Washington is pouring money into a project in Kyrgyzstan that, based on available evidence, has very questionable chances of success.
USAID has awarded a no-bid contract to Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), a for-profit company, "to ensure from the outset that the new parliament and its members understand their representative roles and functions," The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports.
Democratization may be a laudable goal, but politicians in Kyrgyzstan understand their roles and functions in a very different way than Washington would care to acknowledge. Some, for example, readily admit spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy seats on their party lists.
In this case, the institutional inertia of Washington’s democratization programs is costing the American taxpayer $3.25 million. True, it’s not a lot in the great scheme of American spending (the US has pledged roughly $100 million in aid to Kyrgyzstan this year), but considering what the Post has reported about DAI’s track record, how effective will this spending be?
A July 2010 review of recent USAID inspector general reports covering Pakistan and Afghanistan show that such contracts have trouble producing results.
A 2008 contract to DAI to increase the capacity of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas found that after almost two years, and spending of about $15.5 million, "little progress had been made" because most of the first year was spent developing plans and building relationships.
Though the US has been generous in helping rebuild Kyrgyzstan’s shattered south, there’s still a lot to be done before winter. For example, the fund to build latrines for those left homeless after June’s violence is underfunded by $3.4 million.
In terms of bang for the buck, if those "Parliamentary Strengthening Program" millions were put into these toilets, there’s an astronomically higher chance the goals of that program would succeed. After all, it’s been over two weeks since the elections, and still behind-the-scenes wrangling is preventing Kyrgyzstan’s would-be leaders from forming a government and moving the country forward.
(NB: If no-bid contracts give you déjà vu, it may be because the most scandalous no-bid contracts given by the US government in Kyrgyzstan, for fuel supplies to the Manas Transit Center, are currently under congressional investigation. Granted, the sums involved were thousands of times bigger and part of US spending on the war in Afghanistan.)
David Trilling is Eurasianet’s managing editor.
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