Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Afghanistan: A Plan to Turn the Tide? (Panel I)
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SEN. JOHN SUNUNU (R-NH): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary, how much was obligated last year through USAID for all of the important programs we have been talking about?
MR. BOUCHER: We're in the range of $2 billion for the civilian side of the effort, yeah.
SEN. SUNUNU: On the civilian side, you think you were close to $2 billion. And what are the proposed outlays for fiscal year 2008?
MR. BOUCHER: 2008, it's same range. I think last year was 1.8 and this year is about 2. I'm now looking at my numbers, and we didn't do the totals. But if I add up the regular spending and supplemental, it's about $2 billion.
SEN. SUNUNU: But you believe it will be close or slightly above to what we did last year.
MR. BOUCHER: Yeah, slightly above, probably.
SEN. SUNUNU: And as I look down a list I have of the different areas -- agriculture, road, power, water -- you know, there are obligations in all of these important areas. But it begs the question: Which of these areas is the most resource-constrained? If you had an incremental $100 million or $500 million in addition to your proposed outlays, where would you put it?
MR. BOUCHER: I'd probably put it into electricity and governance. I mean, if you do the totals for this year, I've got, governance is the biggest one, 493 between the base and supplemental, 493 million. That includes 100 million -- (inaudible) -- the election, which will be held next year. So we know we need more money as we move to the elections next year.
SEN. SUNUNU: Is the bulk of that money, $500 million, being used to prepare for the elections?
MR. BOUCHER: No, about 100 million is for elections. Then you have the provincial justice amounts. You have a lot of the training that was talked about, especially officials that are going to go out at local levels. Money to support the outreach efforts of the government, the reconciliation efforts, a lot of things like that. The overall governance category --
SEN. SUNUNU: But you would place governance and electricity ahead of, say, police training.
MR. BOUCHER: We got -- the police training's not included in this amount. There was a big chunk of money, about 8 billion, I think, for police and military training, came out of last year's budget.
SEN. SUNUNU: So that's not funded through AID.
MR. BOUCHER: There's more this year and continuing basis but there's money there to do what we need to do right now.
SEN. SUNUNU: The issue with the police has been covered in some detail. It's clear that there are very significant problems. You seem to feel that you've changed some of the approaches that are being taken.
But I want to try to better understand what went wrong, because after, you know, 2002 and the 2003 time frame, as we were trying to work with the government to deal with all of these terrible issues, everything from governance to infrastructure and the economy and security, I think everyone probably recognized that local security, police force would be an important issue.
You indicated there were 500 U.S. trainers now, focused on the police.
MR. BOUCHER: No, there's more than that now.
SEN. SUNUNU: You said there were -- well, you just -- someone just used the number of 500.
MR. BOUCHER: Oh. (You used five ?) -- there's the military guidance, too. There's -- I think, it's 500 in your programs?
MR. JOHNSON: Plus -- yes --
MR. BOUCHER: And then General Cone's found, I think, another 800 or something (in his southern ?) forces.
SEN. SUNUNU: Understood. So we have -- those are U.S. trainers in place, obviously --
MR. BOUCHER: Yeah.
SEN. SUNUNU: -- working on the issue. It sounds as if the United States is in a lead position at this point. Who was the leading the effort in 2003 and 2004, and what did they do wrong that has required us to go back and rethink our approach to training police?
MR. JOHNSON: In 2002, when we began this effort, we divided up responsibilities among countries who would step up and do some things. The Germans have a longstanding program which dated back to pre-Soviet days -- engagement with security in Afghanistan, and this is a program that they began themselves. As they got underway, it became clear to us that it was focused almost exclusively on training a senior officer corps, if you will. And there was a very high demand, at that time, by the Afghan government, by our military -- I think, by any observer, that we needed to move as rapidly as we possibly could to provide some form of police on the streets. And as a result of that, rapid training programs were developed. Rapid training programs answered the question of putting people on the street, but -
SEN. SUNUNU: When was that realization?
MR. BOUCHER: I'm sorry?
SEN. SUNUNU: You said, "We realized these --"
MR. BOUCHER: I think the realization became apparent during the course of 2002 as the problem started.
SEN. SUNUNU: It still begs the question, then, what was being -- if you realized that shortcoming in 2002, what were we doing wrong in 2003 and 2004?
MR. BOUCHER: I think what we were doing wrong in the long-term but right in the short-term was giving short-term training to people to get them out as quickly as we possibly could. That led, in and of itself, to retention issues, to not having people as well trained as they should have been, but it did answer the demand of getting people out as rapidly as we possibly could. We're -- and in a sense recovering from having to try to push out possibly too fast.
SEN. SUNUNU: On the issue of drug interdiction, I think it's understandable that there's a -- there's a potential conflict in aerial spraying or any basic eradication, because that's having an effect on the Afghan population on a mass scale, at the grassroots scale with farmers and people who are doing the cultivating. And so you run the potential of turning those individuals against the government and against our efforts and it makes -- it could make the security situation worse.
But in the documentation we have, it suggests that targeting drug labs is still under review. Now, it would seem to me that the lab itself is obviously a bottleneck for the production of drugs. It's a -- even a larger source of income for the Taliban or other drug lords that are benefiting from the cultivation.
There are few of them. And it would seem to make sense that they should be a target already in some way, shape or form. Why is this described as still being under review? And if it's not under review, if it's part of your policy, how many have you targeted over the last 12 months? How many have been destroyed?
MR. JOHNSON: Let me get you the statistics on the last question you asked, but this is something we're attempting to do. But you've got to bear in mind that these labs can be quite small, so it's not a question of having, you know, a handful that really are the bottleneck that we wish that they were. But as we discussed earlier, this is part and parcel of our effort here, but we don't believe that we can have a successful program if it is exclusive of any of these elements. And so there has to be an element of risk to someone planting poppy. The U.N. estimates you have to have about a 25 percent chance before there's a real deterrent. So we're working as best we can on all elements of this program, not just on one.
SEN. SUNUNU: How much money was spent on programs to provide alternative sources of income, alternative crops, crop substitution to deal with -- or try to reduce the preponderance of poppy growing?
MR. JOHNSON: Directly related to poppy, and exclusive of other development programs, $200 million.
SEN. SUNUNU: So $200 million compared to how much spent on the interdiction and eradication effort?
MR. JOHNSON: On interdiction, which includes funding to support the Drug Enforcement Administration, $350 million. On eradication, 166.
SEN. SUNUNU: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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