Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is holding out the possibility that Iraq’s national election could be delayed beyond January because of a dispute over the allocation of seats in parliament.

Clinton told reporters at the State Department Monday that U.S. officials are involved in trying to help Iraqi politicians sort out their differences over an elections law that must pass before the vote can be held.

The election is supposed to be conducted in January. Clinton mentioned no specific dates but said the election “might slip” as a result of the continuing dispute over the elections law. She expressed confidence that the voting eventually will be held.

Iraq’s upcoming election, the second since the 2005 passage of Iraq’s constitution, has no shortage of problems. Last week the Sunni vice president vetoed a cobbled-together election law intended to ensure the election could proceed on time. And today an amended law passed parliament — but only after Sunni lawmakers walked out in protest.

I suppose Clinton is saying that the United States will follow the Iraqi lead on this one. But it’s hard to shake the suspicion that if this were Afghanistan, the U.S. would possess a greater urgency about the election being held on schedule.

Terrific. Well, first let me thank you all. I’m sorry that my schedule didn’t permit me to get to Bagram to actually have this meeting, but thanks for coming down. I really appreciate the opportunity to hear firsthand from all of you.

And I am very pleased that we’ve made progress. I know we still have a long way to go, but the story that needs to be told is the kind of committed service that is being shown in this integrated civilian-military effort. And I’m really grateful to each and every one of you. I want to hear from you. That’s what I’d like to spend time doing.

And that’s it! That’s the whole transcript!

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter on Wednesday that his committee was told by a top State Department official that the company had engaged in “broad violations” of export laws and that the unlicensed shipments “went beyond weapons for personal use.”

In the letter, Senator Kerry asked the State Department’s acting inspector general to begin an investigation into the “continued fitness” of Xe Services to carry out contract work for the State Department. The letter cited a report in The New York Times last week that Blackwater executives had approved of a plan to make secret payments to Iraqi officials after Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.

Rajiv Shah and USAID (Department of Agriculture, USAID)

After nearly 11 months of allowing the top U.S. foreign-development bureau go without permanent leadership, the Obama administration decided Tuesday afternoon on the unconventional choice of Rajiv Shah, a 36-year old undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture and medical doctor with extensive experience in food security and public heath, to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be Shah’s boss if the Senate confirms him, gushed. “He has a record of delivering results in both the private and public sectors, forging partnerships around the world, especially in Africa and Asia, and developing innovative solutions in global health, agriculture, and financial services for the poor,” she said in a statement heralding Shah’s nomination.

But some USAID program managers and contractors, the people whom Obama tapped Shah to oversee as USAID’s next administrator, aren’t happy. In a series of emails forwarded to The Washington Independent on condition of anonymity by a USAID contractor concerned about the Shah nomination, those within the agency who focus on its core mission of helping impoverished countries improve their governance and foster economic growth wondered whether Shah’s background makes him the best fit person to lead the troubled development agency.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

In another of the emails, another USAID contractor who works on development and governance said that unless Shah can transcend his background, it will signal “that other areas are less important.”

Shah was not the Obama administration’s first choice to head USAID. That was Paul Farmer, the founder of the global public-health organization Partners In Health and well-respected figure in the development community. But for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, Farmer did not make it through the administration’s vetting process. At a visit to USAID’s headquarters in July, Clinton cryptically called the laborious vetting a “nightmare” and “frustrating beyond words.”

As a result, read another email, “the lead on this story was the need to propose a candidate who would easily be confirmed by the Senate,” according to its author, another USAID contractor. “The vetting process may be depriving the Agency of the seasoned professional, senior leadership it needs during this crisis.”

USAID faces no shortage of problems. Despite a requested boost in funding from the Obama administration, the agency had a budget of barely $1.25 billion this past fiscal year, compared to over a half-trillion for the Pentagon. It remains without a planning bureau, which the Bush administration folded into the State Department. And the organization is largely reliant on contractors to supplement its relatively small staff in fulfilling its diverse mandate of development, public-health, governance and agricultural programs: it had 1,759 employees in 2006, compared to millions employed by the Pentagon. “AID is never going to have the depth of knowledge on health, education, agriculture, microenterprise,” said George Ingram, a former senior USAID official, rattling off some of the tasks of the agency, “or the number of people required to carry them out.” Additionally, an emerging proposal to create an office for managing U.S. civilian tasks in war zones may cut into bureaucratic territory that USAID sees as its own.

But Shah himself has his own series of credentials. A fairly recent Agriculture Department hire, Shah manages a staff of more than 10,000 and a budget of over $2 billion. (The Obama administration’s funding request, currently before Congress, would give USAID about $1.7 billion next year.) Before arriving at the department to work on food security, he directed agricultural-development research for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the leading private development organizations that have emerged in recent years to reshape the international development landscape. Partnering with those non-governmental organizations is a driving focus of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, according to Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department director of policy planning.

One public-health expert who contracts with USAID, and who declined to speak on the record with TWI, said that Shah’s rapid ascent “tends to confirm” a rumor going around USAID circles that “Hillary Clinton was holding up the confirmation process because she wanted a USAID administrator she could control.” But the expert added that Shah’s credentials and experience made him “probably the best compromise we’re going to get.”

A different USAID contract employee worried that development and governance issues would be “pushed aside” in countries where the U.S. “has few strategic interests and there are overwhelming economic and public health issues to contend with.” The employee, in an email interview with TWI, anticipated “less governance work in the Papua New Guineas of the world” under Shah.

Ingram, now the co-chair of the Modernize Foreign Assistance Network, a nonpartisan group urging foreign-assistance reform, considered the early criticism of Shah to be premature and unfair. “The guy brings expertise in health [and] agriculture, but that does not neccarily tell us how he’d lead the agency,” he said. “I can see why people are saying that, but they’re making presumptions that may or may not be correct.”

One private development organization, the International Center for Research on Women, hailed Shah’s nomination. Shah “brings to USAID the powerful voice and vision required to elevate development’s role in U.S. foreign policy,” the center’s president, Geeta Rao Gupta, said in a statement. “He will provide the leadership and insight crucial for the agency at this pivotal time in its history.”

Another USAID contractor, in an email forwarded to TWI, had a mixed reaction. The contractor said it was “exciting to see a relatively young, brilliant man take the reigns and perhaps steer [government] aid in a revised direction” and praised the nominee’s management experience. But the contractor, reflecting a sentiment expressed in several of the emails, said Shah’s nomination was “yet another (or maybe a stronger) indication that Obama is shifting from nation building/good governance to heath care and food security initiatives. This may not bode well for D&G,” a shorthand for development and governance.

A statement released yesterday from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will vet Shah, praised the Obama administration for belatedly producing a USAID nominee but did not pledge any support for Shah. Kerry expressed his concern about the vacancy, saying a new administrator would “bring significant momentum to foreign aid reform,” and pledged a “thorough nomination process.” Lugar looked forward to a discussion with Shah of the ways “to improve and support the development mission that benefits our long-term security as we proceed with the confirmation process.”

That was Ingram’s main concern for Shah’s confirmation hearings as well. Ingram said he had heard largely positive things about Shah from emails with his friends in the development community, and hoped Kerry and Lugar would “ask questions on revitalizing AID” with a “bipartisan recognition that the dramatic reduction in staffing in AID over the last 20 years has been a mistake.”

Dr. Raj Shah is a leader in the development community, an innovative and results-oriented manager, and someone who understands the importance of providing people around the world with the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty and chart their own destinies. By nominating Raj to lead the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), President Obama has reaffirmed that development must be a core pillar of American foreign policy.

A trained medical doctor and health economist, Raj has the skills and experience to lead a reinvigorated USAID in the 21st century. He has a record of delivering results in both the private and public sectors, forging partnerships around the world, especially in Africa and Asia, and developing innovative solutions in global health, agriculture, and financial services for the poor. He has led and worked with many of the initiatives that are defining best practice in the field of development, including the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His tireless efforts to immunize children around the world have helped save countless lives.

As Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Raj currently manages more than 10,000 federal employees and a budget of more than $2.6 billion, and works closely with Congress, the State Department, the White House, and the international development community on issues ranging from health and nutrition to bioenergy and climate change.

If confirmed, Raj will bring an impressive record of accomplishment and a deep understanding of what works in development to his role as USAID Administrator. I look forward to working closely with him to advance the President’s agenda and to elevate and integrate development in our foreign policy.

I want to take this opportunity to also commend Acting USAID Administrator Alonzo L. Fulgham for his service. Under his steady leadership, we have launched a number of ambitious development initiatives, including on global health and food security, in the first months of this administration that will improve lives around the world. I also want to thank the thousands of career professionals who work tirelessly every day to fulfill USAID’s important mission.

But before Bowen gets to USOCO, his own organization, known as SIGIR (”Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction”), has to go out of business. To be clear, Bowen told me he’s not looking to run USOCO; I’m just using this as a cheap transition device to get to Josh Rogin’s report in Foreign Policy on the last days of SIGIR:

Bowen is currently searching for a way to keep SIGIR’s institutional knowledge and expertise in the government and to keep his staff employed. He has been shopping around town his idea for a new U.S. government agency that would manage all reconstruction efforts in areas where the military is deployed. He calls it the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations, which would exist in perpetuity and stand independent of either the State or Defense Departments, as SIGIR does now.

“It assumes that over time, contingencies will occur,” said Bowen, “It’s sort of like FEMA. FEMA is set up to address disasters, but disasters aren’t continuous. The history of the last 50 years, with 15 contingencies or so, indicates that the next 50 years will probably have more contingency operations.”

Rogin reports that Bowen met on Thursday with Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg and will soon get an audience with Anne-Marie Slaughter, State’s policy planning chief who’s in charge of a big diplomacy and development review.

Elliot Madison, who counsels seriously mentally ill patients, first came under suspicion when, at the G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh in September, he was arrested for allegedly listening to a police scanner and then sending out the information on Twitter to help protesters avoid the heavily armed police. Wired notes that the State Department applauded the same activity when protesters did it in Iran.

But in Madison’s case, the following week the Joint Terrorism Task Force got a warrant and raided the 41-year-old social worker’s home, where he lives with his wife and some roommates. The feds seized his computers, books, camera memory cards, air-filtration masks, bumper stickers and political posters. These were all supposedly evidence of his breaking the federal anti-rioting law. If found guilty, he could spend up to five years in prison.

Among his possessions taken were an electronic manuscript of a book he was working on. His first book, written with the “Curious George Brigade,” is called “Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs.”

Madison and his lawyer are now claiming that the search and seizure were unconstitutional.

Wired reporter Ryan Singel is decidedly sympathetic, suggesting that Madison is “yet another casualty of the government’s nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.”

The House Judiciary Committee is actually holding a hearing on a related subject this afternoon — the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, in which one of the thousands of Muslims rounded up, treated harshly and detained in the United States just after 9/11 sued the government for wrongful imprisonment and violation of his constitutional rights. In May, the Supreme Court dismissed Iqbal’s claims.

Anne-Marie Slaughter (Photo Courtesy of Princeton University)

Anne-Marie Slaughter was attending a private lunch on Tuesday at the International Finance Corporation in Washington when she saw the gap between what U.S. foreign policy is and what it needs to be. Discussed around the table: the myriad changes to the development landscape now that commercial banks and investment funds are joining with private foundations and corporations to assist governments and multilateral institutions on anti-poverty programs. While development work has been trending in this direction for years, even decades, the United States’ principal instruments of foreign policy, the State Department and USAID, hadn’t kept pace.

For Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning, the lunch crystallized the need to refit the capabilities of the State Department and USAID — the independent development agency that reports to the Secretary of State — to better match an increasingly complex world. Which was fortuitous, since the project taking up the vast majority of Slaughter’s professional time is an ambitious top-to-bottom review of those capabilities for precisely that purpose.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In July, Slaughter’s boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, announced a new planning and budgeting document, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, or QDDR, created to “effectively design, fund, and implement development and foreign assistance as part of a broader foreign policy” every four years. It is the first such effort for the State Department, which is not known for a culture of planning, and is modeled after a planning document produced by the Defense Department that reassesses and guides strategy on a recurring basis.

Clinton put Slaughter, acting USAID administrator Alonzo Fulgham and Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew in charge of creating the document — a process of managing five working groups chaired by top-level agency heads to produce an interim report in January and a final document by next September. Last week, in an address to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, Lew defined the nascent QDDR process as an attempt to redress “a serious imbalance” in funding over decades that has left the “military but not civilian agencies resources to support expanding international roles.”

But in an expansive interview in her office on the State Department’s seventh floor, Slaughter, a former dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, outlined the broader strategic concepts that are driving the QDDR. “This is not an abstract planning exercise that goes into a report and sits on a shelf,” she said. “It’s a planning exercise that does connect to the budget, that’s very important, but the implications go far beyond the budget. The budget is the tool to implement what we’re going to come up with. This is really what I think secretaries of state should be doing, which is a kind of farsighted look into how the United States is going to implement its foreign policy agenda in the 21st century.”

The review comes as at a time when the State Department is facing existential questions about its utility to American foreign policy, and some aren’t so sure that it will be as influential as Slaughter believes. In a provocative article last month for Foreign Policy magazine, public-diplomacy specialist Matt Armstrong called the agency “broken and paralyzed, unable to respond to the new 21st-Century paradigm” where both state and non-state actors influence the global agenda. “The QDDR will ultimately be just a document. What it spurs will be the real test,” Armstrong, whose article urged radical departmental restructuring, said in an interview. “As we know from the struggle for minds and wills around the world today, words only go so far.”

Asked if the QDDR will result in institutional changes at the State Department and USAID, Slaughter answered simply, “Yes.” While she said she could not yet determine would precisely would change, the QDDR’s working groups are asking a fundamental question: “What do we need?”

Three broad conceptual lines will determine the answer. The first, Slaughter explained, is that U.S. foreign policy is beset with “collective problems” — from terrorism to climate change to pandemic disease — that require joint international action, something all the stakeholders at Slaughter’s International Finance Corporation lunch recognized. “How are we going to allocate our resources and organize ourselves to be able to work cooperatively, while maintaining enough freedom of action to play the leadership role that we think we ought to play?” The corollary implication of that question, Slaughter indicated, is that the State Department and USAID need to strengthen their partnerships with different multilateral institutions, but also different U.S. agencies and departments, military and civilian — but not replicate their existing strengths.

“When we do food security, we talk to Agriculture,” Slaughter said, giving an example of current interagency cooperation that might be bolstered after the QDDR process is complete. “We’re doing global health; we’re talking to [the Centers for Disease Control] and [the Department of Health and Human Resources]. That’s great! State doesn’t want to duplicate that.” The same goes for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which awards development grants to countries based on governance capabilities: “We have MCC people engaged in the QDDR and will definitely be learning from and considering its experience in how we integrate diplomacy and development.”

Accordingly, the second concept is about how State and USAID work with the military to address “the question of civilian operational capacity to crisis.” The widespread inability of the State Department and USAID — with budgets representing a tiny fraction of the half-trillion-per-year Defense Department — to deploy to conflict zones has expanded the military’s role in stabilization and reconstruction duties broadly understood to be civilian tasks. The problem has grown so pronounced that a number of ad hoc solutions have emerged. Earlier this month, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, director of the Army’s Combined Arms Center, teamed with scholar Beth Cole at the U.S. Institute of Peace to write a field manual for civilian operations in stabilization and reconstruction, after the senior State Department official dealing with those issues, Amb. John Herbst, observed that his office lacked any doctrinal guidance.

For Slaughter, the QDDR will address the “space between what AID or DIFD [the U.K.'s foreign-assistance agency] or UNDP [the United Nation Development Program] does and what peacekeepers and international armies do” in conflict zones and failed or fragile states. But she does not believe that the first QDDR can arrive at a definitive answer for what that capability is or how State and USAID can develop it, since the issue would require “continually asking and figuring out how we answer it.”

The final overarching construct the QDDR will address goes back to Slaughter’s International Finance Corporation lunch. Powerful states remain “very, very important” in geopolitics,” she said, but “the landscape of nonstate actors is so dramatically different,” requiring State and USAID to think about how to perform diplomacy and and development work in an international environment where investment banks, multinational alliances, private advocacy groups, religious institutions and other players “have the power that once only states had.”

Slaughter does not yet know how the QDDR will answer to those questions. “I think by framing the questions that way, you’re asking people to look at the capabilities that we need” and then identify existing gaps.

That task falls to the five working groups that she oversees — working groups that comprise senior officials from across both State and USAID. Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia, and Karen Turner, director of USAID’s office of development partners, head the group responsible for “Building a Global Architecture of Cooperation.” Maria Otero, the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, and Gloria Steele, USAID’s global-health chief, work on whole-of-government solutions. Johnnie Carson, State’s top African-affairs official, and George Laudato, USAID’s Mideast chief, handle “Investing in the Building Blocks of Stronger Societies.” Conflict prevention and response is under Eric Schwartz, State’s assistant secretary for population, migration and refugees; and Susan Reichle, USAID’s senior democracy and humanitarian assistance official. And Ruth Whiteside of State’s Foreign Service Institute and JeanMarie Smith, Lew’s special assistant, are in charge of “Building Operational and Resource Platforms for Success,” along with USAID’s acting administrator for management, Sharon Comer. 

The presence of senior officials from both organizations in the QDDR process ensures that it doesn’t remain confined to Slaughter’s policy-planning shop. “This is something the whole building is doing,” she said, “with Policy Planning, with AID and with Jack at the top.”

Only one policy option has been ruled out: dissolving USAID and moving development work to the State Department. “There will be no merger,” Slaughter said. “Secretary Clinton has made clear she wants a strong AID, a well-resourced AID, [and] wants diplomacy and development well-integrated.”

Armstrong has a similar focus, but he wondered how thoroughly the QDDR would adopt the critique. “A focus of the QDDR seems to be State’s ability to play well with others,” he said. “But creating more plugs and sockets to connect with other agencies will be of little value if the internal bureaucratic friction that inhibits agility and creativity are not addressed.” He said that the department would need to abandon its bureaucratic “emphasis on national borders”– the State Department is primarily organized around countries, rather than transnational phenomena — if it wants to become “become an effective alternative and counterweight to DOD.”

Whether the QDDR will adopt that critique remains to be seen. But even if it doesn’t, Slaughter indicated that she shares the concern that animates it. “To redress the imbalance between [the Pentagon] and State/AID in the 21st Century, we need vastly increased capabilities,” Slaughter said, “and we need to be organized in a way that lets us engage other parts of government but also a whole new landscape of both diplomatic and nongovernmental actors.”

Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Sec. Clinton placed James Michel, a senior USAID official, alongside Lew and Slaughter at the helm of the QDDR process. While Michel plays a leading role with Slaughter at the implementation level, the USAID co-chair of the process is acting Administrator Alonzo Fulgham.

An earlier version of this piece neglected as well to note that Sharon Comer, the acting USAID administrator for management, is the lead USAID representative on the “Building Operational and Resource Platforms for Success.”

(On the other hand, maybe Lew is just stopping by on his way to the Willard.)