To the State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs subcommittee, Shah said:

“We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying.”

[...]

“Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back specifically. The other 40,000 is broken out as 24,000 would die because of a lack of support for immunizations and other investments and 16,000 would be because of a lack of skilled attendants at birth.”

In total, the cuts that appear in H.R. 1 would chop 16 percent from President Obama’s budget request for international relations. Certain programs would be hit harder than others; the International Disaster Assistance (IDA) fund, for example, would be allotted $430 million in 2011, half of what Obama has requested and just a third of what was ultimately spent in 2010. Shah said that the cut would likely put half of the 1.6 million Darfurians IDA currently supports at risk for disease, famine and further oppression.

Shah has previously come out against the USAID cuts that appear in the House Republicans’ budget plan. He called them “absolutely devastating” and said that U.S. efforts like disaster relief and nuclear emergency prevention in Japan could be threatened by cuts.

Foreign aid comprises about 1 percent of the total U.S. budget. Polls have shown that Americans vastly overestimate how much the government spends on foreign aid. The median guess as to how much of the budget is devoted to foreign aid is 25 percent.

In addition to targeting Planned Parenthood specifically, the Continuing Resolution (PDF) contains language that would limit foreign aid set aside for reproductive health to $440 million, a cut of almost a third from where it currently stands. It goes on:

“None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this division for the Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs for population planning activities or other population assistance may be made available to any foreign nongovernmental organization that promotes or performs abortion, except in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term.”

If the Continuing Resolution is finally approved with this language intact, it would be a de facto reinstatement of the government’s “Mexico City Policy,” more commonly termed the “global gag rule,” a now-defunct policy denying foreign aid money to any organizations involved in abortion. President Reagan instituted the global gag rule in 1984, Bill Clinton rescinded it upon taking office in 1993, George W. Bush put it back in place in 2001 and President Obama overturned it for a second time when he took office in 2009.

The government bringing back the global gag rule could have devastating consequences for organizations in vulnerable countries offering family planning and contraceptive services. Population Action International (PAI), a nonprofit NGO dedicated to reproductive health, reports that under the Bush’s gag rule in 2002, Marie Stopes International Ethiopia and the Family Guidance Association of Ethiopia (FGAE) lost 10 and 35 percent of their budgets, respectively. PAI reports that FGAE also lost out on participation in a U.S.-based HIV/AIDS program because of the misapprehension that the gag rule also applies to HIV/AIDS funding. And this occurred in Ethiopia, which has one of the lower HIV/AIDS infection rates in Africa: an estimated 2.1 percent of the adult population, as compared to Swaziland, which has the highest rate in the world, at 26.1 percent of the adult population. The top 23 countries in the world in terms of HIV infection rates are all in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The February amendment was Pence’s second effort in as many months to remove funding for domestic and international family planning organizations, though his original resolution on family planning funding was perhaps somewhat toothless given its format. While it sought the exact same goals as the current amendment and had a great deal of support, as a stand-alone bill, it was vulnerable to being voted down in the Senate. Even if it could have made it through, President Obama almost certainly would have vetoed such a bill. But the fact that it’s an amendment to the House’s Continuing Resolution makes it much more likely to go into effect.

If Democrats hope to avoid a government shutdown and actually keep the government funded through the year, they’ll have to make some compromises. If the Pence amendment’s supporters refuse to budge, this may very well become a battle that Democrats can’t afford to fight. This, in spite of public opinion polls showing that most Americans oppose cutting funding to Planned Parenthood.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen (Defense Department photo)

It’s not the Mullen Doctrine — yet. But in a recent speech that’s attracted little notice outside the defense blogosphere, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered the first set of criteria for using military force since Gen. Colin Powell held Mullen’s job nearly 20 years ago. And Mullen’s inchoate offerings provide something of an update — and something of a refutation — to Powell’s advice.

[Security1] Mullen’s speech, delivered to Kansas State University on March 3, was not intended to provide an inflexible blueprint for how the U.S. ought to use its military, aides to the chairman said. Instead, the speech meant to draw conclusions from Mullen’s three years as chairman advising two administrations about the scope — and, Mullen’s aides emphasize, the limitations — of military force in an era of stateless and unconventional threats after nine years of continuous warfare.
“This is his legacy,” said Patrick Cronin, a defense analyst with the Center for a New American Security. “He has articulated the Pentagon’s rediscovery of limited war theory.”

Perhaps Mullen’s most provocative “principle,” as he called it in the speech, is that military forces “should not – maybe cannot – be the last resort of the state.” On the surface, Mullen appeared to offer a profligate view of sending troops to battle, contradicting the Powell Doctrine’s warning that the military should only be used when all other options exhaust themselves. Powell’s warning has great appeal to a country exhausted by two costly, protracted wars, one of which was launched long before diplomatic options had run out.

But Mullen’s aides said the chairman was trying to make a subtler point, one that envisioned the deployment of military forces not as a sharp change in strategy from diplomacy but along a continuum of strategy alongside it. “The American people are used to thinking of war and peace as two very distinct activities,” said Air Force Col. Jim Baker, one of Mullen’s advisers for military strategy. “That is not always the case.” In the speech, Mullen focused his definition of military force on the forward deployment of troops or hardware to bolster diplomatic efforts or aid in humanitarian ones, rather than the invasions that the last decade saw.

“Before a shot is even fired, we can bolster a diplomatic argument, support a friend or deter an enemy,” Mullen said. “We can assist rapidly in disaster-relief efforts, as we did in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake.”

As much as it seems as though Mullen’s first principle allows for an era of increased conflict, his additional principles flowing from that insight would appear to place constraints on the military. Mullen’s major proposal is that the military should be deployed for future counterinsurgencies or other unconventional conflicts “only if and when the other instruments of national power are ready to engage as well,” such as governance advisers, development experts, and other civilians. “We ought to make it a precondition of committing our troops,” Mullen said, warning that “we aren’t moving fast enough” to strengthen the institutional capacity of the State Department and USAID in order to lift the greatest burdens of national security off the shoulders of the military.

“We shouldn’t start something unless we have the capacity to bring everybody on board,” Baker elaborated, highlighting the “precondition” as among the most important aspects of Mullen’s speech. “I almost read that as more of a cautionary note.” That, at least, is commensurate with the spirit of the Powell Doctrine’s cautions about a national over-reliance on military force. “If you’re going to have anything to sustainable to resolve a conflict, then there’s got to be something that follows,” Baker added, “or you’re going to dump it on the military.”

Stating the position from another — and more controversial — angle, Mullen contended in his speech that foreign policy had become “too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands,” an implicit rebuke of the structural factors resulting in the increased diplomatic profile of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus of U.S. Central Command and Adm. James Stavridis of U.S. European Command. In other words, if State and USAID don’t like being outshined by officers like Petraeus, they need to show a greater assertiveness and capacity to respond to foreign policy challenges before a president turns to the military to solve a problem.

“There is an imbalance in our civilian capacity to work alongside the military in fragile states,” said Cronin, a former senior official at USAID. “The combatant commands are regionally based out in the world, and we don’t have any civilian equivalent of that. So we have to find a way to connect our civilian organization, which is essentially a country team centered on an ambassador, with the interagency represented underneath, with the combatant commander, who has broad swaths of geography and can work across boundaries — which is necessary when you’re dealing with non-state and mobile threats.”

Significantly, Mullen, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to embrace the theorist-practitioners of counterinsurgency — who contend that the loyalties of a civilian population are decisive in a conflict between a government and internal rebels — offered insights that reflected the worldview of the counterinsurgents. “Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way,” Mullen said, because the contemporary battlefield is “in the minds of the people.” That’s the first time a chairman has embraced the concept of “population-centric” warfare, a departure from the “enemy-centric” focus of doctrines like Powell’s, with its focus on applying “overwhelming force” to vanquish an adversary. Mullen also implicitly departed from Powell’s conception that war should be conducted with minimal “interference” from civilian policymakers by arguing that the current threats the U.S. faces require an “iterative” process, requiring “near constant reassessment and adjustment.” He said victory in contemporary warfare would feel “a lot less like a knock-out punch and a lot more like recovering from a long illness.”

Mullen is no stranger to offering broad reconsiderations of American strategy. Before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the president’s senior military adviser — in 2007, Mullen was the nation’s highest-ranking Naval officer, and in 2006 he embraced a concept called the “thousand ship navy,” a way of thinking about global security partnerships. Mullen defined the idea as “a global maritime partnership that unites maritime forces, port operators, commercial shippers, and international, governmental and nongovernmental agencies to address mutual concerns” in an October 2006 op-ed in the Honolulu Advertiser. Similarly, using the handle @thejointstaff, Mullen might be the senior military leadership’s most prolific Twitter user.

Some of the counterinsurgents whom Mullen has embraced have grappled with how to interpret Mullen’s speech. Andrew Exum, author of the popular blog Abu Muqawama, tweeted, “Is this speech by Adm. Mullen a big deal or nothing particularly earth-shattering?” Robert Haddick, one of the editors of the influential Small Wars Journal blog, declared Mullen’s speech to have buried the Powell Doctrine by presuming “low-level warfare is an enduring fact of life.” Other bloggers have dissected whether it’s even fair to characterize the speech as a “Mullen Doctrine.”

If it’s not the Mullen Doctrine yet — “That’s your guys’ judgment,” Baker said — it might form the basis for one. Baker said that he would encourage his boss to expand the speech and develop its ideas for a longer essay in one of the major foreign-policy journals. “He felt like he had something to say here,” Baker added, “so he went out and said it.”

As the people of Haiti observe a national day of mourning to remember those lost in the catastrophic earthquake one month ago, the United States continues to stand with our Haitian friends as they recover and rebuild. Our thoughts and prayers also remain with Haitian-Americans around our country who have lost so many family and friends.

We are grateful to the many Americans who have responded with such speed and compassion to assist the relief efforts being led by the Haitian government and supported by the United Nations, as well as many countries and non-governmental organizations from around the world.

As part of the civilian-led American response, search and rescue teams pulled survivors from the rubble. Volunteer physicians, nurses and paramedics continue to deliver life-saving medical treatment. Having reopened the main airport and port to enable a massive international humanitarian effort, our servicemen and women are supporting the distribution of urgently needed food, water, medicine and shelter until these functions can be fulfilled by the rapidly-expanding civilian operation and the United Nations in Haiti. Americans have also generously contributed tens of millions of dollars to help, Congress took quick action, and the United States government is providing substantial immediate assistance. No relief operation of this magnitude and complexity is without its difficulties and challenges, but in cooperation with the Haitian government and our many partners, we have helped to save countless lives and avert an even larger catastrophe.

Nevertheless, the situation remains dire. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Today, the need for food, shelter, medical supplies and basic security is enormous, and the coming rainy season will pose new challenges. Infrastructure that was destroyed in minutes will take years to rebuild. Guided by the roadmap for cooperation and coordination developed by the government of Haiti, the United States will support our Haitian partners as they transition from emergency assistance to recovery and long-term reconstruction. The United Nations continuing appeal for additional peacekeepers and police, as well as next month’s donors’ conference at the United Nations, offer important opportunities for countries around the world to help Haiti recover and rebuild.

Amidst unimaginable suffering, the people of Haiti have inspired the world with their faith, strength of spirit and determination to rebuild. In the difficult months and years to come, they will continue to have a friend and partner in the United States of America.

See also Rajiv Shah, the administrator of USAID, reflecting on a month’s worth of relief efforts.

It is also important to consider whether USAID’s growing national security mission is compatible with its development aims. For example, can USAID participate effectively in counterinsurgency and stabilization operations while maintaining a credible humanitarian presence, or do these functions demand a new approach altogether? There is justification for aid programs that have both short-term strategic value and long-term development objectives, but the line between these two goals is often blurred. At a minimum, foreign aid accounts need to be rationalized so that they support U.S. priorities and the missions of the agencies in which they are located.

How to square the circle? Stuart Bowen’s proposal for a U.S. Office of Contingency Operations is one way. Bowen’s so-called USOCO would create an operational structure in crisis situations for integrating defense, diplomacy and development efforts, along with humanitarian relief, reconstruction, rule-of-law advisory and other elements of national power as necessary. That’s what Clinton wants. But it would leave USAID alone to focus on long-term development projects, as Kerry and Lugar want.

Whether Bowen’s proposal will gain traction is a different story. He’s expected to present the USOCO idea to Congress in the coming weeks — probably on Jan. 30, when he presents his next quarterly report on Iraq reconstruction to lawmakers. (The idea recently won support from the respected diplomat Ryan Crocker.) Before he does, however, the various foreign-policy departments are expected to send Bowen their formal perspectives on the merits of USOCO in the next few days — including, naturally, State and USAID.

That proposal may be controversial in some circles — particularly in areas the development community, where there’s concern that USOCO might represent a more cumbersome bureaucratic structure. But Bowen’s idea is attracting some powerful allies, like the widely admired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. “I do support the concept,” Crocker, the incoming dean of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, emailed me. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies.”

From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.

That figure comes from a Pentagon study from last month. It’s a dramatic uptick. More disturbing still, the memo doesn’t explain the relationship between those security contractors and the military chain of command. Are they required to adhere to Gen. McChrystal’s intent to protect the Afghan civilian population? If not, how to mitigate their potential damage to the mission?

Additionally, the Obama administration is trying to shift the majority of its development aid into quick-impact agricultural sectors. But McCaskill’s staff found a lot of problems with USAID’s agricultural contracts:

In November 2006, USAID awarded a four-year, $102 million contract to Chemonics International, Inc., to implement the Accelerating Sustainable Agriculture Program, a program to improve agricultural production and efficiency in rural Afghanistan. Although the contractor has reported progress, the USAID Inspector General found that the contractor could not adequately support its reports and that the contractor had failed to comply with some contract requirements.

According to the USAID Inspector General, Chemonics “had inadequate support” for its report that 1,719 individuals had received agricultural training, and “no support” that its activities had created an economic value of more than $59 million. The Inspector General also reported that a $40 million initiative to cultivate land for a commercial farm was behind schedule.

I don’t know if Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has canceled this contract. But he’s indicated a general sense that he wants USAID to deal directly with government officials and not through contractors, a position that has earned him some rebuke from USAID. McCaskill’s staff, however, has found that in many cases USAID is asking contractors to look out for waste, fraud and abuse against … other contractors, rather than expanding its own base of contract oversight personnel.

Finally, a Defense Department contractor agency has reviewed about $5.9 billion worth of Afghanistan contracts controlled by the department. And of that, the auditors have identified more than $950 million in “questioned and unsupported costs” by Defense contractors. That’s 16 percent of what the auditors have examined so far.

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.

[Security1]“Looks as though food security and agriculture are the key new directions for both AID and DFID,” said a USAID contract employee, referring to Britain’s development agency, which works closely with USAID, in a forwarded email. “This is a huge pendulum swing from the past 20 years, which were dominated by democracy and economic growth.” The contractor worried that a White House statement heralding “fresh ideas” for the agency meant that “there is concern the decision will be unpopular among the ‘career men and women of the agency,’ since the President has chosen someone who has never worked for AID and is so very young.”

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.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) and Ranking Member Dick Lugar (R-IN) welcome the nomination of a Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

“I am pleased that the Administration has announced their nominee, Dr. Rajiv Shah, to be the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID),” said Chairman Kerry. “I have been very concerned about the lack of political leadership at USAID, especially in the face of critical foreign policy, humanitarian and development priorities in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan. I also believe having an Administrator will bring significant momentum to foreign aid reform. I look forward to a thorough nomination process.”

“For development to play its full role in our national security structure, USAID must be a strong agency with the resources to accomplish the missions we give it,” Senator Lugar said. “The issues that we face today – from chronic poverty and hunger to violent acts of terrorism – require that we work seamlessly toward identifiable goals. I look forward to discussing ways to improve and support the development mission that benefits our long-term security as we proceed with the confirmation process.”

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.