed that interconnectivity. It probably would have made more sense to then focus on telecoms, rather than reinventing agriculture far away from Kabul. And that would have allowed us to ramp thoughtfully.”
3. State and DoD do not play well with each other.
This is well known, but I was struck at how many problems in the interviews were downstream of that tension between the State Department and the Department of Defense, from restrictions on consular travel in Afghanistan to roadblocks in Iraq. As Dehgan put it, “When I got to Iraq, there was not a lot of interest in supporting the State Department programs that were on the ground. You had to be really entrepreneurial to make this thing work.”
This is a shame, because in some ways the agencies could clearly learn from each other. As Spokojny puts it, “The Department of Defense… has doctrine processes, where it studies the way it’s conducted business in basically every aspect of the organization. We bring those to our system of war colleges. We try to think hard about how to create patterns of instructions that we can then train and teach the next generation... Those processes build in opportunities for learning.”
In a future interview, I’d like to better understand where this tension between agencies comes from, and who has managed to build strong cross-agency relationships. Recommendations welcome.
A note on the final interview: during it, I challenged Spokojny on a set of citations in his think tank’s manifesto, “Less Art, More Science: Transforming U.S. Foreign Policy through Evidence, Integrity, and Innovation.”
As mentioned, there have been critiques of the McKinsey report for several years, including that the results should not be generalized, or that causation runs the other way. But a new paper published on Monday in Econ Watch goes a step further, and finds McKinsey’s results can't even be replicated.
“Our inability to [replicate] their results suggests that ... they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.”
Should the State Department manage information better internally, as Spokojny argues? I came away interested in this idea and the ways it could be implemented.
But should State integrate more political science literature into its decision-making processes? On the evidence provided in the interview, color me unconvinced.
What’s next for Statecraft
This month, we have some exciting individual interviews lined up, covering:
How America’s organ procurement system got broken, and possibly fixed
Why federal agencies stink at hiring
How the Council of Economic Advisors actually works
And we’re prepping another series for May that colleague Alec Stapp calls “the coolest Statecraft project yet.” No hints.
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Thank you for the series. To add to you first point, expertise is rare but the illusion of it is common.
Big fan of your how to format, comrade ;)
Never forget Biden’s disastrous withdrawal and Bush’s coverup of Pat Tillman: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/pat-tillman-coverup