Big Budgets, Little Oversight in War Zones by Scott Higham, Jessica Schulberg and Steven Rich, Washington Post
… Along the way, the nonprofit rewarded its employees with generous salaries and millions in bonuses. Among the beneficiaries: the minister, Arthur B. Keys, and his wife, Jasna Basaric-Keys, who together earned $4.4 million in salary and bonuses between 2008 and 2012.
The story of IRD reflects the course of America’s ambitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which started with great enthusiasm and consumed tremendous resources, only to see many hopes go awry. Nation-building projects aimed at supplanting insurgents and securing the peace that looked promising on paper in Washington proved to be difficult to execute in dangerous and unpredictable war zones.
In Baghdad and Kabul, companies such as IRD were left to manage hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded programs with little meaningful oversight from USAID, according to interviews with government auditors and former IRD employees familiar with the projects…
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I remember doing an analysis last year on the impact of USAID efforts at reforming a particular economic sector in a third world country. 10 years and 3 major contracts later the agencies was asking for another round of bids. The reason was that there was no progress accomplished in 10 years that couldn't be traced directly to a single set of independent variables in that country's economy. The bid also recognized that the reason the efforts were failing had almost everything to do with a particular power structure in that country. Yet, the tax dollars were to be spent anyway because........that was a metric of activity in the region. And so, a decade of utterly wasted effort of millions of dollars, and a bid to do more of the same with full recognition that the obstacles were actually insurmountable by USAID.
Oh, almost forgot. To compensate for the lack of progress, past reporting had used shifts in goods production to show that X crop had risen by Y%. Except, the reporting was completely decontextualized. A little bit of analysis showed that the reason that crop X production grew was because it was directly incentivized. So what actually happened was that producers of other crops just switched to producing X and the expense of everything else. So yes, crop X grew, while the agricultural sector grew <1% in 10 years.