Funding the Enemy by Douglas A. Wissing

Author:Douglas A. Wissing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus

Both the US military and civilians played some unfortunate games of chicken—funding ill-fated poultry projects that left egg on their faces. One night, I was working in a military development-team office in eastern Afghanistan. It was a typical thrown-together military office, crammed with soldiers at abutting desks. Civilians bustled in now and then for hurried confabs. A British postconflict-development consultant sat at the desk facing mine as we both bent over our laptops. In a low voice, he told me he had “gone to the dark side,” by taking a military development contract. Civilian aid workers typically pride themselves on maintaining distance from the military.

“What's your e-mail address?” he asked, and information on failed development projects began popping into my in-box. “Did you hear about that Dole farm up north?” he asked in his lilting accent. He smiled as he punched his send button. He began telling me about the Afghan chicken scam. Both USAID and the military gave millions of dollars to Western development consultants for contracts to train Afghans (primarily women) in basic poultry techniques. Most often a sketchily trained Afghan subcontractor would give a few days of chicken classes to a group of Afghan women, who often received money to attend. Following the training, the women would get a flock of chickens and a rooster. But things seldom went as planned in Afghanistan. In a pattern that followed many Afghan livestock programs of this nature, most of the women quickly sold their free chickens in the marketplace, and the majority of the surviving chickens soon died. The Brit glanced around and then leaned closer. He told me out of the corner of his mouth that 80-90 percent of the inordinately expensive poultry-development projects in Afghanistan have failed. Noting one particularly extravagant project, he snorted, “It would have been cheaper to have parachuted chickens out of an airplane, with a year's worth of food.”24

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