I have dealt with USAID for nearly four decades now, and my overall impression has been akin to Longfellow’s description of the little girl with a curl:
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
My first contact with the organization was as a military observer with the U.N. Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO) in the Middle East. Stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, USAID partnered with U.N. alphabet organizations (UNRA, WHO, UNICEF, etc.) to provide aid relief to refugees who were primarily Palestinians.
I quickly learned that USAID considered itself a contracting and grant-giving organization independent of the rest of the U.S. government. They primarily worked through contracted NGOs which they term “implementers.” The USAID folks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem didn’t physically do anything. They primarily gave contracts and grants to the implementers. I believed that some of them were corrupt. The Israelis thought that most were terrorist front groups and I learned to stay away from them in the field in Lebanon and Gaza for fear of being caught up in an Israeli strike.
My experience in the 1991 Operation Sea Angel in Bangladesh softened my view of the organization considerably. The horrific cyclone in the Bay of Bengal in 1991 caused a tidal surge 20 feet high that killed thousands and displaced millions. The Bangladeshi Navy was literally displaced to the downtown area of the Port City of Chittagong. As the director of operations (J-3) of the newly designated Joint Task Force, I accompanied my commander and a small assessment team to the nation to determine what needed to be done.
We were met at the embassy by the ambassador and the country director of the USAID mission, one of the largest in the world at the time. After the usual whining from the USAID head that her entire budget wouldn’t buy a single Patriot missile, she introduced us to her head “implementer” — the country director of CARE. CARE is an expert in disaster relief, and he gave us a tutorial on a subject on which we were mere novices. The education he gave us was invaluable.
We thought that disaster relief was merely pushing Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) out of aircraft, building temporary military tent camps for displaced persons, and perhaps using our reverse osmosis water purification units (ROWPUS) — which the Marine Corps was very proud of — to provide potable water. The CARE rep patiently explained the reality to us. There were plenty of emergency rations stored in the region as well as emergency shelter kits pre-positioned nearby. What was needed from us was helicopters and landing craft to get the supplies where they were needed.
He also explained that our ROWPUs were not a good idea because the locals might become dependent on them. He suggested that we use our engineers to sink tube wells by simply driving pipes down to the high freshwater level and supply cheap generators and pumps to provide a sustainable long-term solution to the clean water problem.
The host-nation government was asking for help in disposing of the thousands of human and animal remains littered along the beaches of the Bay of Bengal. CARE had the funding to hire pop-up local mortuary teams to dispose of the remains in a culturally sensitive manner.
My commander was a Vietnam veteran and had nightmare visions of the public affairs impact of U.S. military bulldozers pushing Bangladeshi families into mass graves. These were just a few of the good tips we got from CARE.
Fortunately for Bangladesh, a Navy force carrying a Marine Expeditionary Brigade was passing through the region on its way home from Operation Desert Storm. We were able to wrap up the military support operation in 30 days and hand it back to local authorities and USAID. SEA ANGEL remains a textbook case of proper U.S. civil-military interagency cooperation.
My experience in the 1993 humanitarian support operation in Somalia was mixed, but USAID “implementers” generally worked well with the U.S. and coalition military to get relief supplies to those who needed them. They had the supplies and the military could protect them from marauding militias.
However, as the mission morphed into a Clinton administration nation-building endeavor, Somalis soured on the U.N. and many USAID “implementers” who were trying to enforce new governance measures that were culturally inappropriate to Somalia. The ultimate result was the tragedy of the Battle of the Black Sea Market (Black Hawk Down).
As a State Department field advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan, I witnessed the ultimate decline of the agency. By that time, years of leadership by people who were more prone to join the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps had turned the senior leadership of the agency into a haven for overaged hippies more comfortable with the embassy bars in Kabul and Baghdad than in the field supervising their “implementers.”
The field representatives were generally good people, but not experienced enough to effectively supervise their “implementers,” many of which were out of control. I cannot count the times when our military partners rolled up on Taliban and Islamic State safe houses only to find USAID rice bags lying about.
In some areas, the agency was actually working against U.S. and host nation policy. The most egregious case I witnessed came in Iraq in 2010. The Iraqi government was trying to eradicate illegal fish farms along the Euphrates River. Rich sheiks were draining the water from the Euphrates returning much of the surrounding farmland back into a desert.
One day, I was leading an interagency team made up of U.S. Army Engineers, Iraqi National Police, and personnel from the local government on a mission to destroy several of the fish farms. Along the way, I decided to check on one that we had blown up the month before. When we got to the site, we found it being repaired by a USAID “implementer” under a contract.
Needless to say, our district sub-governor who was accompanying us went ballistic. He wanted to arrest the workers on the spot. I dissuaded him from doing so and merely sent the workers on their way. Later that day, I got an incensed call from the USAID head of mission berating me for interfering with an agency project. When I informed him that she was violating U.S. policy by not supporting the Iraqi government, she airily stated that the agency knew better than the Iraqis what was good for nation-building. We had to go to the ambassador to kill the project.
As an independent agency, USAID far exceeded its authority in instances such as those related above. But, it can still be a valuable tool for national soft power in international affairs, but it badly needs adult supervision. President Trump did the right thing putting it under State Department control.
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Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel. He served as a special advisor to the deputy secretary of defense and later as a State Department field advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan
