Empowering Afghan Women? w/Special Guest Peter van Buren
USAID spent half a billion dollars to "empower Afghan women" but the programs, according to the government's own oversight arm, had "no tangible benefit." Former State Department official Peter van Buren, who wrote of similar wasteful programs in Iraq while he was stationed there, joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to add his expertise to the discussion...
USAID spent half a billion dollars to "empower Afghan women" but the programs, according to the government's own oversight arm, had "no tangible benefit." Former State Department official Peter van Buren, who wrote of similar wasteful programs in Iraq while he was stationed there, joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to add his expertise to the discussion...
USAID spent half a billion dollars to "empower Afghan women" but the programs, according to the government's own oversight arm, had "no tangible benefit." Former State Department official Peter van Buren, who wrote of similar wasteful programs in Iraq while he was stationed there, joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to add his expertise to the discussion...
Hello everybody and thank you for joining the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams who is the Executive Director of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
He's also the co-host of this program.
Daniel, good to have you with us again today.
Good to be with you, sir.
Good.
Today we have a special guest with us, somebody that both you and I have been in contact with over the years.
And just recently you posted one of his articles on the Institute site.
And this has to do with the so-called empowerment of the people in the Middle East because we know what's best for the Middle East.
Peter von Baron is with us and with us by Skype from New York.
We're delighted to have Peter with us.
Welcome, Peter, to our program.
Dr. Paul, thank you very much for having me.
Well great.
You wrote a book in 2011.
You even came by my office in DC and visited with us and visited with a few of my colleagues and the book was we met well.
You mean to say every time we mean well it doesn't work out quite that way?
Well to be honest I think that the next time I write a book I'm going to use a less ironic title.
I'm not sure that we meant well and unfortunately many people who just see the title write into me very angry complaining we didn't mean well in Iraq and we don't mean well in Afghanistan.
Who are you?
Some kind of Bush supporter or something like that.
I don't think they get as far as the subtitle which is how I help lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
So next time I think I'm going to be a little more straightforward in the title.
Yes and we all know where good intentions lead us.
But Daniel, this is an issue that you've been interested in in particular about what's going on and these efforts of USAID to change the culture of the Middle East.
So maybe you have a question or two for Peter.
Sure and I'm sure you remember sort of the endless hearings we had in the Foreign Affairs Committee.
It was interesting right as it looked like militarily the U.S. was not doing so well in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you remember they started trotting out this idea that well we're actually we're empowering women.
We're doing all sorts of wonderful things with the NGO.
So that's what they tried to do to make up for the fact that the militarily they were failing.
But Peter, you spent a couple of decades as a U.S. diplomat.
So you have been involved very intimately even before you had your one year as part of the reconstruction team in Iraq.
So you know very well how USAID and the State Department operate together and the process of subcontracting to NGOs.
Well you wrote an excellent article as Dr. Paul mentioned that we put up on the Institute for Peace and Prosperity website where you pointed out that the independent group, SIGAR, the inspector general for U.S. operations in Afghanistan, pointed out that the money we spent empowering women in Afghanistan didn't do that awfully well.
Can you explain a little bit more for our viewers what went into your article?
Absolutely.
First of all, I think it's important to say that we all agree that women's rights are very important.
What we don't agree on is why taxpayer money needs to be wasted on programs that do absolutely nothing to push those rights forward.
In Afghanistan, empowering women has become a theme, as it was in Iraq, largely to satisfy domestic U.S. pressures with very little interest in actually helping the condition of women overseas.
To order to justify these programs and to keep as many domestic constituencies happy as possible, most politicians in power who are running these things want to have programs that sound good back home.
And so the idea would be that in our belief, the belief of the United States as enacted by USAID, women in the Middle East really secretly would love to throw off their hijabs, their burqas, put on mini skirts, and go out and become entrepreneurs.
Now, whether the women out there want that or not is largely irrelevant.
What they want and what they wanted in Iraq and what I understand in Afghanistan would be health care, would be food, would be schools for their children, would be opportunities to move into different roles if they wanted to, rather than have that pressed on them.
Nonetheless, the United States plowed forward in Iraq and we are plowing forward in Afghanistan.
Specifically, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who goes by the acronym SIGAR, S-I-G-A-R, and for your listeners, that is worth a Google to read through some of their materials.
It will make you angry, but it will also educate you.
See, I found that this past year or two, the USAID folks went out and spent $416 million of our tax money on a series of workshops, programs, seminars, this kind of fluffy, happy stuff that in fact did absolutely nothing to aid the empowerment of women.
In fact, they were so ineffectual that the Afghan First Lady, Ms. Ghani, said, I do hope we're not going to fall into the game of contracting and subcontracting and the routine of workshops and training sessions that generate a lot of certificates on paper and little else.
To me, this is a shame.
It hurts the women.
It wastes the taxpayers' money.
And it underscores, Dr. Paul and Dan, why these interventionist efforts overseas are a ridiculous waste of American time and capital.
You know, Peter, I should know this answer, even though I struggle.
I'm trying to understand exactly the motivation because I lived up there and I saw these things passed.
And you alluded to it a little bit about we met well.
How does the mechanism work from your viewpoint, having been in the State Department on how these programs get through?
Is it just the pressure on the American people that if you vote against this thing, they're going to be accused of not favoring women?
What did you find out about the lobbying efforts to continue these programs?
Well, it's important to understand that the American people have absolutely no say in these programs, and Congress has very little say as long as they continue to simply vote large appropriations for the quote-unquote reconstruction and leave it up to USAID, the Department of State, and others to decide how to spend that money.
That said, how this all works is a perfect example of some of the problems in Washington that I know, Dr. Paul, you spent most of your professional life trying to untangle.
It begins in Washington, where contractors work hand in glove with USAID and the State Department, pitching programs to them.
Let's do this, let's do that.
At the same time, political imperatives come down, typically from the White House or the National Security Council, oftentimes based on more on domestic U.S. political needs, such as empowering women in Afghanistan, than perhaps what is most urgent overseas, such as food and medicine and clean water.
These political imperatives hit the State Department and USAID and its band of contractors, and kind of a witch's brew is created.
Well, how can we implement these programs?
Large contracts are given out to contractors like Chemonics, Development Alternative, Tetra Tech, and a whole range of folks who have been exploiting this system really since 2003, if not earlier.
This is all transmitted to the American embassy, and from there it takes off on its own on the ground.
Yeah, that's what I found particularly interesting about what you wrote, Peter.
And I went back actually when we were planning on having this conversation.
I went back and was trying to find some of the old hearings on Capitol Hill when we were there about these.
And I found one that was interesting, NDI, which is one of the pseudo-government contractors, the National Democratic Institute, part of the National Endowment for Democracy, usually more associated with regime change than reconstruction and assistance.
But I went back and looked at what they recommended for empowering women worldwide.
And it talked about there needs to be quotas for women in politics and quotas for women in society.
But then they went into exactly what you mentioned in your article, which is, I'll just read a couple of them, conducting ongoing communications training, focusing on building leadership skills, uniting women across party lines, internal reform, training women to train other women.
It sounds like it's really tailored more for the American audience.
And the thing that strikes me, and I was involved to a degree in the NGO world in Eastern Europe when I was there in the 90s, you get the sense it's this top-down approach where they assume that the women that's the recipients of this assistance are stupid.
And I think actually these women are probably a lot more clever than they're given credit for.
Well, you know, when you were reading through those different programs and goals with only a little bit of sarcasm, it sounds almost exactly like the Hillary Clinton campaign platform.
And jokes aside, that kind of nails down for you really where the thinking is.
It is again focused on what sounds good in Washington and not really what is any value out on the ground.
As you said, we assume that not only women in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places, and keep in mind these programs are active all over the Middle East, just on a much smaller scale than you see in Afghanistan.
We assume these people don't know what's best for them.
We assume that they need whatever leadership training is or communications training is, never mind the fact that they have been governing themselves in one form or another for quite some time.
In fact, much longer than the United States has even existed as a nation.
We simply parachute in, we simply tell them what they need, and whether they like it or not, we deliver to them what we need, often at great profits to ourselves and our companies.
I'd like to share with you an example from Iraq that dovetails with that idea that we know better than they do.
We had been pressed very, very hard out of the embassy in Baghdad to hold women's empowerment events.
And this was spurred largely by the appointment of a women's issues ambassador to the embassy in Baghdad.
Baghdad is unique in that it had multiple ambassadors.
Typically, an embassy has just one person who's in charge of everything, but we had lots of ambassadors there in the embassy.
They were like vampires.
They bite each other in the neck and then there would be new ones.
The women's issues ambassador was desperate for us to do things so that she could supervise them.
And she said, you know, you're going to hold, everyone was told we're going to hold an empowerment event next week.
Figure it out.
So we ginned up with our contracting partners a women's empowerment conference.
Women would come together and talk about that.
And no one said they were going to come.
We leaned on some of the sheikhs in our area who had benefited from our resources.
They said, well, you know, we really don't want to send our women out there, but, you know, I'll force one of my cousins to go.
It turned out that the only way we could get anyone to show up was to offer taxi fare, oftentimes double or triple what a taxi really would cost, and a free lunch.
That's what brought the women into our events, not any desire to hear.
what we had to say.
You know, Peter, there's a couple ways of looking at this and trying to understand it.
You've mentioned the idea of customs.
Some of those customs have been around for 2,000 years, and we think some of our people will go over there with a little bit of money, change their minds.
But what are the odds of it ever happening, or has it ever happened, in a society like this where customs are not challenged and outsiders don't interfere, then allowing a certain segment to opt out of the system and maybe practice customs a little bit differently?
Is that practical or is that an impractical solution to some of the problems over there?
Certainly staying out of the internal affairs is a pretty practical thing.
I can argue the case for moral and constitutional reasons stay out, but you present all the cases for practical reasons why we shouldn't be there.
Well, the idea of creating opportunities and seeing if people wish to rise to those challenges doesn't strike me as particularly a bad idea.
I think the opportunities have to be legitimate.
They have to be sustainable.
And people have to have confidence in both us and what we've created in order to be willing to take those kinds of chances.
But at the end of the day, when people need food and water and medicine and safe roads and better options for their children's education, we might want to think about taking care of those things first and then moving on to the others.
Realizing Cultural Failures00:03:02
As far as changing cultures, which is an underlying theme for USAID, even if they don't actually say it quite that way, I mean, the easiest way to realize how ridiculous that is is to turn it right around.
Imagine some Afghan contractors coming here to New York City, where I live, and trying to convince women that instead of dressing as they do, they have to wear hijabs and cover their faces.
I don't think the program would get very far.
Maybe some of the fashionistas downtown would want to do it just because it's different.
The other thing is that element of practicality, and I'm a strong believer in that.
Most Americans know the phrase ugly American, but they often misapply it.
The book Ugly American, which came out in the 1960s, actually talked about a physically unpleasant-looking man who went out into the field in this fictional Southeast Asian country and worked directly with the people on their needs in a very practical way.
And so in the book, at least, the term ugly American was actually a term of endearment for this guy who was doing all the right things in all the right ways.
He, of course, was shot down by people running the bureaucracy in the fictional embassy and the fictional USAID in that country.
It's a good book, and I commend it to everyone.
I tried to get everyone in Iraq and the friends and colleagues I have in Afghanistan to read it.
I don't think I was particularly successful, but I think there's a movie version.
Maybe I'll try again.
Well, Peter, you know, speaking of good books, I have to say I started reading your book when it first came out, and I can't remember a book that was so compelling, impossible to put down.
We meant well.
This was such a great read, and it was just full of practical examples of how this U.S. assistance program just botched things left and right.
And do you think now it's been, you know, four years or so since you've written the book, do you think the U.S. government has learned any lessons at all from this other than that they need to silence people like you a lot quicker?
No.
Any other questions?
No.
To expand slightly on that, I mean, the answer really is no.
In terms of what happened in Iraq, well, anyone can pick up a newspaper or look at any news out of that beleaguered country and realize that we failed in every possible way there.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned, the same programs, oftentimes run by the same people, because many of the contractors as the Iraq adventure was wrapped up just simply moved over to Afghanistan and continued doing exactly the same things they were doing there.
I'm afraid that the lessons that I tried to press forward in my book and that are being talked about now a little bit more openly in Afghanistan, particularly by that Inspector General at Segar, I can't say anybody in the government's listening.
They continue to spend the money.
They continue to do the silly things that we've pointed out here in just one small example about empowering women.
Write Second Volume00:00:58
If your show was six or eight hours long, we could go through dozens and dozens of examples.
There were schools that weren't properly fireproofed and were actually dangerous to be in.
There was a huge amount of money spent to bring a frozen yogurt shop to Kabul.
A car show, an attempt to create a skiing resort in the mountains of Afghanistan.
The list is nearly endless, and you could certainly write a second volume called We Meant Well 2 that would be similar to what I wrote four years ago.
Well, please.
Go ahead.
Peter, you remind me about the time, and we may need another session and some more time to talk about this.
But our program time is running out, but I do want to thank you, Peter von Baron, very much for joining us today and remind the listeners that his book, We Meant Well, is very worthwhile reading.