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<strong>Empowering</strong> <strong>citizens</strong><br />

<strong>Engaging</strong> <strong>governments</strong><br />

<strong>Rebuilding</strong> <strong>communities</strong><br />

IRAQ


<strong>Empowering</strong> <strong>citizens</strong><br />

<strong>Engaging</strong> <strong>governments</strong><br />

<strong>Rebuilding</strong> <strong>communities</strong><br />

International Relief & Development<br />

in Iraq<br />

2003–2009<br />

CASE STUDIES IN COMMUNITY STABILIZATION


Copyright © by International Relief & Development (IRD) 2012<br />

All rights reserved.<br />

The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Agency for International<br />

Development or of the US government.<br />

IRD is a nonprofit humanitarian, stabilization, and development organization whose mission is to reduce the<br />

suffering of the world’s most vulnerable groups and provide the tools and resources needed to increase their<br />

self-sufficiency.<br />

Design, editing, and production by Communications Development Incorporated, Washington, DC, and Peter<br />

Grundy Art & Design, London, UK.


Contents<br />

Foreword<br />

v<br />

Overview 1<br />

Chapter 1 Building community trust 6<br />

ICAP: The first step to rebuilding civil society 8<br />

Establishing services, assisting civilians, creating jobs 13<br />

Insecurity: Operational limitations in an unstable environment 16<br />

Chapter 2 A complete stabilization package 22<br />

CSP origins: A new approach for international development 23<br />

Breaking down CSP’s design 26<br />

The complete package: Programmatic and military integration 28<br />

Chapter 3 Successes and setbacks 34<br />

Community infrastructure and essential services: CSP’s entry point 35<br />

Business development programs: Light at the end of the tunnel 40<br />

Vocational training: “A sustainable program when we left” 44<br />

Youth activities: Different from everything else 49<br />

Chapter 4 Converting roadblocks into a roadmap 54<br />

CSP’s three-year life cycle as a “force multiplier” 56<br />

Strategic recommendations for future COIN programs 58<br />

Epilogue 66<br />

Acronyms 68<br />

Notes 69<br />

Boxes<br />

1 ICAP: Program and results 9<br />

2 Awni Quandour: IRD’s original elder statesman 11<br />

3 The evolution of ICAP, USAID’s longest-running program in Iraq 20<br />

4 CSP: At a glance 25<br />

5 CSP: Project development process 29<br />

6 CSP: Results 36<br />

7 Enhancing internal controls and program oversight 41<br />

8 CSP and the changing perception of sustainability 46<br />

9 Stabilization in Iraq: 20 tactical lessons 63<br />

Figure<br />

1 Self-sustaining project work cycle 31<br />

<br />

iii


In memory of Awni Quandour, whose<br />

relationships with local <strong>communities</strong> in<br />

Iraq were invaluable to making IRD’s<br />

programs work, and who was instrumental<br />

in establishing IRD’s presence in the<br />

Middle East. His legacy lives on through the<br />

organizational strategy he helped craft.


Foreword<br />

Recent civil stabilization successes can be traced to<br />

efforts launched in the Balkans in the 1990s. There,<br />

civil society groups became critical partners in sustaining<br />

and strengthening the peace. The communitybased<br />

model employed in that region is now being<br />

applied in other conflict and postconflict zones,<br />

including West Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan.<br />

A fairly new development is that NGOs now cooperate<br />

and coordinate directly with US and international security<br />

forces, along with bilateral and multilateral donor<br />

agencies. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the<br />

coordination has been so close that the NGOs’ work<br />

has been viewed as examples of effective counterinsurgency.<br />

As military and civilian leaders have pointed<br />

out, civilian agencies are best equipped to understand<br />

and work directly with local <strong>communities</strong>, and they are<br />

generally better received by local <strong>governments</strong> and<br />

populations. While some development organizations<br />

say “civ-mil” partnerships would compromise their<br />

neutrality, beneficiaries recognize the consistency of<br />

such partnerships with the NGO community’s mission<br />

to assist the world’s vulnerable populations—even<br />

those caught in armed conflict.<br />

This publication explores the Community Stabilization<br />

Program (CSP) in Iraq, a successful civ-mil partnership.<br />

This cooperative agreement between USAID and<br />

IRD initially funded stabilization activities in Baghdad<br />

and then expanded nationwide. At the height of the<br />

program, IRD had 1,800 staff (more than 90 percent<br />

local employees) in 15 cities and was implementing<br />

$21 million a month in programming. Where CSP went,<br />

multiple USAID audits, military, and USAID experts say<br />

that stability tended to follow.<br />

from its Community Revitalization through Democratic<br />

Action (CRDA) program in the Balkans. IRD applied<br />

lessons about mobilizing war-weary populations to<br />

reestablish self-governance, community organization,<br />

and democratic principles. CSP benefited from IRD’s<br />

on-the-ground presence and record of success in Iraq,<br />

as well as the earned trust of local <strong>communities</strong>. The<br />

program supported basic training on principles of<br />

governance, promoted civil society institutions, and<br />

instituted a rapid participatory appraisal process to<br />

get projects moving quickly. With this capacity development,<br />

Iraqi community groups developed action<br />

plans and implemented them in coordination with the<br />

military and local provincial reconstruction teams as<br />

well as local ministry officials—helping legitimize the<br />

government and establish lines of trust and communication<br />

between leaders and <strong>citizens</strong>.<br />

This publication offers an unvarnished examination<br />

of CSP and its precursor program in Iraq—the<br />

approaches, challenges, results, and impacts. The<br />

story is told in the voice of the many people who<br />

implemented it as well as by the beneficiaries who<br />

appreciated its contributions to improving security,<br />

government services, and the quality of life in conflictaffected<br />

areas. In my view CSP provides evidence<br />

to support the assertion that social and economic<br />

development does help sustain peace and stability.<br />

Dr. Arthur B. Keys Jr.<br />

CSP relied on more than civ-mil partnership, however.<br />

The program also built on the experience IRD gained<br />

<br />

v


Overview<br />

General David Petraeus, commander of the International Security<br />

Assistance Force, and IRD staffers meet with members of the Ramadi<br />

Women’s Center


“Stabilization and reconstruction missions occur in a range<br />

of circumstances—sometimes in hostile security environments,<br />

sometimes in permissive ones, and sometimes in<br />

environments somewhere in between. The mission to stabilize<br />

and reconstruct a nation is one that civilians must lead.”<br />

— John Negroponte<br />

Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks<br />

and subsequent US military operations in Afghanistan<br />

and Iraq, traditional relief and development programs,<br />

historically the province of a small group of civilian<br />

and voluntary agencies, expanded dramatically in<br />

scale and scope, touching nearly every government<br />

department, including the US military. Whereas the<br />

primary focus of assistance operations generally had<br />

been centered on providing humanitarian aid, rebuilding<br />

services, and enhancing civil society, the evolving<br />

efforts reached beyond basic relief measures, aiming<br />

to stabilize and rebuild populations during a period of<br />

conflict and, in some instances, while military operations<br />

were ongoing.<br />

At the same time that the US government was expanding<br />

into stabilization operations, American military<br />

leadership, informed by the ongoing wars in Iraq and<br />

Afghanistan, was recognizing its own need—and current<br />

structural limitations—in these areas. In 2006, the US<br />

Army and Marine Corps released a new field manual<br />

covering counterinsurgency operations, the first time<br />

in more than two decades that either had addressed<br />

counterinsurgency (COIN) exclusively in a manual. The<br />

primary purpose of the document was to lay out a<br />

blueprint for the military’s approach to a more contemporary<br />

form of warfare, an approach that General David<br />

Petraeus, one of the manual’s chief authors, recognized<br />

as inextricably tied to nonmilitary resources.<br />

A counterinsurgency campaign, Petraeus wrote,<br />

requires soldiers and marines “to employ a mix of<br />

familiar combat tasks and skills more often associated<br />

with nonmilitary agencies” and to be prepared<br />

for “extensive coordination and cooperation with many<br />

intergovernmental, host-nation, and international agencies.”<br />

The second chapter of the manual is devoted<br />

to integrating civilian and military activities, beginning<br />

with a kind of acquiescence to the limits of industrial<br />

might in unstable environments. Military efforts are<br />

necessary to fight insurgents, the manual states, but<br />

they are only effective when integrated into a larger<br />

strategy intended to meet the needs of the local<br />

population and win community support.<br />

Testifying before Congress in 2008, John Negroponte,<br />

the US ambassador to Iraq (2004–05), noted there<br />

had been 17 “significant” stabilization and reconstruction<br />

missions over the preceding 20 years in which<br />

“too much of the effort was borne by our men and<br />

women in uniform.” Negroponte was lobbying for<br />

State Department funding for what would become<br />

the Civilian Response Corps, but the message was<br />

clear—despite greater need, neither the military<br />

1


what made CSP stand out was the<br />

close cooperation between the US<br />

military and USAID’s implementing<br />

partner, IRD—a collaboration at both<br />

the strategic and operational levels<br />

nor the government had the necessary knowledge<br />

or capacity in conflict development and stabilization<br />

methods to carry out an expanded civilian-military<br />

partnership. “Our civilian-military partnership is strong,<br />

beneficial, and appropriate,” he said. But, he added,<br />

“the mission to stabilize and reconstruct a nation is<br />

one that civilians must lead.”<br />

Civ-mil cooperation: A new way forward<br />

With the military actively involved in trying to win<br />

hearts and minds in conflict zones, civilian agencies,<br />

such as the US Agency for International Development<br />

(USAID), were coordinating among themselves and<br />

with the military at unprecedented levels to push the<br />

new approach forward. That intersection of overlapping<br />

concerns is the centerpiece of “civ-mil” partnerships.<br />

One of the largest and most important examples<br />

of this new type of partnership was the Community<br />

Stabilization Program (CSP) in Iraq, a sweeping $644<br />

million initiative awarded to International Relief &<br />

Development (IRD) and designed to support quickimpact<br />

projects, a “nonlethal counterinsurgency<br />

program that reduces the incentives for participation<br />

in violent conflict by employing or engaging at-risk<br />

youth between the ages of 17 and 35,” according to<br />

the agreement language.<br />

CSP was a landmark investment in both time and<br />

resources. Not only did it mark USAID’s first largescale<br />

commitment to a stabilization program in an<br />

active conflict zone, it was also the largest USAIDfunded<br />

cooperative agreement ever to date. “The<br />

scale of this was unusual,” said Jeanne Pryor, USAID’s<br />

deputy director of Iraq reconstruction, at a 2009 US<br />

Institute of Peace symposium on CSP. Pryor noted that<br />

the amount of money devoted to CSP was “oftentimes<br />

appropriated for an entire continent, let alone one<br />

program in three years.”<br />

Aside from the funding, what made CSP stand out was<br />

the close cooperation between the US military and<br />

USAID’s implementing partner, IRD—a collaboration at<br />

both the strategic and operational levels that helped<br />

bring economic development and community stabilization<br />

in a conflict environment squarely within the US<br />

government’s COIN strategy. Unlike traditional relief<br />

and development programs where security may be one<br />

of many equally important factors, CSP operations<br />

depended wholly on some level of security to succeed.<br />

Collaborative decisionmaking among the many parties<br />

involved was crucial. Provincial reconstruction teams<br />

(PRTs) and local government entities often generated<br />

ideas that then became CSP projects, such as a<br />

fun-run sporting event for youth or the reconstruction<br />

of the Abu Ghraib Old Market in Baghdad, but that<br />

collaboration relied on a secure operating environment.<br />

In most situations, though, once the military<br />

had cleared an area in a city and secured its relative<br />

safety, CSP projects would begin immediate implementation<br />

by rebuilding the community’s physical and<br />

economic infrastructure.<br />

In short, CSP provided the final component of the military’s<br />

“clear-hold-build” strategy. “That very popular<br />

phrase, that was the sort of concept that drove<br />

the interrelationship between the military and what<br />

followed,” said James Kunder, a former senior official<br />

with USAID and now an advisor to IRD. “The CSP<br />

program kind of wove in through the hold and build<br />

phases. It was part of the hold, that people would<br />

have something to do and wouldn’t start firing at the<br />

forces that were trying to maintain security. But also,<br />

it could be the beginning of a longer term development<br />

program that might actually change the place.”<br />

CSP launched in Baghdad, but after only six months<br />

its early success led to a rapid rollout in other cities<br />

across Iraq, 15 in all. With the program quickly under<br />

way, CSP began focusing on Iraqi <strong>communities</strong> with<br />

the specific purpose of helping the military stabilize<br />

2


Through its ICAP work, IRD had an<br />

established base of operations in<br />

Baghdad and an important logistical<br />

springboard for launching the much<br />

larger and more complex CSP<br />

them. IRD’s rapid response for relief and reconstruction<br />

work, in both kinetic and nonkinetic environments<br />

and often alongside military personnel, exemplified the<br />

changing face of development and the role of nongovernmental<br />

organizations (NGOs).<br />

Earning local trust<br />

IRD was able to launch and expand CSP quickly<br />

because it had been operating in Baghdad for three<br />

years implementing the Iraq Community Action<br />

Program (ICAP). By going into some of Baghdad’s most<br />

dangerous and at-risk neighborhoods when no other<br />

relief agencies were around, IRD began to gain local<br />

favor as it assisted a war-weary population to rebuild<br />

civil society.<br />

ICAP began operations in May 2003, as a way to mobilize<br />

Iraqi <strong>communities</strong> after decades of repression and<br />

to help <strong>communities</strong> identify, prioritize, and address<br />

their most pressing civic needs. Projects focused on<br />

rebuilding economic and social infrastructure, boosting<br />

business development, and providing assistance<br />

to civilian victims of war. Most important, the projects<br />

weren’t decreed by IRD, but decided in conjunction<br />

with locally organized community action groups.<br />

In Baghdad neighborhoods, where no legitimate sense<br />

of grassroots activism or democratic engagement<br />

had existed for years, community action groups gave<br />

ordinary <strong>citizens</strong> a direct role in a kind of decentralized<br />

decisionmaking that had been mostly missing<br />

from Iraq. With the help of these community groups,<br />

IRD completed almost 2,400 ICAP projects between<br />

2003 and 2006, at a value of more than $73 million.<br />

The program required an in-kind Iraqi contribution<br />

of 25 percent of project funds, but that number was<br />

exceeded by almost $10 million—another sign of<br />

Iraqis’ eagerness to be involved in their planning and<br />

development processes. Through community action<br />

groups, IRD helped put individual <strong>citizens</strong> directly<br />

in touch with government leaders during a time of<br />

upheaval and uncertainty. Even tenuous links between<br />

public and private interests, IRD believed, would help<br />

<strong>citizens</strong> regain some sense of trust in their local<br />

political system and open doors to broader improvements<br />

in their <strong>communities</strong>’ physical and social<br />

infrastructure.<br />

IRD’s close working relationship with the community<br />

continued throughout the evolution of ICAP, which<br />

ran concurrently with CSP and continued for years<br />

afterward as an even more robust mobilization and<br />

participatory program. After three years of focused<br />

community interaction with civilians and local leaders<br />

under ICAP, IRD had enough credibility among Iraqis to<br />

take on a program as large and military-dependent as<br />

CSP—and to make it work.<br />

Stabilizing <strong>communities</strong><br />

CSP kicked off in June 2006, a few months ahead of a<br />

highly publicized military surge by US and international<br />

forces. It ended more than three years later, in late<br />

2009. Throughout implementation, IRD staff found<br />

themselves under pressure, pulled in a variety of<br />

directions by competing and sometimes contradictory<br />

demands from multiple stakeholders. But they also<br />

implemented hundreds of projects that brought order<br />

and economic revitalization to an oppressed population<br />

in the middle of a war zone.<br />

CSP’s main goal can be summarized in one statement:<br />

reduce or eliminate incentives for individuals to participate<br />

in insurgent activities by creating employment<br />

opportunities and fostering community engagement. In<br />

Iraq, people were desperate for jobs, so employment<br />

is where CSP focused its financial muscle. More than<br />

90 percent of the program’s funds were geared toward<br />

short- and long-term employment. As the implementing<br />

3


By the end of the program, the<br />

business development component had<br />

generated 74 percent of the 57,109<br />

long-term jobs documented by CSP<br />

agency, IRD was responsible for the civilian-led effort<br />

to reach CSP’s goal. IRD strove to provide a complete<br />

package of services that optimized the natural overlap<br />

between the four program components that made<br />

up CSP’s operational design: creating short-term<br />

jobs through community infrastructure and essential<br />

services, creating long-term jobs through business<br />

development grants, establishing robust vocational<br />

training and apprenticeship services, and engaging<br />

Iraqi youth through community and cultural programs.<br />

The IRD approach and program components linked<br />

CSP projects with military strategy and community<br />

needs.<br />

The Community Infrastructure and Essential Services<br />

(CIES) program component was divided into two<br />

general project areas—infrastructure rehabilitation<br />

and essential services work, which required unskilled<br />

labor on quick-impact projects such as trash collection<br />

and rubble removal. CSP supported scores of<br />

these projects during the program’s first year. By<br />

the middle of the second year, IRD began to transfer<br />

oversight of projects back to municipal <strong>governments</strong>.<br />

Approximately 1,600 CIES projects generated more<br />

than 525,000 documented person-months of shortterm<br />

employment—20 percent above the target. Given<br />

the high value placed on providing some kind of job to<br />

as many Iraqi men as possible, as fast as possible,<br />

person-months of employment was a critical indicator<br />

of immediate impact. By this calculation, CSP succeeded—the<br />

program exceeded this target during<br />

every year of operation.<br />

However, there were unavoidable challenges in<br />

implementing a rapid, cash-for-work component like<br />

CIES, including documentation. Generally, laborers<br />

were paid in daily financial transactions, but payments<br />

were not always possible to track or fully account for.<br />

Subsequently, the trash collection projects became<br />

a lightning rod for CSP critics. Some of IRD’s early<br />

administrative missteps also created obstacles.<br />

With the business development program, IRD aimed to<br />

provide long-term jobs, business training to grantees,<br />

and assistance to vocational training and apprenticeship<br />

graduates to transition into regular employment.<br />

Of the more than 10,000 grants awarded, 97 percent<br />

were classified in the micro and small categories,<br />

most commonly to family-owned businesses. By<br />

the end of the program, the business development<br />

component had generated 74 percent of the 57,109<br />

long-term jobs documented by CSP. Once the program<br />

was up and running in the different cities, the grants<br />

program produced most jobs fairly quickly, and about<br />

25,000 jobs were created during the first two years.<br />

Trade and service sector grants were found to be the<br />

most efficient: quick-impact but longer term employment<br />

opportunities proved extremely supportive of the<br />

COIN strategy.<br />

The primary goal of CSP’s vocational training and<br />

apprenticeship program, also referred to as employment<br />

generation, was to stimulate economic stability<br />

by providing Iraqis with employable skills that could<br />

lead to long-term jobs. That goal was reached, with<br />

more than 41,400 graduates completing course<br />

training in construction and nonconstruction trades.<br />

Through the innovative methods IRD used to link<br />

training courses to market demand and unemployed<br />

<strong>citizens</strong> to employment opportunities, more than<br />

8,000 vocational training graduates landed long-term<br />

jobs as a direct result of their training. Yet the vocational<br />

training program accomplished much more than<br />

reaching a benchmark. It also had a profound effect<br />

on Iraq’s institutional capacity—one of CSP’s most<br />

notable achievements.<br />

The CSP design, like the COIN strategy in general,<br />

presumed that the strength of Iraq’s cultural and<br />

community network was at least equal to employment<br />

as a factor in the country’s overall stability and<br />

social cohesion. Organizing safe and secure “communal<br />

activities” was perceived to be a critical step<br />

4


most important, <strong>citizens</strong> were impressed.<br />

A sizable number of Iraqis, regardless<br />

of whether they were directly involved in<br />

the program, credit CSP with improving<br />

security and government services<br />

in reducing sectarian strife. Therefore, CSP’s youth<br />

activities component aimed for something more personal<br />

than jobs—it aimed to help young Iraqis connect<br />

to their identity, culture, and community and to give<br />

them enhanced opportunities to form social bonds<br />

that would be stronger than the pull of the insurgency.<br />

Altogether, IRD’s youth activities engaged more than<br />

350,000 participants through soccer matches and<br />

tournaments and a wide range of other activities.<br />

A legacy of positive perceptions<br />

IRD staff, from field workers to leadership, exude<br />

pride when talking about CSP, but the program had<br />

many other fans as well. Former Deputy Secretary of<br />

State Jacob Lew said CSP was considered “one of<br />

the most effective counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq.”<br />

Arizona Senator John McCain, Connecticut Senator<br />

Joe Lieberman, General Petraeus, and others made<br />

visits to CSP project sites firsthand. And Ryan Crocker,<br />

during his 2007–09 tenure as the US ambassador<br />

to Iraq, repeatedly lauded CSP’s track record of job<br />

creation. “I’ve had discussions with the [Iraqi] government,”<br />

Crocker said in late 2007, midway through<br />

CSP’s implementation. “What they want, they want<br />

jobs. They want something that looks like a stable<br />

future. . . . They’re saying, ‘I want gainful employment.’<br />

And we know how to do this because we’ve done it<br />

with community stabilization.”<br />

Perhaps most important, Iraqi <strong>citizens</strong> were<br />

impressed. At the program’s conclusion, evaluators<br />

worked with two independent Iraqi polling companies<br />

to survey almost 1,400 CSP participants and nonparticipants<br />

about the perceived effectiveness of CSP<br />

activities, how well community needs were addressed,<br />

and the local support for those activities. While<br />

economic and security variables make it impossible<br />

to establish direct causality between CSP activities<br />

and a reduction in violence, the poll results show that<br />

a sizable number of Iraqis, regardless of whether they<br />

were directly involved in the program, credit CSP with<br />

improving security and government services:<br />

• 84 percent of CSP-type program participants said<br />

their community was safer in 2009 than in 2006<br />

because of CSP, an assessment shared by 70<br />

percent of nonparticipants.<br />

• 69 percent of program participants said CSP<br />

helped improve government services.<br />

• 60 percent of participants credited CSP with<br />

bettering relations between religious and ethnic<br />

groups.<br />

According to USAID’s Jeanne Pryor, the results showed<br />

that “It worked. All four components worked. Polling<br />

data, in addition to the outputs that had been measured,<br />

reported that beneficiaries did notice a positive<br />

impact in their community.”<br />

* * *<br />

This report revisits IRD’s work in Iraq from the beginning<br />

of ICAP in 2003 to the close of CSP in 2009.<br />

It is not a project performance assessment but an<br />

examination of the approach and the results, informed<br />

primarily by the people who carried it out. In considering<br />

the impact of ICAP and CSP, it’s important to<br />

consider factors in addition to outcomes and indicators,<br />

to grasp the weight of individual moments that<br />

made up the collective whole. These observations<br />

are important, because they put a human face on the<br />

anonymous “beneficiary” and the generic “staffer.”<br />

For an endeavor like CSP, heavily debated and controversial,<br />

they also offer a complete way of seeing the<br />

program—its accomplishments, its shortcomings,<br />

and, more importantly, its lasting impact.<br />

5


1<br />

Building community trust<br />

through action, empowerment, and commitment<br />

ICAP offered Iraqi women new skills to support their families


“Local leaders were not paying attention to everyday people.<br />

They would focus on their relatives or close friends. It wasn’t<br />

the real people in need. And with ICAP we went directly to the<br />

people in need.”<br />

— Iqbal al-Juboori<br />

Economic sanctions against Iraq following the 1991<br />

Gulf War meant fewer economic and political opportunities,<br />

while decreasing quality in public education led to<br />

a surge in adult illiteracy among Iraqi women—as high<br />

as 45 percent by 2000, according to United Nations<br />

(UN) estimates. After the US-led invasion in 2003, the<br />

Coalition Provisional Authority was charged to advance<br />

women’s rights and to leverage women’s “skill and<br />

knowledge” in the “revival of their country.” But in<br />

aftermath of the occupation, the reality on the ground<br />

was that huge numbers of Iraqi women had to support<br />

their families, and they had to do so after decades<br />

of diminished educational opportunities had severely<br />

thwarted their technical skills and capabilities.<br />

“Early on, I met a widow who was responsible for<br />

feeding her two sons and one daughter, her father,<br />

her mother, and her two sisters,” said Iqbal al-Juboori,<br />

who at the time was an IRD business development<br />

program officer in Baghdad. “She was the head of the<br />

family. Her parents were too old to work, her children<br />

too young, and her sisters couldn’t. Her husband was<br />

killed during the war, and she didn’t know what to do.<br />

Then she heard about IRD.”<br />

Al-Juboori, who is Iraqi, joined IRD in July 2005,<br />

two years after IRD had established its presence in<br />

Baghdad with ICAP. One of ICAP’s cross-cutting objectives<br />

was to encourage the inclusion and empowerment<br />

of women in all activities. The community action groups<br />

at the center of ICAP emphasized ensuring the equality<br />

of men’s and women’s voices, while program grants<br />

and employment programs gave women an opportunity<br />

to engage in the local economy. Internally, IRD hired,<br />

trained, and promoted women employees for nontraditional<br />

management roles with ICAP, including al-Juboori.<br />

IRD staff would often concentrate on widows, treating<br />

them as people in need. When determining grant<br />

awards, program officers would make home visits to<br />

meet them and assess the individual circumstances.<br />

When al-Juboori visited this particular widow, she<br />

found a home no larger than a shelter, a single room<br />

with little furniture housing the full family. The widow<br />

was receiving nominal help, such as used clothes and<br />

food, but as she met with al-Juboori, she remained<br />

defiantly prideful. “I don’t believe anyone can help us,”<br />

she said. “What makes you so special? What makes<br />

you so different? All I need is a decent income for my<br />

family.” As an Iraqi woman, al-Juboori knew that she<br />

had an exceptional opportunity to relate to this widow,<br />

standing there in the middle of her home. “You’ve got<br />

nothing to lose,” she said. “So try us.”<br />

As with many Iraqi women, the widow had no discernible<br />

skills or earning power. Al-Juboori described<br />

one of ICAP’s business development opportunities,<br />

a home-based sewing program in which IRD would<br />

7


“<br />

The community believed in what we<br />

were doing and in our ability to help”<br />

—Iqbal al-Juboori<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

supply equipment as long as the recipient maintained<br />

consistent production. “You have to learn to be a<br />

tailor,” she told the widow. “If you’re good, and if you<br />

learn, then we’re going to come back and monitor<br />

you, and we’re going to ask you how much you’re<br />

selling.” This process was an established part of the<br />

ICAP program. But a more immediate problem quickly<br />

became apparent—the house was so small, there<br />

was no place to put the equipment. “All I have is this<br />

house,” the widow said. “And it’s only one room. So<br />

where am I going to do this?”<br />

IRD had access to revenue-generating equipment, procedures<br />

in place to disburse grants, and a results-based<br />

system of accountability to maximize a beneficiary’s<br />

chance at success. If an issue required a programmatic<br />

solution, IRD had an answer. But overcoming the physical<br />

limitations of poverty and an overcrowded one-room<br />

house? That was another issue entirely. Still, IRD found<br />

a solution. Once the widow’s friends and neighbors<br />

learned of her plight, they got together and found a<br />

workspace to donate, provided IRD followed through with<br />

giving her the grant. “The community believed in what<br />

we were doing,” al-Juboori said, “and in our ability to<br />

help. She got the grant, and then she learned to sew.”<br />

The widow began selling coats, and over the course of<br />

the grants process, IRD workers delighted in watching<br />

her grow professionally and personally. “The first time<br />

she received actual money from one of her coats, she<br />

came to me, crying, and she hugged me,” al-Juboori<br />

said. “And she looked at me and said, ‘I’ve struggled for<br />

my whole life, and no one has ever helped me like this. I<br />

don’t feel alone anymore.’”<br />

ICAP: The first step to rebuilding civil society<br />

Often called the cradle of civilization, modern day Iraq<br />

is a country steeped in rich cultural and historical<br />

heritage. Ancient Mesopotamia gave rise to some of<br />

the world’s earliest cities, including Hatra, the capital<br />

of the first Arab kingdom, and it’s where agriculture<br />

was born. The region boasted accomplishments in the<br />

arts, agriculture, architecture, law, and medicine. But<br />

Iraq’s rich heritage proved of little value for much of<br />

the twentieth century, as political turbulence and war<br />

took a severe toll. After post-World War I British rule<br />

ended, 58 separate <strong>governments</strong> ruled Iraq over 37<br />

years, until a 1958 revolution overthrew the monarchy.<br />

1 After the Ba’ath party took power in a 1963 coup,<br />

a brief period of stability and prosperity produced a<br />

secular state with a thriving oil economy, a rising GDP,<br />

and a burgeoning education system. After Saddam<br />

Hussein seized power in 1979 and almost immediately<br />

launched a war with Iran, the country’s economic and<br />

social infrastructure began to deteriorate.<br />

In a short time, Iraq descended from affluence to a<br />

country in which the standard of living was reduced to<br />

a “subsistence level,” according to the UN’s Committee<br />

on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 2 As a closed<br />

society, Iraq’s GDP plunged by more than $50 billion<br />

in less than 10 years, food and agricultural production<br />

slowed, and 60 percent of the population depended on<br />

government rations. Malnutrition, a leading contributor<br />

to rising infant mortality rate, grew rampant. 3 Essential<br />

services slowed due to years of poor maintenance or<br />

outright neglect. Approximately half the population did<br />

not have regular access to potable drinking water, and<br />

even fewer households were connected to a functioning<br />

sewage system. Iraq was a failing state even before<br />

the Hussein government fell in March 2003.<br />

In April 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority was<br />

established as a transitional government. One month<br />

later, USAID awarded cooperative agreements to five<br />

American NGOs to implement ICAP, a central element<br />

of USAID’s overall relief and reconstruction mission<br />

in Iraq. ICAP was conceived as a community action<br />

and mobilization initiative to foster civic pride in Iraqis<br />

and to try and reconnect them to an operational civil<br />

society (box 1). IRD, chosen to implement the program<br />

8


Under the initial ICAP intervention, IRD<br />

completed 2,381 projects benefiting<br />

more than 20 million people and<br />

worth more than $73 million<br />

Box 1<br />

ICAP: Program and results<br />

1<br />

ICAP began in May 2003 as a mechanism to mobilize Iraqi <strong>communities</strong> to identify, prioritize, and address their<br />

most pressing civic needs. IRD oversaw operations in Baghdad; the rest of the country was divided among four other<br />

implementing agencies.<br />

IRD helped establish locally organized community action groups to drive project work, which was filtered through<br />

three broad program components: economic and social infrastructure to build and repair roads and public buildings;<br />

business development to provide grant support to micro, small, and medium businesses; and the Assistance to Civilian<br />

Victims Fund, which provided social and financial aid to innocent individuals and <strong>communities</strong> injured or afflicted<br />

by military forces.<br />

Building community trust<br />

Under the initial ICAP intervention (2003–06), IRD completed 2,381 projects benefiting more than 20 million people<br />

and worth more than $73 million—almost 40 percent of which was covered by Iraqi <strong>communities</strong> and the government<br />

through in-kind contributions. ICAP laid the foundation for the larger and more complex development and stabilization<br />

projects to come, and it<br />

yielded a number of positive<br />

Baghdad governorate districts and city districts<br />

performance measurements.<br />

At its conclusion, ICAP had:<br />

Al-Tarmiya<br />

• Generated more than 5,600<br />

short-term jobs and almost<br />

Taji<br />

Al-Istiqlal<br />

23,000 long-term jobs.<br />

Employment generation<br />

Adhamiya<br />

Kadhmiya<br />

Sadr<br />

City<br />

steadily rose for both short-<br />

9 Nissan<br />

and long-term jobs for each<br />

Abu Ghraib<br />

Taji Karkh<br />

Karada<br />

year of the program.<br />

Al-Mada’n<br />

Al-Rasheed<br />

• Established 441 community<br />

action groups with approximately<br />

5,500 members—a<br />

Mahmoudiya<br />

third of whom were women.<br />

• Completed more than 700<br />

infrastructure projects,<br />

including the construction or<br />

rehabilitation of 278 schools,<br />

75 health centers and hospitals,<br />

65 water and sewage facilities, 60 roads, and 38 sports and recreation facilities.<br />

• Invested $8 million in more than 1,100 business development projects, covering competitive grants, technical<br />

assistance, vocational and managerial training, marketplaces, cooperative grants, and handicap activities.<br />

• Aided more than 760,000 Baghdad residents through 515 projects assisting civilian victims.<br />

9


Community action groups stood at the core<br />

of ICAP. They were formed in conjunction<br />

with community mobilizers that IRD deployed<br />

in districts in and around Baghdad<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

in Baghdad, began operations immediately, fewer than<br />

two months after the country’s government structure<br />

had been completely wiped away.<br />

Community action groups—a common thread for IRD<br />

IRD drew from some relevant experience in formulating<br />

its ICAP implementation strategy. At the time,<br />

IRD’s Community Revitalization through Democratic<br />

Action (CRDA) program in Serbia was nearing the end<br />

of its second year, and the organization had learned<br />

many lessons about mobilizing war-weary populations<br />

to reestablish basic concepts of self-governance,<br />

community organization, and democratic principles.<br />

As part of the CRDA design, IRD at the outset established<br />

community committees, chosen entirely by a<br />

larger population, to serve as implementation partners,<br />

before later establishing even larger municipal<br />

working groups to aid in the critical development of<br />

public-private partnerships. IRD succeeded under<br />

trying conditions during CRDA’s earliest months, and<br />

that record of accomplishment in postconflict Serbia<br />

played a role in USAID’s decision to award ICAP<br />

to IRD.<br />

Community action groups, the primary organizational<br />

tool of ICAP, bore a close resemblance to the community<br />

groups IRD helped organize under CRDA. The<br />

community groups, known locally as “CAGs,” stood at<br />

the core of ICAP. They were formed in conjunction with<br />

community mobilizers that IRD deployed in districts in<br />

and around Baghdad. The mobilizers provided basic<br />

training on civil society, rules of order, and a rapid<br />

participatory appraisal process to get ICAP-funded<br />

projects moving quickly. Using these newfound skills,<br />

the community groups worked to develop action plans<br />

based on their own prioritized needs. Like CRDA, the<br />

ICAP plan called for a rapid startup to show quick<br />

results, not only to the donors but to local <strong>citizens</strong>.<br />

Additional funding from the US PRTs aided in the<br />

ability to make a quick impact.<br />

Another commonality between CRDA and ICAP was the<br />

guiding principle that success depended on mutual trust<br />

between IRD and the community. In Serbia, IRD worked<br />

to build social capital among people who, due to a<br />

variety of factors, were predisposed to distrust. In Iraq,<br />

IRD faced a similar sociopolitical structure, albeit with<br />

a gaping difference: Iraq was not postconflict. Rather, it<br />

was an unstable, occupied country with rapidly shifting<br />

political and religious alliances. Still, in each setting,<br />

relying on community groups to build strong relationships<br />

proved productive in moving projects forward.<br />

In Baghdad’s local <strong>communities</strong>, where no legitimate<br />

sense of grassroots activism or democratic engagement<br />

had existed for years, community action groups<br />

gave ordinary <strong>citizens</strong> a direct role in a decentralized<br />

decisionmaking process that had been missing<br />

from Iraq for years. Offered this opportunity, <strong>citizens</strong><br />

responded. Within four years, 5,500 Baghdad <strong>citizens</strong><br />

were members of community action groups.<br />

Altogether, IRD helped organize 441 of these groups<br />

during the initial program phase that ran between<br />

2003 and 2006. (ICAP had been extended multiple<br />

times and continued to grow and evolve as a community<br />

empowerment program.)<br />

As the organizational engine of ICAP, the community<br />

groups were critical to project implementation. In<br />

the beginning, however, they were not easily formed.<br />

Each group had to have a minimum of nine members<br />

along with the community mobilizer, who typically<br />

lived in the local neighborhood as a show of commitment<br />

and, ideally, to win the confidence and trust of<br />

local leaders. Program design was easier said than<br />

done, since Baghdad’s political structure was still<br />

in a transitional state and many leaders viewed the<br />

community groups as a political threat. “At the time,<br />

there was some rudimentary selection process by<br />

Baghdad leadership for the city council members<br />

across all the districts,” said Awni Quandour, who<br />

filled numerous roles on ICAP, including chief of party<br />

10


Quandour joined IRD in June 2003, for the<br />

beginning of ICAP. He took a leap of faith with<br />

IRD, an organization barely 5 years old but<br />

under intense pressure to show quick results<br />

Box 2<br />

Awni Quandour: IRD’s original elder statesman<br />

1<br />

It was June 2009, and Gary Kinney had spent almost two months in Baghdad on temporary assignment, anxious<br />

to get home. “Neither sandstorms nor faulty documentation would have been welcome delays,” Kinney wrote in<br />

an email, detailing his bumpy exit from Iraq via Jordan. Kinney, who at the time was IRD’s contracts and grants<br />

manager, avoided a sandstorm, but his documentation proved more troublesome. Passport control officers at the<br />

Baghdad airport flagged his visa for being incomplete or incorrect. Whatever the reason, Kinney found himself<br />

stuck.<br />

“Two officers were in the booth, handing my passport back and forth, without any ability to solve the problem,” he<br />

said. Eventually, the men called for their supervisor, who came and led Kinney to a private airport office.<br />

Building community trust<br />

“Do you have a CAC card?” the official asked, referring to the Common Access Card issued as a standard identification<br />

by the Department of Defense. No, Kinney replied, he did not. “Do you have an MNF-I card?” he then asked,<br />

referring to another type of identification issued to workers entering and leaving Iraq. Kinney didn’t have one of those<br />

either.<br />

What he did have, however, was his IRD identification badge, which he pulled from his wallet. The Iraqi official gave it<br />

a quick glance and then, after verifying that Kinney was traveling to Amman, promptly returned the ID. Then, without<br />

further delay and in one brisk motion, he approved the visa, stamped the passport, and cleared Kinney to leave—with<br />

a parting message: “Tell Mr. Awni that Captain Zain sends his regards.”<br />

A few months later, Awni Quandour, 56, died of lung cancer at a hospital in Amman. Instrumental in helping IRD set<br />

up its initial operations in the Middle East, Quandour at the time was serving as IRD’s country director in Jordan,<br />

where his family had lived for more than 100 years and where he had built a respected reputation doing communitybased<br />

economic development work, including for the Noor Hussein Foundation. During a 2008 Capitol Hill ceremony<br />

celebrating IRD’s 10-year anniversary, Jordan’s Queen Noor publicly commended Quandour for his work. “Awni was a<br />

great man,” said Dr. Arthur B. Keys, IRD’s founder and president, “and a major source of insight and information to<br />

many, many key decisionmakers.”<br />

Quandour joined IRD in June 2003, for the beginning of ICAP. He had already spent a lot of time in Iraq, working for<br />

Catholic Relief Services during the 1990s, and he had an in-depth knowledge of the country and its people. He took<br />

a leap of faith with IRD, an organization barely 5 years old but under intense pressure to show quick results in an<br />

unstable country where it had no organizational footprint—or local staff. Quandour came on board anyway.<br />

He first met Keys in Amman, at a USAID organizing meeting for ICAP implementing agencies. IRD volunteered to<br />

work in the capital, where the needs were most widespread and immediate. “Awni and I traveled across the desert in<br />

a fast, unarmed convoy to set up IRD’s initial ICAP program in Baghdad,” Keys said. “We went out into the neighborhoods,<br />

visited families in their homes, visited mosques and universities.”<br />

(continued)<br />

11


“<br />

Many colleagues have told me<br />

that Awni gave IRD a lot of credibility<br />

in that region of the world”<br />

—Dr. Arthur B. Keys<br />

1<br />

Box 2<br />

Awni Quandour: IRD’s original elder statesman (continued)<br />

Building community trust<br />

At the time, aside from foreign military, they were the only non-Iraqis around. Quandour’s experience and familiarity<br />

with the country, however, proved crucial in getting ICAP and IRD’s regional operations established quickly. “Dr. Keys<br />

said that he wanted to go to the poor areas of Baghdad first, before the others,” Quandour said. “I told him that all<br />

the areas were poor.”<br />

Quandour and Keys knocked on doors and talked to the residents, and they learned that in some areas people were<br />

sleeping on their rooftops because their houses were flooded with sewage. With trash and debris everywhere, and<br />

with sewage backed up as high as a foot or more on some roads, “we determined that just cleaning the streets<br />

would be our first project, after listening to people talk about how they were living.”<br />

In the matter of a few weeks, Quandour and ICAP’s chief of party, Terry Leary, hired their staff, created a training<br />

plan, began street-cleaning and trash-removal operations, and started organizing ICAP’s first community action<br />

group. “People were desperate and wanted some type of sign that life would improve,” Quandour said. “We gave<br />

them hope.”<br />

Quandour’s first position with IRD was as ICAP’s community outreach director. Before long, he became the program’s<br />

deputy chief of party before assuming the chief of party role. He hired and trained IRD’s initial Iraqi staff,<br />

many of whom still work with IRD almost a decade later. He played a critical role in adapting the ICAP model on a<br />

wider scale-up when IRD began implementing CSP in 2006.<br />

In Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, and other locations, Quandour helped hone IRD’s project work in unstable<br />

environments, and many current staff credit him with being the founding father of IRD’s community development and<br />

stabilization programs.<br />

“Many colleagues have told me that Awni gave IRD a lot of credibility in that region of the world,” Keys said. “His<br />

relationships with local <strong>communities</strong> were invaluable to making the Iraq programs work. Local staff looked up to<br />

Awni as an elder statesman. He was ready to go back to Iraq, saying that when he regained his strength, he would<br />

return to that country.”<br />

While Quandour never had the opportunity to return to Iraq, his legacy and his work live on through the organizational<br />

strategy he helped craft and through his own personal ties—his daughter Zain and his niece Farah both work on IRD<br />

projects in Jordan.<br />

(box 2). According to Quandour, as the community<br />

groups flourished, tension developed between IRD<br />

and local political leaders, some of whom accused<br />

Quandour of “causing problems” and subsequently<br />

used their power to delay the approval of projects.<br />

“There was some rivalry between the council<br />

members and the community action groups,” he said,<br />

“because the CAGs suddenly had the ability to create<br />

projects that weren’t part of the council’s administrative<br />

structure.”<br />

12


The first few years of ICAP projects<br />

directly benefited more than 20 million<br />

Iraqis and generated 23,000 long‐term<br />

jobs and 5,600 short-term jobs<br />

With the help of these community groups, IRD completed<br />

almost 2,400 ICAP projects over 2003–06,<br />

at a value of more than $73 million. The program<br />

required that 25 percent of project funds be in-kind<br />

donations from local Iraqi <strong>communities</strong>, but this<br />

number was exceeded by almost $10 million—<br />

another sign of local <strong>citizens</strong>’ eagerness to be<br />

part of the planning and development of their<br />

<strong>communities</strong>.<br />

Establishing services, assisting civilians,<br />

creating jobs<br />

Once a community action group formed, IRD mobilizers<br />

would provide basic training on rules and<br />

procedures and a condensed form of the appraisal<br />

process. With this introductory training complete,<br />

members began writing bylaws to guide their work.<br />

Again, the mobilizers oversaw and helped run this<br />

activity. Throughout the program, IRD provided training<br />

to community groups on computer skills, core<br />

business skills, first aid, and conflict mitigation. This<br />

training incentivized members to continue their participation<br />

while bolstering the groups’ ability to create<br />

quality reports and applications and recommend grant<br />

candidates to IRD.<br />

Once trained, group members helped shepherd community<br />

projects through three main program areas:<br />

• Economic and social infrastructure projects to build<br />

and repair roads and public buildings as well as<br />

restore essential services.<br />

• Business development grant support to micro,<br />

small, and medium businesses.<br />

The first few years of ICAP projects directly benefited<br />

more than 20 million Iraqis and generated 23,000<br />

long-term jobs and 5,600 short-term jobs. 4 “ICAP was<br />

a unique program, at least in Iraq because it was<br />

community-based,” al-Juboori said. “We’d reach out<br />

to the grassroots level, and at that time, no one was<br />

representing anyone. There was no effective local<br />

government. Even though neighborhoods had a lot<br />

of needs, nobody was reaching out to those people.<br />

There was no government. There was nobody.”<br />

According to al-Juboori, even after the rudimentary<br />

Baghdad councils had been established, the basic<br />

needs of ordinary <strong>citizens</strong> were often overlooked<br />

due to the rampant nepotism or favoritism that<br />

had become ingrained in Iraqi political and social<br />

structure. “Local leaders were not paying attention<br />

to everyday people,” she said. “They would focus<br />

on their relatives or close friends. It wasn’t the real<br />

people in need. And with ICAP we went directly to the<br />

people in need.”<br />

A chance for <strong>citizens</strong> to rebuild basic services<br />

Many of those people in need lived in the Sadr<br />

district, one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods<br />

in Baghdad. With little access to basic<br />

services, residents in two districts encompassing<br />

roughly 25,000 people formed the Al Bir community<br />

action group. In its first year, the group completed<br />

15 projects ranging from the administration of small<br />

business grants to the creation of public parks and<br />

playgrounds on vacant lots. The group also organized<br />

neighborhood cleanups and public health campaigns.<br />

In a very short time, the Al Bir group became a vocal<br />

advocate for its <strong>citizens</strong>, and, in doing so, formed a<br />

critical link between individuals and their municipal<br />

government leadership.<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

• Assistance to civilian victims and <strong>communities</strong><br />

injured, impaired, or otherwise negatively affected<br />

by coalition forces.<br />

As part of its effort to boost the local infrastructure<br />

and business environment, the Al Bir community group<br />

reached out to create a dialogue with its neighborhood<br />

13


IRD’s health advisor referred Omar<br />

Mohammad Abas to a hospital that specialized<br />

in treating amputees, where he was fitted<br />

with an artificial leg and underwent an<br />

intensive five‐week physical therapy program<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

advisory council, the local governing authority. In doing<br />

so, the group learned of an effort to provide needy<br />

families with cooking oil and propane. But that effort<br />

had not been extended to Al Bir due to the lack of<br />

municipal capacity—simply put, the local government<br />

had no way to distribute the goods. So the citizen<br />

group responded, first by conducting a house-by-house<br />

needs assessment, then organizing a distribution<br />

network consisting of donated warehouse space and<br />

vehicles staffed by volunteers. Once the network<br />

was in place, the community action group developed<br />

a distribution schedule and a publicity campaign to<br />

inform residents about the program.<br />

Through the community action group, IRD helped put<br />

individual <strong>citizens</strong> directly in touch with government<br />

leaders. Even tenuous links between public and<br />

private interests, IRD believed, would help <strong>citizens</strong><br />

regain trust in their local political system and open<br />

doors to broader improvements in the physical and<br />

social infrastructure. The Al Bir group, for instance,<br />

had a broad impact. In addition to helping distribute<br />

cooking materials, it also helped coordinate a public<br />

health campaign to provide safe and sanitary circumcisions<br />

for young boys. IRD assisted the group in<br />

organizing qualified practitioners and nurses to come<br />

directly to families’ homes and perform the operation<br />

free of charge. The program proved very popular in<br />

the community: it was both low cost, and it improved<br />

local capacity to deliver health and social services,<br />

especially for children.<br />

With Iraq’s essential services in poor shape even<br />

before the 2003 invasion, community action group<br />

members placed their greatest priority on initiatives<br />

that would, among other things, revitalize roads,<br />

schools, medical facilities, sports facilities, sewage<br />

systems, and electricity delivery. Even with the<br />

improvements needed for services like water treatment<br />

and power supply, more than a third of the<br />

economic and social infrastructure budget was<br />

directed to school rehabilitation. A total of 278 school<br />

projects were completed through the infrastructure<br />

component. But with so much work to be done and<br />

so many people in need, program components often<br />

overlapped. Years into the conflict, Iraq’s Ministry of<br />

Education built a school in the Sadr district for 500<br />

children orphaned by the war. But the ministry did<br />

not have money to purchase generators, computers,<br />

or administrative supplies. After being contacted by<br />

the local community action group, IRD furnished the<br />

school with its missing equipment through ICAP’s<br />

Assistance to Civilian Victims (ACV) program.<br />

Addressing the needs of innocent victims<br />

Omar Mohammad Abas, an Iraqi university student,<br />

was standing outside his family’s home in May 2003,<br />

when a gunner on an American Humvee opened fire.<br />

Abas was not the intended target, but the gunfire<br />

struck him in the left leg. His injury was severe, and<br />

doctors were forced to amputate above his left knee.<br />

Almost two years later, in February 2005, the community<br />

action group representing Abas’s neighborhood<br />

brought his story to the attention of IRD mobilizers.<br />

IRD’s health advisor referred Abas to a hospital that<br />

specialized in treating amputees, where he was fitted<br />

with an artificial leg and underwent an intensive fiveweek<br />

physical therapy program.<br />

IRD financed Abas’s treatment and prosthetic leg with<br />

ACV funds. Launched during ICAP’s second year, the<br />

civilian assistance program was conceived as a way<br />

to provide relief for Iraqi civilians who were harmed as<br />

a direct result of US military operations. The congressionally<br />

earmarked funds were intended to benefit a<br />

wide range of Iraqis, from individual <strong>citizens</strong> to large<br />

families to entire <strong>communities</strong>. Projects were divided<br />

into a number of categories—community-based activities<br />

included reconstructing or expanding local civil<br />

services, such as orphanages, hospitals, or centers<br />

for the disabled; rebuilding or refurbishing individual<br />

14


After being told of Marwa Naim’s<br />

situation, IRD staff began working on<br />

an assistance plan that ended with<br />

Marwa being transported to the United<br />

States for reconstructive surgery<br />

homes that had been damaged or destroyed by the<br />

military; and providing support and necessary equipment,<br />

such as wheelchairs or prosthetics, for medical<br />

procedures like the one that benefited Abas.<br />

The program, which was not part of the original ICAP<br />

design, enabled IRD and other ICAP implementers<br />

to build trust with Iraqis. The funds were made available<br />

primarily through the efforts of international aid<br />

worker Marla Ruzicka, who had successfully petitioned<br />

Congress to provide financial assistance to civilian<br />

victims of war. Ruzicka’s relentless efforts to focus<br />

international attention on civilian hardships made her<br />

something of a celebrity. She won over journalists,<br />

diplomats, activists, and politicians, including Vermont<br />

Senator Patrick Leahy, who pushed the victims’ compensation<br />

package through Congress and said Ruzicka<br />

was “as close to a living saint as they come.”<br />

The ACV program began in 2004, but in April 2005,<br />

Ruzicka was killed on a Baghdad road by a suicide<br />

bomber. Her death drew greater attention to civilian<br />

assistance efforts in general—Rolling Stone called her<br />

“perhaps the most famous American aid worker to die<br />

in any conflict of the past 10 or 20 years.” The organizations<br />

implementing ICAP were charged with putting<br />

the ACV funds to the most effective and efficient use,<br />

and IRD found no shortage of people in need. One<br />

year after Ruzicka died, the activist organization she<br />

founded, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict<br />

(CIVIC), played an important role in assisting IRD with<br />

one of its most high-profile beneficiaries, the young<br />

Marwa Naim.<br />

Much like Omar Mohammad Abas—and scores of<br />

other Iraqis—Marwa benefited from the commitment<br />

of her local community action group. Her father first<br />

learned of the civilian assistance program through<br />

his neighborhood group. Nearly destitute, he received<br />

a grant to open a small grocery store. As part of the<br />

monitoring process, IRD workers visited Naim regularly<br />

at his home. During one of these visits, someone<br />

from IRD asked about the shy girl who would always<br />

hide when visitors arrived. The girl was his daughter;<br />

she hid, Naim explained, because she was ashamed<br />

of her severe injuries. When coalition forces entered<br />

Baghdad in April 2003, an errant rocket struck the<br />

Naim home with the family huddled inside. Marwa’s<br />

mother was killed; Marwa, 9 years old at the time, was<br />

disfigured, losing part of her nose and her right thumb.<br />

Local doctors treated the injuries, but little else could<br />

be done to reconstruct her appearance. Sad and selfconscious,<br />

Marwa became withdrawn.<br />

After being told of Marwa’s situation, IRD staff began<br />

working on an assistance plan that started with a<br />

series of medical assessments and ended with Marwa<br />

being transported to the United States for reconstructive<br />

surgery. Working with two other nonprofits, the<br />

Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and CIVIC, IRD<br />

located a surgical team at the UCLA Medical Center<br />

willing to perform the operations free of charge. In<br />

early 2006, doctors at UCLA reconstructed Marwa’s<br />

face in a series of surgeries conducted over four<br />

months. IRD also arranged for Iraqi foster families<br />

to host Marwa during her time in California. In 2009,<br />

Marwa returned to Los Angeles for a follow-up procedure.<br />

5 Her story garnered international attention for<br />

innocent civilian victims in need of help. In many of the<br />

<strong>communities</strong> where the ACV program was established,<br />

IRD and community action groups were the only ones<br />

offering social services and assistance during most<br />

violent period of the country’s insurgency.<br />

Through the initial ICAP period, the number of ACV<br />

beneficiaries soared to 770,000—a remarkable<br />

achievement for a total cost of $5.1 million. ACV<br />

continued to be a major part of ICAP’s ongoing work<br />

in Baghdad, and its impact grew even more. For<br />

example, more than 200 hospital and clinic renovations<br />

supported by ACV helped millions of Iraqi <strong>citizens</strong><br />

access more reliable healthcare.<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

15


IRD placed a premium on diversity—<br />

not just gender diversity, but also a<br />

diversity of business and geography<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

Small steps toward economic renewal<br />

Civilian assistance cases like Marwa’s were instrumental<br />

in creating community trust. But social infrastructure<br />

projects accounted for the bulk of IRD’s early<br />

work, totaling more than $31 million through ICAP’s<br />

first phase. These projects also generated the largest<br />

employment numbers, though ICAP’s business development<br />

program was designed specifically to target<br />

the need for jobs. The infrastructure and job components<br />

carried their own operational designs, but they<br />

clearly overlapped, which not only aided IRD’s efforts<br />

with ICAP but also served as a useful precursor to the<br />

even more integrated program design of CSP.<br />

IRD focused on job creation through small and<br />

medium enterprise development, such as giving<br />

private enterprise grants, forming cooperative societies,<br />

establishing market links, and extending technical<br />

assistance and business management training. Grants<br />

would range from a few hundred dollars to help supply<br />

a small shop to more than $100,000 to establish a<br />

new factory. Most grants, like the one Bakir Mohammed<br />

received, fell somewhere in between.<br />

Bakir, a livestock farmer in the rural but highly volatile<br />

Taji district of Baghdad, received a $24,000 grant<br />

in the form of cattle. He personally put up another<br />

$12,000 in facility rehabilitation costs to bring his<br />

farm up to standards and make it fully operational.<br />

Agriculture and livestock farms had always been<br />

primary contributors to Taji’s commercial engine, and,<br />

with this grant, Bakir was able to reestablish his farm<br />

as a local employer and as a sizable beef producer.<br />

Within a short time, Bakir hired a dozen workers,<br />

more than half women, and began producing enough<br />

meat products to meet the demand of nearly 15,000<br />

people.<br />

In working with community action groups to administer<br />

business development grants, IRD placed a premium<br />

on diversity. Not just gender diversity, though high<br />

value was given to ensuring equal opportunity for<br />

women, but also a diversity of business and geography.<br />

A slate of business opportunities was necessary<br />

to maximize employment generation. While staff took<br />

pride in helping an unskilled widow learn a trade and<br />

set up a small sewing business, larger agricultural,<br />

manufacturing, and service sector investments<br />

accounted for more than 80 percent of approved<br />

grants. Those grants provided the highest probability<br />

of large-scale economic renewal and, as a result, the<br />

greatest opportunity for community impact.<br />

For regional diversity, business grant opportunities<br />

were given throughout Baghdad. The total business<br />

development budget was spent disproportionately,<br />

the result of a variety of factors such as the dearth of<br />

viable entrepreneurs and different capacities between<br />

community action groups. The main issue, however,<br />

can be attributed to a lack of access due to insecure<br />

or nonpermissive working environments. This hurdle,<br />

unfortunately, was a common thread throughout all of<br />

IRD’s work in Iraq. While IRD tried to balance business<br />

development and spending as evenly as possible<br />

across Baghdad’s districts, the task proved difficult<br />

due to violence in some areas. Overall, IRD was able<br />

to maintain significant activity throughout the life of<br />

the program in all but two districts. Yet, even in those<br />

dangerous areas, community action groups functioned<br />

as intended, and the interrelated program components<br />

worked together to provide relief and support.<br />

Insecurity: Operational limitations in an<br />

unstable environment<br />

In the Ibn Zuhr neighborhood of the Mada’en district,<br />

IRD held a town hall meeting in May 2004 to form a<br />

community group. From that initial meeting, 19 local<br />

Iraqis were directly elected by their fellow <strong>citizens</strong> to<br />

represent the neighborhood. Working with the local<br />

16


Regarded as Iraq’s preeminent facility for<br />

the treatment of communicable diseases,<br />

the Ibn Zuhr Hospital was the country’s only<br />

hospital with specialized equipment and staff<br />

trained to treat patients with HIV or AIDS<br />

mobilizer, the group set about identifying and ranking<br />

needs to develop program proposals. They then<br />

worked with IRD to put together a realistic implementation<br />

plan for projects that the group could organize<br />

and fund through their own resources. The projects<br />

ranged from small neighborhood cleanups to work on<br />

a much larger scale, like the restoration of facilities<br />

at their renowned but war-damaged neighborhood<br />

hospital.<br />

Regarded as Iraq’s preeminent facility for the treatment<br />

of communicable diseases, the Ibn Zuhr Hospital<br />

was the country’s only hospital with specialized<br />

equipment and staff trained to treat patients with HIV<br />

or AIDS. During 2003, looters stole vital equipment,<br />

supplies, and drugs. They also started fires, smashed<br />

windows, and damaged equipment. After the looting,<br />

some hospital staff set out on their own to restore the<br />

facility’s capabilities by scrounging medical equipment<br />

from other Baghdad locations and, in some<br />

cases, purchasing supplies with their own money.<br />

The destruction of the hospital was a bitter blow to<br />

the community’s residents, who not only viewed the<br />

hospital’s work as a source of pride but also relied on<br />

the facility to provide emergency room services and<br />

primary healthcare. The Ibn Zuhr community group<br />

designated the restoration of the hospital, a vital<br />

piece of the community’s infrastructure, as its top<br />

priority.<br />

Group members met with hospital staff to determine<br />

the most urgent needs and worked with mobilizers to<br />

develop a proposal. ICAP provided the hospital with<br />

much needed equipment, such as diagnostic tools<br />

and machinery for sterilizing medical instruments. For<br />

the community contribution, the Ministry of Health<br />

provided the hospital with additional equipment and<br />

office furniture. At the same time, group members<br />

developed their own project to dovetail with the<br />

ICAP-backed project. Canvassing the neighborhood,<br />

members raised donations and signed volunteers to<br />

repaint rooms and make basic carpentry repairs. Using<br />

equipment donated from local businesses, volunteer<br />

electricians repaired the hospital’s damaged electrical<br />

system, not only restoring its functionality but also<br />

bringing the wiring up to international standards.<br />

The enterprising Ibn Zuhr community group, continuing<br />

its independent work, soon created its own NGO<br />

to provide assistance to the disabled. Relying solely<br />

on community donations, the newly formed NGO<br />

began providing clothing, wheelchairs, and medical<br />

care to hundreds of disabled children living in the<br />

Mada’en district. Members contacted IRD for ongoing<br />

guidance on projects and fundraising strategies,<br />

while mobilizers continued to provide capacity development<br />

support. “Those residents didn’t wait for<br />

someone from outside their community to tell them<br />

what they needed or how to proceed,” said Ernest<br />

Leonardo, the chief of party for ICAP. “They took the<br />

initiative to organize themselves and to get to work.<br />

This kind of grassroots activism is at the heart of<br />

civil society.”<br />

The Ibn Zuhr community group exemplified the positive<br />

outcomes that a program like ICAP, intended to<br />

reengage <strong>citizens</strong> through stronger civil society, can<br />

achieve. Just as impressive was the commitment<br />

of the Ibn Zuhr group to restoring order even as the<br />

larger societal fabric in the Mada’en district began<br />

to unravel. On April 20, 2005, less than a year after<br />

the formation of the Ibn Zuhr action group, 57 bodies<br />

were fished from the Tigris River downstream of<br />

Mada’en; residents said that hundreds more were in<br />

the water. Days before that discovery, insurgents had<br />

taken control of Mada’en district streets, and the local<br />

government reported 150 Shia men and women had<br />

been kidnapped. 6 The evidence pointed to a systematic<br />

killing believed to have taken place over several<br />

months, during the same time that Ibn Zuhr residents<br />

and IRD staff had been taking steps to rebuild the<br />

area’s civic pride and functionality.<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

17


Whenever harm befell a community action<br />

group member, or a member of their own<br />

team, IRD staff would cope by banding<br />

together for encouragement and support<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

Perseverance in the face of adversity<br />

IRD was not immune to violent incidents. Also in April<br />

2005, two community mobilizers were kidnapped<br />

as they left a scheduled community meeting in the<br />

Makasib neighborhood of the Rashid district. The IRD<br />

employees were held for 15 days and released after<br />

their families intervened. The evidence pointed to<br />

members of the community collaborating with the kidnappers.<br />

After the incident, IRD decided to terminate<br />

operations in the village and the surrounding area.<br />

While this incident came to a peaceful conclusion, this<br />

was not always the case. Musharaf Jabar Alwan, the<br />

Iraqi chairman of a community action group in Rashid,<br />

was executed along with his family “for working with<br />

the Americans,” according to local accounts. Altogether,<br />

seven community action group members were<br />

murdered for their involvement with community action<br />

groups and ICAP.<br />

As Iraq’s sectarian violence ramped up, the worsening<br />

security was a central concern for project management,<br />

which took a number of steps to try and ensure<br />

the safety of staff, participants, and beneficiaries.<br />

Security personnel were contracted and given<br />

ongoing training, and staff members were informed<br />

daily of security events throughout the city. When<br />

an area became too “hot” for project activity, work<br />

was stopped, and field staff were reassigned to less<br />

dangerous areas. Some of the numbers detail the<br />

danger:<br />

• 115 infrastructure projects worth $9.3 million were<br />

canceled for security reasons.<br />

• At least 40 employees resigned because of death<br />

threats.<br />

• Five employees were kidnapped: three were<br />

released, one was killed, and one was never<br />

found.<br />

• Five employees were killed outside work; four more<br />

died in work-related incidents.<br />

• While working on IRD projects, five contractors and<br />

six laborers were killed; seven IRD employees were<br />

shot or injured by shrapnel.<br />

Baghdad’s increasing violence cost the program in<br />

many ways. IRD spent $2.2 million for concrete blast<br />

walls, razor wire, security lighting, communications<br />

equipment, body armor, and guards and security<br />

coordination. Many times, offices had to be closed<br />

due to security concerns and curfews, with the longest<br />

closure lasting 23 days. Security closures cost an estimated<br />

$11,000 a day in salaries and other expenses.<br />

Aside from office shutdowns, individual staff members<br />

often had to take “security leave days” when circumstances<br />

prevented them from traveling to the office.<br />

During peaks in the violence, as much as 20 percent<br />

of labor was lost to curfews and security leave.<br />

Less quantifiable was the impact that fear and<br />

depression had on morale. Once, a mock improvised<br />

explosive device was placed adjacent to the IRD<br />

compound, an example of the intimidation directed at<br />

workers. Many staff were forced to move from their<br />

homes, sometimes in response to specific death<br />

threats. Nearly everyone lost a friend or relative to<br />

violence. Whenever harm befell a community action<br />

group member, or a member of their own team, IRD<br />

staff would cope by banding together for encouragement<br />

and support. In December 2005, Iqbal<br />

al‐Juboori’s house was attacked by militants, and they<br />

left with her brother, part of a mass kidnapping that<br />

day of men in her neighborhood. Dazed, shaken, and<br />

scared, she found herself walking directly to the IRD<br />

office, where she shared her ordeal with co workers.<br />

She was told to go home and rest, but she had no<br />

desire to do that: “I was already where I felt the<br />

safest—at work, with others.” Her brother was never<br />

found.<br />

18


Even with the insecurity and growing<br />

threats, significant reductions or<br />

elimination of operations in neighborhoods<br />

and districts were rare, and IRD<br />

remained committed to the project<br />

People had learned to trust us<br />

In 2006, the final year of ICAP’s initial program and the<br />

beginning of CSP, staff turnover exceeded 25 percent.<br />

The costs of recruiting, hiring, and training new workers,<br />

in addition to operating without a full staff, were high.<br />

During one two-month period, ICAP lost six of its seven<br />

monitoring and evaluation officers as well as its top<br />

three finance officers. Many staff members were called<br />

upon to help launch CSP, but the insecurity drove many<br />

others away. When CSP became operational, staff turnover<br />

and emotional distress became even larger issues.<br />

For one reason, CSP was nationwide, not just Baghdad,<br />

which, despite the insecurity, was still safer than many<br />

of the country’s other cities and provinces.<br />

IRD management continued to work to minimize risk by<br />

adjusting protocol and activities, and, despite protests<br />

from staff in some instances, canceling projects<br />

or ceasing operations in certain areas. When IRD<br />

stopped working in the Makasib region of the Rashid<br />

district after the staff kidnappings, more than a dozen<br />

home reconstruction projects had been completed and<br />

staff had to abandon a good working relationship with<br />

community members because one or two community<br />

members were conspiring with insurgents against IRD.<br />

Even with the insecurity and growing threats, significant<br />

reductions or elimination of operations in neighborhoods<br />

and districts were rare, and IRD remained<br />

committed to the project. “When I talk about that<br />

time, I compare IRD to the UN or Red Cross,” said<br />

Vigeen Dola, an Iraqi national who joined IRD as a<br />

monitoring and evaluation manager after CSP started<br />

up. Before that, he worked for the Red Cross while his<br />

wife was working with the UN. Both were stationed<br />

in Iraq. On August 19, 2003, Dola’s wife was at work<br />

when a suicide bomber drove a cement mixer into the<br />

side of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing 23,<br />

wounding more than 100, and collapsing three floors<br />

of the facility. 7 His wife was only wounded.<br />

Following the attack, the UN withdrew most of its<br />

Baghdad staff. After another attack in October left<br />

12 more workers dead, the UN pulled out of Baghdad<br />

completely. “The UN dropped everything and left,” Dola<br />

said. “They had no obvious activities in the conflictzone<br />

areas. They had activities in the peaceful areas,<br />

in the north. But people in these conflict zones didn’t<br />

even have drinking water; they didn’t have electricity.<br />

Two months later, the Red Cross was bombed, and<br />

they did the same thing; they pulled out. I was there,<br />

working with them. I was not only confused, but angry.”<br />

Iqbal al-Juboori, who had not yet joined IRD’s staff<br />

and was working for the UN, was among the 50 or so<br />

UN employees who remained in Baghdad after the<br />

first attack. All UN operations had been suspended,<br />

and she had to work from home, conducting business<br />

through email correspondence. Al-Juboori said she<br />

understood why the UN had to pull out: “It was not<br />

a light decision for them to withdraw from Baghdad.<br />

A lot of people had died.” However, like Dola, she<br />

said the UN needed to at least maintain some kind<br />

of public presence in Baghdad to send a message to<br />

the Iraqi people “as well as to those who intended<br />

to do them harm.” IRD, due in some combination to<br />

its size, flexibility, and organizational commitment,<br />

stuck around, even if it had to adjust operations.<br />

To local Iraqis and other aid professionals, such as<br />

Dola and al-Juboori, this commitment helped set IRD<br />

apart in the eyes of <strong>citizens</strong> who might be naturally<br />

disinclined to trust outsiders. “I joined IRD in 2005,<br />

and I’ve seen some really bad days,” al-Juboori said.<br />

“But whenever we encountered tragedy or trouble, IRD<br />

would become more fixed and determined, no matter<br />

what the obstacles or the challenges were. And there<br />

were great, great challenges. But people had learned<br />

to trust us.”<br />

IRD’s close working relationship with the community<br />

continued throughout the evolution of ICAP, which<br />

was extended and which not only ran concurrently<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

19


Scheduled to wind down in 2012 after more<br />

than eight years, ICAP is USAID’s longest<br />

running development program in Iraq<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

with CSP but also continued for years afterward<br />

as an even more robust mobilization and participatory<br />

program (box 3). Through its ICAP work, IRD<br />

had an established base of operations in Baghdad,<br />

which proved an important logistical springboard for<br />

Box 3<br />

The evolution of ICAP, USAID’s longest-running program in Iraq<br />

launching the much larger and complex CSP. More<br />

important, after three years of focused community<br />

interaction with civilians and local leaders, IRD had<br />

the credibility to take on a program as large and<br />

military-dependent as CSP.<br />

ICAP spanned the initial turbulence of postinvasion Iraq, the subsequent outbreak of sectarian violence and civil<br />

war, the flow of foreign insurgents, the US military surge, and the uncertain first steps of a new national government.<br />

But it originally was scheduled to end December 31, 2006. At the time, 68 projects worth roughly $2.5 million had<br />

not closed out, though some had ended operations. The others were near completion but had been prevented from<br />

closing out due to security problems. More than 90 percent of ICAP projects had been completed by the original<br />

close-out date, despite the surging violence.<br />

ICAP’s achievements, particularly the successful formation of community action groups (CAGs) and the groups’<br />

growing role in civil society, led USAID to extend the program, and IRD continued to play an important implementation<br />

role. USAID extended ICAP once, pushing its project total to more than 1,200 and the number of beneficiaries<br />

to more than 12 million. A second extension began in 2009 amid improving security conditions. Scheduled to wind<br />

down in 2012 after more than eight years, ICAP is USAID’s longest running development program in Iraq.<br />

With that eight-year record of bringing together <strong>citizens</strong> to identify their needs, mobilize resources, and lobby local<br />

government representatives, Baghdad’s community action groups grew into a lynchpin of IRD’s development legacy<br />

in Iraq. At the end of 2011, Baghdad had more than 120 CAGs with a total membership exceeding 1,800 Iraqi<br />

<strong>citizens</strong> across more than 100 residential <strong>communities</strong>. The organizational growth and development of the CAGs<br />

as a civil force is impressive. Since the original ICAP program began, the groups have evolved from committed but<br />

informal collectives to elected membership bodies that are governed by bylaws, hold regular public meetings, and<br />

abide by institutionalized processes that help give voice to millions of Iraqi <strong>citizens</strong>.<br />

“These groups are Iraq’s largest and most organized network of local change agents, from homemakers to professionals,”<br />

said ICAP Chief of Party Ernest Leonardo. “They understand local needs, and they advocate for those<br />

needs at the neighborhood and district government levels. In the process, they do more than provide a vital link<br />

between <strong>citizens</strong> and their government—they foster transparency, responsiveness, and, most critically, public<br />

confidence.”<br />

(continued)<br />

20


“<br />

Through ICAP, community groups have<br />

become a bellwether of democratic participation,<br />

giving everyday <strong>citizens</strong> an outlet to identify<br />

needs and the means to address them”<br />

—Ernest Leonardo<br />

CSP’s operational design incorporated many elements<br />

of ICAP, but, as a straight stabilization mission, it<br />

was fundamentally different. It was shaped by the<br />

near total collapse of Iraq’s internal political and<br />

social infrastructure and the ensuing breakdown in<br />

Box 3<br />

The evolution of ICAP, USAID’s longest-running program in Iraq (continued)<br />

security—the same elements that threatened ICAP<br />

and other relief and development programs. But unlike<br />

traditional relief programs, normally divided among a<br />

group of implementers, CSP was given only to IRD to<br />

manage and run.<br />

The community action groups, which remain at the core of the ICAP design, were able to change because the overall<br />

program mission changed. In the early days, with <strong>communities</strong> facing a critical lack of basic services, ICAP focused<br />

on quick-impact projects designed to stave off a range of impending crises, from outbreaks of cholera to widespread<br />

truancy. Thanks to the continuing dedication of group members, the CAGs moved from stop-gap measures and toward<br />

the kind of robust, participatory planning processes that create sustainable bonds between <strong>citizens</strong> and their leaders.<br />

1<br />

Building community trust<br />

By the end of 2011, all community action groups had completed comprehensive community action plans to inform<br />

long-term district development strategies for Baghdad’s 15 governmental districts. At week-long planning workshops,<br />

under IRD’s guidance, group members worked with government officials at the neighborhood, district, and<br />

province levels to outline long-term, districtwide strategies for improving basic services and livelihoods, especially<br />

for women, youths, and the internally displaced. By the end of its program date, ICAP was expected to shepherd<br />

more than 600 projects identified in the official action plans through completion.<br />

ICAP’s broader agenda not only sharpened the mission of community groups, it fostered more diverse program successes,<br />

including better assistance outreach for Baghdad’s internally displaced population, and enhanced measures<br />

to reach the estimated 5 million Iraqis who had Internet access by mid-2011. IRD worked with all 15 district<br />

councils to build dynamic websites featuring useful information on government services and contact details and<br />

spearheaded technology and skills training for information technology specialists from each council. And as part of<br />

a very inventive and groundbreaking “donor marketplace,” representatives from more than 20 international funding<br />

agencies—including the UN, the International Organization for Migration, the US Institute for Peace, and groups<br />

from Japan, the Republic of Korea, and northern Europe—gathered with community action group members to discuss<br />

funding priorities and local community needs. The ICAP-sponsored event was the first time donors had the opportunity<br />

to engage directly with community leaders around a locally owned plan for social and economic development.<br />

“Through ICAP, community groups have become a bellwether of democratic participation, giving everyday <strong>citizens</strong> an<br />

outlet to identify needs and the means to address them,” said Leonardo. “Their efforts, despite violence and limited<br />

resources, have helped make responsive, bottom-up planning a respected and acceptable practice in Baghdad.”<br />

21


2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

of programmatic and military integration<br />

A CSP soccer league holds its grand opening ceremony


“That dramatic difference that life was getting better, it all had<br />

to do with CSP. Neighborhoods were being cleaned up, soccer<br />

leagues were starting, and businesses were opening. It wasn’t<br />

all done by the military. The partnership with CSP made all<br />

these things possible.”<br />

— Andrew Wilson<br />

In his influential work, political scientist John Kingdon<br />

explored the “sources of initiative” that create unique<br />

opportunities for change, either incremental or radical,<br />

in the sociopolitical sphere. These “policy windows”<br />

present themselves when internal and external government<br />

forces come into temporary alignment. “Despite<br />

their rarity,” Kingdon said, “major changes in public<br />

policy result from the appearance of these opportunities.”<br />

To stakeholder participants, action is often<br />

imminent when an issue “is really getting hot.”<br />

By November 2005, as violence worsened in Iraq, the<br />

direction of US policy in the country had gotten very<br />

hot. The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to require<br />

that the White House submit quarterly, unclassified<br />

reports to Congress on the war’s progress and, in a<br />

rare show of bipartisanship, agreed that Iraqi forces<br />

should begin to assume the lead in the war effort in<br />

2006, calling for a “campaign plan” that would outline<br />

the phased withdrawal of troops. In the House, Pennsylvania<br />

Rep. Jack Murtha, a well-known ex-Marine<br />

who had supported the war, issued a public call for<br />

the immediate withdrawal of US troops.<br />

“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” he said.<br />

“It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American<br />

public is way ahead of us.” Murtha was referring to<br />

public opinion, which had moved solidly against the<br />

war. A Newsweek survey released the same month<br />

showed support for the administration’s handling<br />

of Iraq had reversed since May 2003. “We cannot<br />

continue on the present course,” Murtha said.<br />

In late November, The Economist declared this time<br />

America’s “most bitter period of debate over the Iraq<br />

war so far.” The policy window was wide open.<br />

CSP origins: A new approach for<br />

international development<br />

On November 30, 2005, President George W. Bush<br />

unveiled the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, a<br />

38-page plan outlining an endgame for the American<br />

military and an exit strategy intended to minimize<br />

further destabilization. The integrated strategy of the<br />

plan focused on a “security track” for neutralizing the<br />

insurgency, a “political track” for building democratic<br />

governance, and an “economic track” for creating a<br />

“sound and self-sustaining economy.” The strategic<br />

objectives underlying each track consisted of missions<br />

and tasks assigned to both military and civilian units.<br />

Although many had contributed to the document, The<br />

New York Times noted the strategy “strongly reflected<br />

23


As planning for CSP unfolded, the security<br />

situation in Iraq worsened, including the<br />

deadly bombing of the al-Askari Mosque<br />

in Samarra in February 2006. USAID<br />

had to move quickly, and it needed an<br />

experienced implementation partner<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

a new voice in the administration, Peter D. Feaver,” a<br />

special adviser to the National Security Council and a<br />

political scientist who had studied and written extensively<br />

on civilian-military relations. The US government<br />

recognized its objectives could not be accomplished<br />

through security interventions alone.<br />

Shortly thereafter, USAID released its Iraq Transition<br />

Strategy Plan (2006–08), which outlined three objectives<br />

in support of the administration’s security-political-economic<br />

delineation. The first of these objectives<br />

called for the “stabilization of strategic cities and the<br />

improvement of local <strong>governments</strong>’ ability to provide<br />

services” through short- and long-term job creation<br />

programs and through close working association with<br />

provincial councils. “Linking stability with development<br />

will reduce incentives for violence and integrate<br />

key cities into longer term development initiatives,”<br />

the plan stated. Out of this strategy, CSP was born<br />

(box 4).<br />

From the beginning, CSP differed from most international<br />

development programs and particularly from<br />

USAID programs. The scope of work said that: “Rather<br />

than focusing on traditional long-term sustainable<br />

development, CSP is a short-term COIN program”<br />

with a concentration on “employing or engaging mass<br />

numbers of at-risk, unemployed males.” Designed to<br />

be run “in close coordination with the [US] military,<br />

provincial reconstruction teams, and with local civilian<br />

counterparts,” CSP brought into one program the US<br />

government’s most comprehensive postwar strategy<br />

plan to date, as well as the military’s emerging<br />

outlook on civ-mil partnerships for carrying out COIN<br />

strategies.<br />

In January 2007, the president announced the<br />

stabilization plan during an internationally televised<br />

address, detailing how the embedded PRTs would<br />

place development experts inside brigade combat<br />

teams, the “civilian surge” to accompany the military<br />

surge of 20,000 troops. Initially, there was a struggle<br />

within the administration as to which department or<br />

agency would take the lead in civilian-led stabilization<br />

and reconstruction. Should it be housed at the<br />

Pentagon? Implementation cells could be placed<br />

within the combatant command responsible for Iraq,<br />

but concern was expressed over how much flexibility<br />

the civilian workers would have. Should it be housed<br />

at the State Department? At the time, the department<br />

did not have any scalable programmatic capability for<br />

stabilization—the Civilian Response Corps was still a<br />

few years away. But some high-ranking State Department<br />

officials pushed for it, arguing that the department<br />

was already overseeing democracy building and<br />

programs for internally displaced persons, and that<br />

those programs could be transitioned into stabilization<br />

activities.<br />

USAID, without a Cabinet-level voice, lacked the influence<br />

of other departments, but its mission practices<br />

offered an obvious alignment with CSP’s programming<br />

requirements. Not everyone in the administration<br />

agreed, of course. But after prolonged discussion,<br />

administration officials decided to house the program<br />

at USAID. “The reconstruction activities that were put<br />

forward for USAID to implement focused on the areas<br />

where the government believed it could get the best<br />

goodwill from Iraqi <strong>citizens</strong>, the best places where<br />

we could engage Iraqis in a constructive manner so<br />

they’re not taking up arms,” explained a senior IRD<br />

official.<br />

In the context of government decisionmaking, CSP<br />

was moving forward rapidly, despite the jockeying for<br />

oversight. Momentum for focused stabilization had<br />

been building, but as early planning for CSP unfolded,<br />

the security situation in Iraq worsened. The al-Askari<br />

Mosque bombing in Samarra in February 2006 led to<br />

an estimated 1,300 deaths, ignited ethnic tensions,<br />

and plunged Iraq into a spiral of violence. USAID had<br />

to move quickly, and it needed an implementation<br />

24


IRD oversaw CSP operations in 15 cities<br />

nationwide, reaching millions of Iraqis<br />

through employment, training, business<br />

development, and youth projects<br />

Box 4<br />

CSP: At a glance<br />

2<br />

Awarded to IRD by USAID in 2006, CSP grew into a $644 million delivery mechanism for quick-impact projects, a<br />

“nonlethal, counterinsurgency program that reduces the incentives for participation in violent conflict by employing<br />

or engaging at risk youth between the ages of 17 and 35,” according to the contract’s scope of work. In short, CSP<br />

was designed to address the root cause of the insurgency through a four-pronged strategy that focused on:<br />

• Assisting the government of Iraq at all levels in fulfilling its duties, thus improving <strong>citizens</strong>’ perceptions of government<br />

efficacy and legitimacy.<br />

• Mitigating the major economic factors contributing to the insurgency.<br />

• Stimulating preconditions for economic stability.<br />

• Facilitating constructive dialogue and peaceful interactions through civic education and community-oriented<br />

activities.<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

To implement this strategy, IRD focused on activities intended to create jobs and rebuild relationships among young<br />

Iraqis from different ethnic backgrounds. Projects were closely coordinated with the military and local PRTs. In<br />

addition, CSP staff, the vast<br />

majority native Iraqis, collaborated<br />

with local and ministry<br />

CSP operations by city<br />

Kirkuk<br />

Nov 06–Mar 09<br />

officials as part of a larger effort<br />

Mosul/Tal Afar<br />

to legitimize the government<br />

Nov 06–Sep 09<br />

and establish lines of trust and<br />

Beiji<br />

Feb 08–Jun 09<br />

communication between leaders<br />

Haditha<br />

Tikrit<br />

Oct 07–Jan 09<br />

Feb 08–Jun 09<br />

and <strong>citizens</strong>. This community<br />

Samarra<br />

interaction played a critical role<br />

Feb 08–Jun 09<br />

Al Qaim<br />

Nov 06–Jan 09<br />

in building CSP. The years IRD<br />

Baquba<br />

Jul 07–Sep 09<br />

had spent cultivating relationships<br />

at the grassroots through<br />

Baghdad<br />

Hit<br />

Oct 07–Jan 09<br />

May 06–Jun 09<br />

ICAP allowed it to leverage its<br />

Babil<br />

Ramadi<br />

Jan 08–Mar 09<br />

resources and local standing<br />

Nov 06–Mar 09<br />

into a quick start in Baghdad,<br />

Habbaniyah<br />

Oct 07–Jan 09<br />

enabling a nationwide rollout of<br />

CSP within six months.<br />

Fallujah<br />

Nov 06–Mar 09<br />

Basra<br />

Nov 06–Jul 09<br />

Altogether, IRD oversaw CSP<br />

operations in 15 cities nationwide,<br />

reaching millions of Iraqis<br />

through employment, training, business development, and youth projects. Although IRD used the same program<br />

design in each of the cities, the funding and length of engagement varied widely based on a number of factors,<br />

primarily local need and level of local security.<br />

25


“<br />

There were no similar programs. CSP<br />

was historic from the first day. The scale,<br />

the ability, the necessity to work with<br />

the military in a kinetic environment”<br />

—Dar Warmke<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

partner with experience doing this kind of work and a<br />

host of other criteria as well, including a willingness<br />

to work with the military, rapid-start capability, and<br />

flexibility to manage a project that was expected to<br />

grow significantly over its life. On May 29, 2006, it<br />

chose IRD.<br />

USAID looked specifically at two key IRD credentials—<br />

its successful operation of ICAP in Baghdad, where<br />

CSP would be headquartered and where IRD already<br />

had established relationships with local councils<br />

and community leaders; and IRD’s work in Serbia<br />

and Montenegro under the CRDA program. However,<br />

Serbia and Montenegro were not the same as Iraq.<br />

The mission was not remotely on the same scale, and<br />

it was not the same model. IRD’s work in the Balkans<br />

took place in a postwar setting. Iraq, by contrast, was<br />

in full insurrection, and IRD was to work alongside the<br />

US military to provide relief and to help mitigate the<br />

conflict itself.<br />

“There were no similar programs,” said Dar Warmke,<br />

who ran CSP operations for IRD in Basra and, later,<br />

Mosul. “CSP was historic from the first day. The<br />

scale, the ability, the necessity to work with the military<br />

in a kinetic environment. . . . I worked through<br />

the whole Bosnian war, with another organization,<br />

but we were not trying to do stability work at the<br />

same time. There was no clear and hold.” CSP was<br />

unprecedented in its design, and the result was a<br />

stabilization program widely credited by military and<br />

diplomatic leaders for meeting its primary goals—<br />

creating jobs and helping make some of Iraq’s most<br />

devastated <strong>communities</strong> safer. It also stretched<br />

IRD’s capacity, wound down in controversy, and left<br />

many of the organization’s staff simultaneously<br />

praising it for its successes and criticizing it for its<br />

missteps. Ultimately, it offered a blueprint for civilian<br />

participation in COIN operations, and a case study of<br />

the complexities inherent in assisting the military and<br />

militarizing assistance.<br />

Breaking down CSP’s design<br />

As CSP was being designed, a consensus emerged<br />

that high unemployment contributed to <strong>citizens</strong>’<br />

negative perception of local and national government<br />

capacity. CSP focused primarily on males ages<br />

17–35 years because that group made up the highest<br />

percentage of the unemployed, marginalized, and<br />

disaffected and because they were most vulnerable to<br />

joining insurgent groups. By reaching the most-at-risk<br />

members of the population, CSP reasoned, violence<br />

would be mitigated.<br />

“At the end of the day,” said Michele Lemmon, an IRD<br />

senior program officer, “it was all about one thing:<br />

jobs, jobs, jobs. It wasn’t to do charity work, and it<br />

wasn’t to give handouts. It was to help people get<br />

back to what they were doing before.” Jessica Cho,<br />

an IRD field program coordinator, conducted a series<br />

of postprogram interviews with CSP beneficiaries and<br />

local staff. Cho said one of the clearest takeaways<br />

was a basic sense of appreciation for the “number<br />

of jobs that were created in some of these circumstances.”<br />

In most cities, Cho said, CSP was “truly<br />

successful in combining nonskill public works projects<br />

with rehabilitation of basic infrastructure, then using<br />

those successes to promote businesses development<br />

and vocational training. Together, it all led to longer<br />

term jobs and to some sense of stability.”<br />

CSP’s four core programmatic components—infrastructure<br />

and services, vocational training, business<br />

development, and youth engagement—closely<br />

resembled traditional development strategy. Yet the<br />

underlying goal in three of the four areas was that<br />

employment generation intended to:<br />

• Create short-term (fewer than 90 days) jobs through<br />

community infrastructure and essential services<br />

projects,such as rehabilitation of schools, streets,<br />

health clinics, public gardens, soccer fields,<br />

26


“<br />

At the end of the day, it was all about one<br />

thing: jobs, jobs, jobs. It was to help people<br />

get back to what they were doing before”<br />

—Michele Lemmon<br />

sewage and drainage canals, and water treatment<br />

plants for safe drinking water. These projects<br />

were the fastest to get off the ground and showed<br />

the quickest results, and they included the trash<br />

cleanup campaigns that were a hallmark of the<br />

early part of the program. Internally, this component<br />

was known as CIES.<br />

• Generate long-term (more than three months) jobs<br />

by establishing vocational training and employment<br />

service centers,particularly for young and<br />

unemployed Iraqi males. Other groups considered<br />

high risk for recruitment into insurgency, such as<br />

widowed women, were also targeted. Training was<br />

given for construction and nonconstruction trades,<br />

as well as in courses such as sewing and cosmetology<br />

intended to bring in women. Apprenticeships<br />

and follow-up employment assistance services<br />

were also offered.<br />

• Encourage business development and local ownership<br />

through management training courses and<br />

grants to new or current businesses in agriculture,<br />

industry, manufacturing, and trade services. These<br />

business development grants, which ranged from<br />

$500 to $100,000 and were in the form of equipment<br />

and materials, were based on the potential<br />

for job creation, higher incomes, positive impact<br />

on the community, and the grantee’s own contribution.<br />

Some of the most visible examples of these<br />

grants are the hundreds of shops that were rebuilt<br />

after being destroyed or damaged in violent market<br />

attacks.<br />

• Mitigate conflict by engaging Iraqis socially and<br />

culturally.Young men (and to a lesser extent<br />

women) were the intended targets, but IRD aimed<br />

higher, hoping its activities would also contribute to<br />

bringing together <strong>citizens</strong> from different religious,<br />

ethnic, and political backgrounds. In coordination<br />

with local community leaders and civic groups, IRD<br />

sponsored community programs, such as athletic<br />

events, art programs, computer training, and<br />

healthy living courses.<br />

Successful implementation depended on the ability<br />

of IRD’s program team to work with the provincial<br />

councils, neighborhood advisory councils, and district<br />

advisory councils to establish component-specific<br />

strategies. Although the partners varied between<br />

cities, CSP consistently worked through all levels of<br />

local government leaders to identify and implement<br />

projects. The councils were formed after the Coalition<br />

Provisional Authority took over administration of the<br />

Iraqi government, and they served as a primary governing<br />

body in many localities before eventually becoming<br />

part of the provincial government.<br />

A balance between military strategy and community need<br />

Although many IRD staff recalled extreme challenges<br />

while working with council members, including personal<br />

threats and bribe requests, the councils were necessary<br />

to the implementation process, especially during<br />

the first year. “CSP didn’t select the projects,” said<br />

Awni Quandour, who left ICAP to become a transitional<br />

chief of party for CSP. “They were strictly the choice of<br />

council members.” Quandour made regular visits to city<br />

officials in Baghdad to try and overcome one of the program’s<br />

earliest challenges—the city’s deep religious<br />

divides. Projects in Sunni neighborhoods still had to<br />

get approval from the Shia council members, and vice<br />

versa. “CSP tried to be as fair as possible,” Quandour<br />

said, but in some cases “it wasn’t fair; it was politics.”<br />

Because of the pressure IRD applied on local leaders<br />

to ensure the program moved forward, Quandour said<br />

they were able to proceed without alienating Sunni or<br />

Shia neighborhoods.<br />

“IRD always talks about its focus on communitybased,<br />

or community-led, development work, and I<br />

think that’s where it made the big difference,” said<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

27


the most successful projects were those<br />

in which there was tight community<br />

and national coordination between<br />

the different program components<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

Andrew Wilson, an IRD senior program officer. Wilson<br />

worked with CSP in Iraq as a civil affairs captain in<br />

the US Army, attached to several battalions working<br />

throughout Ramadi in 2006 and 2007. He said he saw<br />

firsthand the value of IRD’s experience in navigating<br />

local political structures and its connection with the<br />

grassroots. “You know in the military, we just went out<br />

there and made it happen. We’d go in and say, ‘Hey,<br />

who’s the elder?’ And some guy would raise his hand,<br />

and we’d tell him, ‘Okay, we’re gonna clean up these<br />

streets and now you’re in charge of this, and you<br />

need to tell us who’s who and what’s what.’ We were<br />

empowering whoever would stand up and raise his<br />

hand. CSP really took that to the next level, because<br />

IRD had experience working with the government,<br />

working with the mayors, or the different ministries.”<br />

In general, CSP strategies were passed down from<br />

provincial ministries to the directorate level, and the<br />

directorates for a specific city would then submit<br />

proposals. Working closely with local councils, PRTs,<br />

and the military, IRD would establish a general planning<br />

process for project work. Once that process was<br />

determined, each CSP program component worked<br />

with local partners specific to the city and setting<br />

(box 5):<br />

• Infrastructure projects were tendered competitively<br />

and awarded and implemented in coordination with<br />

the municipal <strong>governments</strong> in areas like park and<br />

recreational facility rehabilitation.<br />

• The CSP employment generation staff worked with<br />

councils, community groups, and local leaders<br />

to recruit students for vocational training and<br />

apprenticeships.<br />

Wilson said IRD linked CSP projects to military strategy<br />

and community needs, which helped “close the<br />

gap” between the objectives of the military and those<br />

of local populations. “Through CSP, IRD put an Iraqi<br />

face on [stabilization],” he said. “They started doing<br />

some of the soccer leagues and vocational training—<br />

things the military didn’t have expertise in. IRD made<br />

it hum, but the local people owned it.”<br />

The complete package: Programmatic and<br />

military integration<br />

Operationally, CSP comprised four distinct program<br />

areas, but IRD strove to provide a complete package<br />

of services that optimized the overlaps. For example,<br />

irrigation and canal restoration projects were<br />

undertaken in regions where residents could build<br />

greenhouses to grow and market fresh produce<br />

locally. “Economic zones” were identified so that<br />

roads and market areas could be rehabilitated for CSP<br />

grantees to open new businesses. A final analysis of<br />

CSP program data showed that the most successful<br />

projects were those in which there was tight community<br />

and national coordination between the different<br />

program components.<br />

28<br />

• The business development team distributed grant<br />

applications through the district and neighborhood<br />

councils. Applicants were then chosen by a committee<br />

of business development program staff.<br />

• Youth activities were coordinated through local<br />

sports clubs and the Directorate of Youth. In cities<br />

where the directorate was not fully functional, IRD<br />

partnered with local NGOs.<br />

“The first strategy was to get out there and employ<br />

people,” said Travis Gartner, IRD’s deputy chief of<br />

party for program operations with CSP. “From there,<br />

we could begin building on other components, such<br />

as talking about needs in other areas. Once the<br />

streets were cleaned, we started an infusion of cash<br />

to stimulate local economy. Then we looked at a small<br />

grants program, moving from a quick fix to engaging<br />

people on a medium term. We started looking for ways


Given the volatile sociopolitical<br />

environment CSP operated in, a planning<br />

process that included all relevant local<br />

leaders and officials was crucial<br />

Box 5<br />

CSP: Project development process<br />

2<br />

Given the volatile sociopolitical environment CSP operated in, a planning process that included all relevant local<br />

leaders and officials was crucial for expediting project work, demonstrating transparency, and promoting fairness.<br />

CSP activities varied from city to city; and even within cities, the development process would vary. Staff and senior<br />

leadership strove for as much consistency as possible, and all projects relied in some way on collaborative efforts<br />

with different stakeholders. CSP in Baghdad followed this basic development process for community infrastructure<br />

and essential service projects.<br />

Hold introductory meeting<br />

with provincial council and<br />

district and neighborhood<br />

advisory councils. Agree<br />

upon initial project ideas.<br />

Project<br />

idea<br />

Send project idea to<br />

Amanat, the local<br />

overseer of public<br />

works projects<br />

Send project idea<br />

to appropriate<br />

government ministry<br />

for approval and<br />

coordination<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

Send scope of<br />

work to Amanat<br />

for approval<br />

Submit scope of<br />

work to appropriate<br />

government ministry<br />

for approval and<br />

coordination<br />

Develop scope<br />

of work with<br />

directorate general<br />

Send project idea to<br />

directorate general<br />

for approval<br />

Conduct technical<br />

review of project<br />

idea<br />

Complete project<br />

proposal packet<br />

Begin<br />

provincial<br />

program<br />

process<br />

Project<br />

implementation<br />

Tendering, contracting,<br />

performance, monitoring,<br />

completion, and handover<br />

to take cash-for-work laborers and move them into<br />

training programs and sports activities like soccer. We<br />

were looking for other means of engaging people and<br />

bringing them together, so we could talk to them about<br />

their needs and what they felt was really important.”<br />

This is our way forward<br />

Once the site of youth sports competitions, Tameem<br />

Quarter Soccer Field in Ramadi had become a dump.<br />

Garbage trucks couldn’t get to it because the town’s<br />

narrow streets were controlled by insurgents and<br />

littered with debris and improvised explosive devices<br />

(IEDs). Tameem Quarter’s field was just one example<br />

of how city services—and civil society in general—had<br />

collapsed in Ramadi by 2006. Homes and shops, from<br />

bakeries to clothing stores to kebab stands, were<br />

abandoned. Empty or shelled-out buildings lined desolate<br />

streets. “I remember projects that CSP conducted<br />

in our area, youth sports and the like,” Wilson said.<br />

“In part of Ramadi, they cleaned out whole areas of<br />

neighborhoods. That place was like Stalingrad. Every<br />

street you went down, every first row of homes was<br />

destroyed, blown up, almost in rubble. The streets<br />

29


“<br />

You are the future of Ramadi. You should<br />

never forget what you have seen and what we<br />

have been through. This is our way forward”<br />

—Latif Obaid Ayadah<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

had hundreds of IEDs, there were attacks happening,<br />

sometimes multiple times per day.”<br />

But by summer 2007, almost a year after what is often<br />

referred to as the Second Battle of Ramadi, the landscape<br />

began to change. Many shops had reopened<br />

and kebab stands were again filled with customers.<br />

And the Tameem Quarter Soccer Field, refurbished<br />

and reopened, was the site of the Tameem Championship,<br />

a citywide tournament. Before the final match<br />

between Tameem Quarter and the Qadasiyah neighborhood<br />

teams got under way, Ramadi Mayor Latif<br />

Obaid Ayadah walked across the new field and greeted<br />

the players. He shook hands with the young Iraqi men<br />

and congratulated them for making it to the finals and<br />

for helping restore normalcy. The event, and its community<br />

support, was “crucial in winning back the city,”<br />

he said. “You are the future of Ramadi,” he told the<br />

gathered players—and spectators. “You should never<br />

forget what you have seen and what we have been<br />

through. This is our way forward.” CSP sponsored<br />

many similar youth programs, holding sports events<br />

and tournaments in areas once deemed hot zones.<br />

But the Tameem tournament is illustrative of just how<br />

fundamental the element of integration was to CSP’s<br />

success: integrated programmatic components and<br />

integrated activities with the military.<br />

Capturing project progressions and linkages<br />

Four months before the tournament in Tameem<br />

Quarter, a cleanup campaign jointly organized by<br />

US military civil affairs teams and CSP removed<br />

the garbage, junk cars, debris, and other trash that<br />

blocked the streets and prevented kids from getting to<br />

the field. Through that community infrastructure and<br />

essential services project, IRD employed hundreds of<br />

local young men, many of whom were then organized<br />

into neighborhood soccer teams—with help from<br />

community leaders, sports union members, and local<br />

teachers—as part of CSP’s youth activities program.<br />

IRD provided the teams with equipment and uniforms<br />

and organized a series of games on local fields<br />

restored by CSP cleanup initiatives. The Tameem<br />

championship game was the culmination of more than<br />

a month of separate but interrelated projects that<br />

began with hiring temporary workers but ended with<br />

an organized public event that packed in local <strong>citizens</strong>,<br />

including the targeted young male demographic. Organizing<br />

and supporting similar programs in areas that<br />

had been cleaned up and secured, Mayor Ayadah said,<br />

was “the key to preventing insurgents from making<br />

their way back into the community.”<br />

This event was one of hundreds demonstrating how<br />

effective well-planned project links could be. In Mosul,<br />

two Olympic-size pools, restored as a CIES project,<br />

were soon crowded with kids and young adults taking<br />

part in swim meets or swimming lessons—activities<br />

planned and organized by the employment generation<br />

and youth unit. Similarly, CIES rehabilitated hospitals<br />

while the employment generation and youth unit would<br />

provide on-site emergency response and first-aid<br />

training. In Baghdad, newly constructed computer<br />

training centers hosted vocational training classes<br />

that consistently operated at full capacity. In Kirkuk,<br />

a major irrigation canal restoration project allowed<br />

struggling farmers to receive funds through the business<br />

development grants program. And with such a<br />

large number of youth employed on the canal project,<br />

IRD took the opportunity to promote Kirkuk’s Hawija<br />

Medina Soccer Championship, which drew more than<br />

2,500 spectators and participants.<br />

The final independent evaluation commissioned by<br />

USAID found that all four CSP components “were<br />

effective to varying degrees” but that intra-CSP<br />

coordination and “integration with other programs”<br />

was “notable in [its] impacting effectiveness.” Each<br />

program component had specific objectives, but by<br />

closely integrating project work across as many components<br />

as possible, IRD ensured its activities were<br />

30


A typical market project would begin with<br />

an intensive cleaning campaign followed<br />

by rehabilitation work to rebuild roads<br />

and infrastructure that had either been<br />

destroyed or fallen into disrepair<br />

mutually reinforcing, which enhanced the likelihood of<br />

a project’s lasting impact.<br />

Another consideration for IRD was the need to capture<br />

the progression and links between the various shortand<br />

long-term initiatives, so that the shift from service<br />

provision (such as debris removal) to economic<br />

development would not be abrupt and, ideally, would<br />

play out in a linear fashion, a chain of events that<br />

would reflect increasing stabilization. Another way to<br />

describe the complete package would be as a selfsustaining<br />

cycle (figure 1).<br />

CSP in full: Ramadi and the 17th Street market<br />

A typical market project would begin with an intensive<br />

cleaning campaign followed by rehabilitation work to<br />

rebuild roads and infrastructure that had either been<br />

destroyed or fallen into disrepair. Grants would then be<br />

awarded to help businesses in the revitalized market<br />

increase their stock and services to boost sales and<br />

generate new jobs. Such rehabilitations were not possible<br />

without secure neighborhoods, and perhaps no city<br />

in Iraq embodied the need for a joint civ-mil partnership<br />

more than Ramadi. The dramatic turnaround began in<br />

mid-2006, during the Sunni Awakening and the military’s<br />

subsequent push to win the city back from insurgents.<br />

“In 2006, Ramadi had been written off by the military,”<br />

said Gartner, the CSP deputy chief of party. “The<br />

level of destruction was huge. By that time, insurgents<br />

were parading openly up and down 17th Street, the<br />

main street though the city. They were on TV with their<br />

weapons announcing, ‘We own the city.’ So when the<br />

Marines cleared that, the insurgents just destroyed<br />

everything in their way. It was a hardcore battle.” Prior<br />

to 2003, 17th Street had been one of the city’s main<br />

commercial arteries. But the urban warfare, which<br />

had damaged shops and caused shop owners and<br />

residents alike to flee, transformed the corridor from<br />

a lively district into a wasteland. Before the military<br />

campaign to win back the area began, terrorists put up<br />

roadblocks and lined vacant buildings with explosives.<br />

After the military had regained control, there was not<br />

much to control other than the land.<br />

The military split the city into different zones, and<br />

within each zone a company or platoon of Marines<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

Figure 1<br />

Self-sustaining project work cycle<br />

CIES-funded public works<br />

projects boosted short-term<br />

employment and rehabilitated basic<br />

infrastructure (such as streets and<br />

markets), which allowed for . . .<br />

Development grants to help<br />

businesses in the revitalized<br />

areas rebuild economically,<br />

which boosted the need for . . .<br />

Apprenticeship and job placement<br />

services that linked reemerging<br />

businesses and contractors to newly<br />

skilled labor hires, many of whom started<br />

out on CIES-funded works projects.<br />

Vocational training to help young people<br />

acquire the technical and business<br />

skills to find permanent or long-term<br />

employment, which could be secured<br />

through . . .<br />

31


“[Colonel John Charlton] was the first<br />

person who bought into what CSP was<br />

intended to do. And that has to be stressed,<br />

that the military must buy into it”<br />

—Travis Gartner<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

would set up a smaller area of operations with a joint<br />

security station. The area could be as small as five<br />

city blocks, its total coverage often dictated by the<br />

military presence needed to clear and hold it. “The<br />

military’s idea was that you’d take over an abandoned<br />

house or compound, turn it into your safe house,<br />

secure it, and then start doing missions,” Wilson said.<br />

“But we also had to build relationships with the local<br />

leaders. We prioritized different quick-reaction projects,<br />

stabilization, COIN-type spending. We did a lot of<br />

that in the early days, like the trash cleanup. But you<br />

know, right after fighting, we didn’t have the capacity<br />

to do it on the right level, or with a local face. We filled<br />

the gap until a better option came along. That’s when<br />

CSP came into the mix.”<br />

By November 2006, the Marines had seized a multistory,<br />

dilapidated building at a key vantage point in<br />

Ramadi. Dubbed the 17th Street Security Station, the<br />

building became a critical outpost for US and Iraqi security<br />

forces. With an operational security base established<br />

for the military to hold the surrounding area,<br />

the exact window of opportunity CSP was designed for<br />

opened up. The CSP team and local Iraqi leaders came<br />

together to implement a joint revitalization project to<br />

clean streets, reconstruct buildings, and repair sewage<br />

and electrical lines. The $2.1 million infrastructure<br />

project filled holes in the road and repaved sidewalks. It<br />

created hundreds of local construction jobs. While that<br />

was ongoing, IRD moved quickly to award more than 60<br />

business grants to local entrepreneurs to encourage<br />

investment in the rebuilt market and create longer term<br />

employment. “CSP was looked at by the military as a<br />

great partner,” Wilson said, “because they were willing<br />

to take risks and make things happen. If they had<br />

slowed down and said, ‘Hey we can’t do this because of<br />

X, Y, and Z,’ I don’t think you would’ve seen the drastic<br />

turnaround you saw in Ramadi.”<br />

Colonel John Charlton, commander of the 1st Brigade<br />

of the 3rd Infantry Division, headquartered in Ramadi,<br />

was a vocal advocate for COIN-style community stabilization.<br />

In the 2008 Washington Post examination<br />

of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program<br />

(CERP) funds and revenue for reconstruction, Charlton<br />

reiterated the need “to win [Iraqi] trust” and the<br />

importance of investing in <strong>communities</strong> in tandem with<br />

securing the <strong>communities</strong>. “He was the first person<br />

who bought into what CSP was intended to do,”<br />

Gartner said. “And that has to be stressed, that the<br />

military must buy into it.”<br />

IRD’s strong local ties in Baghdad, and the organization’s<br />

adeptness at establishing community rapport,<br />

clearly played in CSP’s favor. “The IRD network in<br />

Baghdad and in the other provinces, especially in<br />

the very critical years of 2006 and 2007, was a<br />

difference-maker,” said Alaa Ismael, who oversaw<br />

CSP’s infrastructure and essential activities. “In<br />

some of the districts we were working in, in which so<br />

many violent incidents happened, sometimes even<br />

the military found it very hard to work there. . . .<br />

Through our local networks, we were able to move<br />

into very dangerous <strong>communities</strong>. We were able to<br />

face those challenges because our staff was there<br />

on the ground.”<br />

The heart of the insurgency was in Al-Anbar, and<br />

employing many people right away was the only option,<br />

Gartner said, to hold gains as they were made in<br />

places like Ramadi. “The military is about to clear, and<br />

we’ve got resources, and they understand that we’re<br />

going to work with the municipalities and that we’re<br />

going to employ Iraqis,” he said. “So they buy into<br />

this, because they know it has to happen, and then<br />

they don’t have to do it. Colonel Charlton kept asking,<br />

‘Where are your expats?’ Well there were no expats.<br />

There was me and $60 million in CSP funds. And I<br />

kept stressing to him point number one: that I would<br />

work with the Iraqis, and that we were gonna employ<br />

a lot of people, local people.” According to Wilson, the<br />

military “loved what CSP and Gartner were doing. They<br />

32


“<br />

The partnership with CSP made these<br />

things possible. Finally, people saw that<br />

it was worth kicking out al Qaeda”<br />

—Andrew Wilson<br />

never thought an NGO could operate like that, in that<br />

type of environment. We didn’t go through any training<br />

where we were taught, ‘Go find your local NGO. They’re<br />

going to help you win the war.’ They’d be stupid not to<br />

teach that now.”<br />

A year after the Ramadi stabilization effort began, in<br />

October 2007, Gartner and Charlton were among more<br />

than 400 attendees at a grand opening ceremony<br />

for the Ramadi Business Center. Local leaders,<br />

Iraqi government officials, business owners, military<br />

personnel, US congressmen, and media attended<br />

the ceremony, which Ramadi Mayor Ayadah called “a<br />

shining day in the history of the Al-Anbar governorate.”<br />

Within two years, the center had become a locus of<br />

economic development. In November 2009, more than<br />

4,000 entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate representatives<br />

from Jordan, Turkey, and the United Arab<br />

Emirates and other countries gathered at the business<br />

center for the Al-Anbar Trade Fair. According to USAID,<br />

which offers ongoing support for the business center,<br />

more than 300 Iraqis a month were receiving vocational<br />

skills training at the same location in courses<br />

that range from secretarial skills to corporate sales<br />

and accounting, from how to apply for a job to how to<br />

write a business report. Qassim Mohammad Abed,<br />

governor of Anbar province, praised the trade fair and<br />

the business center for demonstrating that Ramadi<br />

and the governorate of Al-Anbar were again “open for<br />

business.”<br />

“The 17th Street Market, that was a huge turning<br />

point,” Wilson said. “Before long, John McCain, Joe<br />

Lieberman, and people like that were coming to Anbar.<br />

That dramatic difference that life was getting better in<br />

Ramadi, it all had to do with CSP. Neighborhoods were<br />

being cleaned up, soccer leagues were starting, and<br />

businesses were opening. It wasn’t all done by the<br />

military. The partnership with CSP made these things<br />

possible. And when you add them up, it’s like the<br />

straw that broke the camel’s back. Finally, people saw<br />

that it was worth kicking out al Qaeda.”<br />

While many projects were driven by military or USAID<br />

considerations, the operational reality in Iraq was<br />

that close coordination of all CSP stakeholders was<br />

needed to complete projects. “In a stabilization<br />

program, relationships, particularly with the military<br />

but really with any involved decisionmaker, are key<br />

success factors,” Ismael said. “CSP was unique in<br />

that USAID was working right alongside the military,”<br />

Gartner said. “The key to CSP’s success was the<br />

military buying into it. If the military sees you as a<br />

resource, and you have resources to bring to the table<br />

to directly support counterinsurgency efforts, then it<br />

will work.”<br />

2<br />

A complete stabilization package<br />

33


3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

in a counterinsurgency environment<br />

Local workers rebuild a destroyed market in Jurf al Sakher


“The ultimate goal was to engage people for two or three<br />

years, but in many cases, we made a successful transition to<br />

keep activities going on. And that was evident across all the<br />

program components. CSP created jobs. CSP engaged youth.<br />

But at the local level, it really achieved something special.”<br />

— Barzan Ismaeel<br />

CSP was originally known as the “Focused Stabilization<br />

in Strategic Cities” program, which was descriptive<br />

of the COIN philosophy of quick-impact relief and<br />

reconstruction with short, targeted missions. Unlike<br />

traditional development programs, CSP was fluid,<br />

scaling up or down in response to evolving priorities<br />

in the most insecure areas of key cities like Basra,<br />

Kirkuk, and Mosul. But as CSP evolved from concept<br />

to implementation, “focused stabilization” began to<br />

mean more than geography. IRD’s broader mission<br />

of trying to establish a wholly integrated stabilization<br />

program with discernible short- and long-term benefits<br />

led to a system of “checks and balances.” Individual<br />

program components were afforded flexibility to meet<br />

their goals, but they also maintained a focus on adherence<br />

to the complete package model. As CSP rapidly<br />

scaled up, this tightly integrated approach proved<br />

important.<br />

The initial cooperative agreement was for $265 million<br />

and six months of activities in Baghdad. Expansion<br />

was expected, but funding increased rapidly in<br />

response to Department of Defense and USAID needs<br />

to add cities to the program. These changes eventually<br />

pushed the total obligation to $644 million. At<br />

the height of the program, CSP had 1,800 staff and<br />

was spending an average of $21 million a month.<br />

Program operations easily could have spiraled out of<br />

control, but the overall design didn’t allow it. “When<br />

we started expanding to other cities, the initial processes<br />

and procedures were taken to those cities,”<br />

Michele Lemmon said. “But they had to be adapted,<br />

because each city had its own circumstances, different<br />

<strong>communities</strong>, and a different acceptance of the<br />

program. Remember, we were doing what the Iraqis<br />

wanted to do. All the programs were designed by the<br />

Iraqi staff, with a helping hand from us. Now, consider<br />

going from one city, Baghdad, to 15 cities in a matter<br />

of months. That’s how large we became. Really, the<br />

success we had in those circumstances is owed to the<br />

strong program design. It kept CSP focused almost by<br />

default.”<br />

Community infrastructure and essential<br />

services: CSP’s entry point<br />

CSP categorized employment as either short term<br />

(fewer than three months) or long term (more than<br />

three months). By traditional labor standards in a<br />

modernized country’s economy, three months would<br />

hardly seem long term. In an environment like Iraq,<br />

however, that measure helped differentiate between<br />

jobs created by traditional development tools such as<br />

35


CSP helped create a sense of normalcy<br />

among those who participated and<br />

across the population at large<br />

3<br />

Box 6<br />

CSP: Results<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

CSP had two overarching goals: increasing employment and mitigating conflict. CSP directly benefited Iraqi <strong>communities</strong><br />

in areas most “at risk” by creating jobs, helping families generate income, rebuilding infrastructure, and<br />

implementing youth programs. The program helped create a sense of normalcy among those who participated and<br />

across the population at large. At its conclusion, CSP had:<br />

• Generated more than 525,000 short-term jobs—120 percent of program targets. CSP exceeded its targets for<br />

short-term person-months of employment each year of operation.<br />

• Created or restored more than 57,100 long-term jobs—134 percent of program targets.<br />

• Completed more than 1,600 total projects that rebuilt, refurbished, or revitalized key pieces of community<br />

infrastructure.<br />

• Created or expanded more than 10,000 businesses through micro, small, and medium enterprise grants and other<br />

program interventions.<br />

• Provided business development and skills training to more than 15,000 entrepreneurs.<br />

• Graduated 41,443 <strong>citizens</strong> from vocational training programs developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Labor<br />

and Social Affairs and covering a wide variety of marketable skills, including carpentry, construction, sewing, and<br />

electrical repair. The graduated number of trainees represented 112 percent of program targets.<br />

• Placed more than 9,900 vocational skills trainees in apprenticeships, where they continued to gain valuable job<br />

training. Almost 20 percent of the apprentice placements went to women.<br />

• Engaged more than 350,000 at-risk Iraqis ages 17–35 in more than 500 youth participation activities, including<br />

team sports competition and arts training. The number of Iraqi youth taking part in CSP-sponsored events<br />

exceeded targets by 43 percent.<br />

business grants and skills training and jobs created<br />

in direct support of the COIN strategy. With CSP, each<br />

served completely different purposes. Long-term<br />

employment primarily supported the business community<br />

and the more skilled type of laborer who was<br />

unemployed as a direct result of the war—like a shop<br />

owner whose business was destroyed and employees<br />

put out of work. Getting these Iraqis back to work supported<br />

medium- and long-range COIN objectives.<br />

Short-term employment, by contrast, proved effective<br />

in supporting the immediate COIN objectives<br />

crucial to the clear-hold-build strategy. This type of<br />

employment targeted unskilled or semiskilled laborers<br />

who would otherwise be open to recruitment into<br />

the insurgency. It also injected much-needed capital<br />

back into war-torn <strong>communities</strong> and helped rebuild a<br />

sense of community. “If your city has been shot up,<br />

and somebody is at least sweeping up the rubble<br />

in the marketplace, it doesn’t guarantee that life is<br />

going to be rosy, but it gives you some fragment of<br />

hope in a situation that’s otherwise pretty hopeless,”<br />

said James Kunder, an IRD advisor and former acting<br />

administrator of USAID. A cash-for-work jobs program,<br />

which was the central tenet of the CIES component,<br />

“doesn’t eliminate the placement of IEDs and things<br />

like that,” Kunder said, “but it gives people something<br />

productive to do other than plant IEDs, and it also<br />

gives some sense of hope for the future.”<br />

“A rapid, highly visible, and tangible impact”<br />

The CIES program component was divided into two<br />

general project areas—infrastructure rehabilitation<br />

36


“<br />

A cash-for-work jobs program gives<br />

people something productive to do<br />

other than plant IEDs, and it also gives<br />

some sense of hope for the future”<br />

—James Kunder<br />

and essential services work, which required unskilled<br />

labor on quick-impact projects such as trash collection<br />

and rubble removal. CSP supported scores of<br />

these quick-impact projects during the program’s<br />

first year. By the middle of the second year, however,<br />

IRD began to transfer oversight of those projects<br />

back to municipal <strong>governments</strong>. If local <strong>governments</strong><br />

were willing to support the continuation of some of<br />

these services, IRD would continue its involvement<br />

in cleanup activities on a limited basis. But the lack<br />

of concern or unwillingness of many municipalities to<br />

devote resources to basic services like timely trash<br />

removal beyond IRD’s work worsened public opinion<br />

in many cities. Still, the short lead time needed to<br />

initiate service projects allowed cleanup and rubble<br />

removal to serve as a kind of spearhead for CSP as it<br />

expanded. “The trash pickup campaigns were critical<br />

for establishing CSP, not just because they were cleaning<br />

the streets but because they were labor-intensive<br />

projects that covered entire neighborhoods,” said Alaa<br />

Ismael, the head of program management for CIES<br />

activities. “I have no doubt the cleanup activities were<br />

needed for the stabilization program to work in Iraq.”<br />

In Ramadi, as previously noted, IRD launched a<br />

large-scale cleanup program directly on the heels of<br />

military action to remove insurgents. The goal was<br />

not only to provide immediate employment but also<br />

to restore frayed relations between local community<br />

leaders, tribal leaders, and the citizenry. The cleaning<br />

campaign was implemented through a local contractor<br />

responsible for providing laborers with equipment,<br />

organizing debris removal, and paying daily wages. For<br />

the Ramadi cleaning campaign, laborers earned $10 a<br />

day, which was the standard payment for CSP cleaning<br />

campaigns.<br />

Throughout Iraq, approximately 1,600 CIES projects<br />

generated more than 525,000 person-months of<br />

short-term employment—20 percent above the target.<br />

Given the high value placed on providing some kind<br />

of job to as many Iraqi men as possible, as fast as<br />

possible, “person-months employment” was a critical<br />

indicator of immediate impact. By this calculation,<br />

CSP exceeded its target in every year of operation. In<br />

addition, IRD found a great deal of qualitative evidence<br />

from interviews with local beneficiaries, media<br />

coverage, staff assessments, and final reports that<br />

the increase in short-term employment helped reduce<br />

violent incidents in some of the most unstable areas,<br />

such as Howija in Kirkuk.<br />

“The early projects had a rapid, highly visible, and<br />

tangible impact greatly appreciated by the local<br />

government,” said Alice Willard, formerly a senior<br />

monitoring and evaluation officer with IRD. “The same<br />

programs helped validate CSP to local authorities and<br />

opened the door to more diversified collaboration in<br />

a short amount of time.” That collaboration helped<br />

lead to widespread infrastructure rehabilitation, which,<br />

in contrast to essential service projects, relied on<br />

semiskilled and skilled laborers to help with rebuilding<br />

and construction projects relevant to local <strong>citizens</strong>,<br />

such as school restoration, hospital and health clinic<br />

refurbishment, irrigation canal restoration for agribusiness,<br />

and the rebuilding or enhancing of electricity,<br />

sewage, and water delivery services. These projects<br />

were undertaken with joint input from local community<br />

leaders, US military personnel, and PRTs. As IRD transitioned<br />

cleanup campaigns to local municipalities in<br />

the program’s second year, the focus of CIES component<br />

work shifted primarily to infrastructure projects.<br />

In many instances, a single project encompassed both<br />

the cleanup and rehabilitation phases of CIES. One<br />

example is the Mosul Social Club for Families. Before<br />

the war, the club was a popular gathering spot for<br />

dining, entertainment, and community celebrations—<br />

with on average more than 340 events a year. But as<br />

insurgent violence swallowed up Mosul, public socialization<br />

became too risky for most, and the number of club<br />

events plummeted to a few dozen. Before long, a lack of<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

37


the renovation of the Mosul Social Club for<br />

Families generated more than 1,800 days of<br />

short-term employment, and the reopened<br />

facility created at least 25 long-term jobs<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

funds made maintenance impossible and the facility fell<br />

into disrepair. As the security situation in Mosul began<br />

to stabilize, however, IRD staff believed that breathing<br />

new life into the club would be seen as a powerful<br />

symbol of Mosul’s resurgence and might help return a<br />

sense of normalcy to a divided city. So IRD embarked<br />

on an extensive CIES project that began with cleaning<br />

the club’s grounds and removing years of debris and<br />

continued with building a new children’s playground and<br />

information kiosks. Building rehabilitation required skills<br />

ranging from basic demolition and wall repair to more<br />

complex electrical engineering. Altogether, the renovation<br />

of the Mosul Social Club for Families generated<br />

more than 1,800 days of short-term employment, and<br />

the reopened facility created at least 25 long-term jobs.<br />

the fall of Hussein’s regime, the enforcement of that<br />

law ceased, and the natural cultural approach of a<br />

repressed population quickly took hold in Basra’s city<br />

streets, where thousands of goats and other small<br />

livestock began to subsist on garbage.<br />

“No matter how much effort you put into cleaning<br />

streets and installing trash receptacles, in the next<br />

five minutes all that rubbish would be on the streets,”<br />

Warmke said. “It was clear to me that if we were trying<br />

to make an impact, this was not the way to go forward.<br />

I discussed it with our provincial reconstruction team,<br />

with the military and with others on the ground, and<br />

it was clear that we didn’t see any value in taking our<br />

CSP money and doing cleanup.”<br />

38<br />

On the ground, adapting to what’s needed<br />

While the program’s general pattern was to start with<br />

cleanup campaigns before moving to infrastructure and<br />

rehabilitation work, not every CSP city followed the same<br />

template. In volatile, unstable environments, IRD’s city<br />

directors were responsible for balancing the realities<br />

on the ground against the CSP design. “In a city like<br />

Baghdad, it was essential to ensure that the streets<br />

were clean because of IEDs, and the whole military<br />

strategy there was to ensure that every effort was made<br />

to improve essential service delivery,” said Dar Warmke,<br />

who led the CSP expansion into Basra. “When I arrived,<br />

it was very clear that Basra was a neglected city, and<br />

had been for years, and I realized from day one that it<br />

would make no difference to launch cleanup campaigns,<br />

that it would be throwing good money into a black hole.”<br />

When CSP moved into Basra in 2007, the situation<br />

was not like Baghdad, Warmke said. “You had 1.5<br />

million people living in what was often referred to<br />

as the ‘Sadr city of the south.’” The area’s marshes<br />

had been drained under Saddam Hussein, and the<br />

district’s rural dwellers had been forced into the city,<br />

where they were not allowed to raise animals. After<br />

In Basra, the major concentration for immediate CIES<br />

work centered on cleaning and restoring canals, which<br />

the stakeholders determined to be the most urgent<br />

need, followed by rehabilitating schools and hospitals.<br />

Although Basra didn’t follow the same template as<br />

other locations, local Iraqis were still being employed<br />

on projects that would ultimately allow further CSPsupported<br />

work. When USAID and the local PRT asked<br />

IRD to rehabilitate the Basra Children’s Hospital as<br />

the area’s first project, for example, IRD staff also<br />

began designing a vocational training program with an<br />

eye toward future hospital staffing needs.<br />

So while CIES projects were often the most readily<br />

available stabilization tool in a COIN environment, they<br />

also functioned as the structural backbone of CSP.<br />

The cleanup campaigns yielded immediate dividends,<br />

while infrastructure repairs were often completed in a<br />

few months or less. They put Iraqis to work and, in the<br />

most successful cases, helped legitimize government<br />

services. They also laid the foundation for much of the<br />

later CSP work. Without streets free of debris or parks<br />

unencumbered by trash, or without basic civil infrastructure<br />

restored to some working level, the other<br />

CSP components simply could not have proceeded.


the trash cleanup campaigns were very<br />

high profile, immediately improved life<br />

quality, and, with the rare exception of<br />

a city like Basra, represented CSP’s<br />

initial foray into a community<br />

Overcoming the “messy” realities of a COIN environment<br />

IRD faced challenges in implementing a rapid, cashfor-work<br />

component like CIES, including the issue of<br />

documentation. Laborers were generally paid in daily<br />

financial transactions, but payments were not always<br />

possible to track or fully account for, due to the frenetic<br />

pace of operating and the unwillingness of many<br />

Iraqi men to give their full names and supply contact<br />

information. Subsequently, the trash collection projects<br />

became a lightning rod for CSP critics, and IRD’s own<br />

early administrative missteps—lack of staff capacity,<br />

inadequate record keeping, miscommunication between<br />

headquarters and the field—created additional obstacles.<br />

Internally, staff dealt with the frustration of having<br />

to balance bureaucratic requirements and IRD’s own<br />

administrative limits with the demands of creating jobs.<br />

the context of a COIN operation. The work also saved<br />

lives. “The trash cleanup crews found IEDs hidden in<br />

the garbage, right there on the streets,” said Andrew<br />

Wilson. “They’d be going along, cleaning a neighborhood<br />

out, and they’d find IEDs. That wasn’t necessarily<br />

rare. Right there, you’re saving lives, people’s lives.”<br />

However, “IEDs removed” was not an indicator of<br />

program success, and items that were, such as<br />

person-months of employment, relied heavily on<br />

documentation to show progress and justify the high<br />

expenditures. At one point, CSP was disbursing up to<br />

$1 million a day, and much of that was for the CIES<br />

cash-for-work activities. Due to the sheer size of CSP,<br />

and the chaotic environment IRD was operating in,<br />

tracking each dollar and verifying the honesty of every<br />

local contractor was difficult.<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

“In Ramadi, we wrote a work plan in December 2006,<br />

but our first cash-for-work for 1,000 people wasn’t<br />

until March 1. I was on the verge of losing all credibility<br />

with the military,” said Travis Gartner, IRD’s deputy<br />

chief of party. “They took me where I wanted to go,<br />

they were trying to engage the local government, the<br />

community leaders, and they are bringing me to meetings,<br />

learning about the community. Weeks and weeks<br />

start to go by and they start asking me, ‘Hey, when<br />

are you guys going to do something?’ You know, they<br />

had their CERP fund and would go to these <strong>communities</strong><br />

and say, ‘Who needs a job? Line ‘em up.’ And I’m<br />

working through a tendering process, and I have to vet<br />

a guy to make sure he’s not a terrorist.”<br />

For better or worse, the trash cleanup campaigns<br />

came to define CSP in many ways. They were high<br />

profile, immediately improved life quality, and, with the<br />

rare exception of a city like Basra, represented CSP’s<br />

initial foray into a community. Removing rubble, trash,<br />

and debris in the wake of insurgent control or military<br />

exercises showed how people’s most basic needs,<br />

including security, could be immediately addressed in<br />

“The cleanup campaign was effective but messy,”<br />

said Mamadou Sidibe, who joined IRD as its director<br />

of monitoring and evaluation in 2008. “Let’s say you<br />

hired 100 employees a day, for two months. If you visit<br />

a site, you’ll only see an average of those workers.<br />

Sometimes you’ll see 60, other times it could be 180.<br />

These are extremely hard to monitor.” But, Sidibe<br />

points out, cleanup activities are the kind of projects<br />

“that the military likes best because it keeps unskilled<br />

laborers busy.” CSP was designed the way it was for<br />

a reason, he said, and cash-for-work was an integral<br />

part of it, even if the ramifications weren’t completely<br />

thought through. “CSP was pouring money into<br />

cleaning campaigns to make sure people have some<br />

income rather than be hired by al Qaeda. At the same<br />

time, it opened the door to some corruption.”<br />

Even though CIES activities exceeded goals, serious<br />

concerns over the ability of cleanup campaigns to<br />

avoid fraud at the local level began to surface. In late<br />

2007, these concerns led to an overall audit of CSP by<br />

a regional inspector general for USAID. Some USAID<br />

workers on the ground, and even some military leaders<br />

39


By combining his personal savings with a CSP<br />

grant for $24,000 worth of supplies, Saad<br />

Kathem opened a bakery in Al Mussayib<br />

that had customers lining up every morning<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

who were not convinced of the program’s effectiveness,<br />

alleged not only that IRD was documenting “phantom”<br />

workers to boost its employment numbers but also that<br />

the inability to follow the money, so to speak, meant<br />

that CSP dollars were being taken by corrupt individuals<br />

and funneled back to insurgents. The inspector general’s<br />

office released the audit findings in March 2008,<br />

declaring parts of the program “highly vulnerable to<br />

fraud and exploitation” and recommending more than<br />

a dozen adjustments, but it did not present evidence of<br />

willful negligence or determine that a verifiable amount<br />

had been lost to corruption. Program operations in<br />

certain Baghdad neighborhoods were halted to mitigate<br />

the negative impact, and IRD took immediate steps to<br />

address the findings related to administrative shortcomings<br />

and poor communication (box 7).<br />

Some problems, especially with cash-for-work, were<br />

out of IRD’s control. Multiple staff in the field reiterated<br />

just how common corruption, favoritism, and<br />

nepotism were among some local neighborhood and<br />

district councils. “A lot of people were doing cash-forwork<br />

in the beginning of the program,” Sidibe said,<br />

referring also to the multibillion-dollar military CERP<br />

funds. Cash-for-work and cleanup had to be the starting<br />

point, he added, because those activities support<br />

the overall strategy of reducing violence. “There are<br />

only so many options available in a war. Once the level<br />

of violence starts going down, you can start doing<br />

more agriculture and development work. Then you can<br />

start building toward something.”<br />

facility, construct a drainage system, and purchase<br />

equipment to fulfill his dream of opening a full-service<br />

garage in Baghdad. After Dawood applied for CSP<br />

assistance, IRD awarded him a grant based on a business<br />

plan that would support at least 16 long-term<br />

employees. Within six months of opening, Dawood had<br />

more than 30 employees.<br />

Waleed Jan had been a musical instrument dealer in<br />

Baghdad’s Karrada district for more than 20 years. He<br />

also ran a successful music institute before insurgents<br />

burned down the institute’s building. Jan had<br />

a strong relationship with the local district advisory<br />

council, however, and council members put him in<br />

touch with IRD. Within three months, he had reopened<br />

his conservatory and again was offering music lessons<br />

and training, with a focus on helping Iraqi youth learn<br />

to play and sing in front of a live audience. Jan immediately<br />

hired eight staff to offer piano, violin, guitar,<br />

drum, and lute lectures and instructions.<br />

Saad Kathem believed he could run a successful<br />

bakery; he just didn’t have enough money to establish<br />

the business. He also couldn’t find a job making<br />

pastries and baking breads that would pay enough to<br />

support his family. By combining his personal savings<br />

of $21,000 with a CSP grant for $24,000 worth of<br />

supplies, Kathem opened a bakery in Al Mussayib that<br />

had customers lining up every morning. Within a year,<br />

he had hired 15 bakers, completed business development<br />

training, and begun laying the groundwork to<br />

open a second bakery in nearby Karbala.<br />

40<br />

Business development programs: Light at<br />

the end of the tunnel<br />

Amer Zaidan Dawood saw an opportunity to start a<br />

profitable, viable business for a large clientele. He had<br />

almost 20 years of experience managing car service<br />

centers in Jordan and Iraq, and he had $18,000<br />

saved. But he needed more than twice that to rent a<br />

Through CSP’s business development program, IRD<br />

awarded grants to more than 10,000 Iraqi entrepreneurs<br />

like Dawood, Jan, and Kathem. “The success<br />

stories that came out of those small grants were<br />

astonishing,” said Dar Warmke. “We believed we were<br />

creating longer term jobs by establishing businesses.<br />

The aim was to have a business running for as long as<br />

they were financially viable.”


IRD transported all its CSP records<br />

into a three-story facility that it leased<br />

for the express purpose of allowing<br />

any auditor from any organization easy<br />

access to review the program files<br />

Box 7<br />

Enhancing internal controls and program oversight<br />

3<br />

Managing CSP in an active conflict zone required IRD to continuously improve internal controls and create layers of<br />

accountability and transparency. IRD acted quickly to address potential abuses at the local level and administrative<br />

weaknesses at the international level. In fact, the organization enhanced enough of its financial and programmatic<br />

policies before March 2008 that six of the recommendations had already been addressed before the final audit<br />

was released. “We take any allegations of fraud and abuse extremely seriously and even more so when they involve<br />

concerns about the use of US taxpayer dollars,” IRD President Dr. Arthur B. Keys said at the time.<br />

In addition to the suspension of the program in one of the Baghdad districts, the major recommendations from the<br />

inspector general’s office included a comprehensive review of projects in other areas, enhancing coordination with<br />

program participants, establishing more detailed procedures for reporting potential system abuses, improving data<br />

quality management, and strengthening the program’s monitoring and evaluation processes. By September 30,<br />

2008, all recommendations had been fully implemented and certified by USAID and the Secretary of State. Speaking<br />

at a November 2009 symposium on CSP, Keys spoke about IRD’s commitment to stabilization. “We’ve been in Iraq,<br />

in the Red Zone, since June 2003, when the Iraq Community Action Program started,” he said. “The reason CSP<br />

was undertaken, and why it was such a big program, is because it was a big job that had to be done. And all these<br />

projects were done with a very professional approach. But [USAID] didn’t change the standards; they didn’t change<br />

the regulations for CSP versus any other program in the world.”<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

As stabilization operations in Iraq and Afghanistan became more politicized, CSP became an even larger target. So<br />

IRD took the unprecedented step of opening a data warehousing and auditing facility in Amman, Jordan. The organization<br />

transported all its CSP records into a three-story facility that it leased for the express purpose of allowing any<br />

auditor from any organization easy access to review the program files, documentation, datasets, and contracts in a<br />

secure facility across the Iraqi border. After the program came to an official end, IRD moved all its final documentation<br />

to the warehouse.<br />

Despite the strongest possible oversight efforts and close coordination among IRD, USAID, and military counterparts,<br />

preventing misuse of funds or small-scale corruption at the program level in a country like Iraq remained a<br />

laborious task. As CSP progressed, additional allegations of misconduct arose in Mosul. IRD responded swiftly,<br />

launching its own internal investigation with the help of outside counsel and sending to the site an experienced<br />

investigative team comprising both senior IRD and external experts. IRD staff were interviewed by the US government,<br />

and the allegations were not substantiated.<br />

A unique purpose in support of COIN objectives<br />

The business development program’s overall aim<br />

was to provide long-term jobs to those in CSP’s focus<br />

population, to provide business training to grantees,<br />

and, ideally, to transition vocational training and<br />

apprenticeship graduates into regular employment.<br />

The grants, awarded as equipment and services<br />

rather than cash, ranged from micro to small to<br />

medium, starting as low as $150 and capping at<br />

$100,000. Of the more than 10,000 grants awarded,<br />

97 percent were micro or small, most to family-owned<br />

41


Ninety-eight percent of grantee businesses<br />

up to that point were still operational<br />

one year after receiving their grants<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

businesses. “The small grants component was literally<br />

in-kind,” Gartner said. “If your storefront windows were<br />

missing, we’d help replace them. If your bread-baking<br />

machine had been stolen or destroyed, we’d get you a<br />

new one and get your business going. Of course, you’d<br />

need to employ two or three people to keep it going.”<br />

While business grants are a common development<br />

assistance tool, in CSP they served a unique purpose<br />

in support of COIN objectives. Micro grants, with a<br />

maximum allotment of $3,000, were largely designed<br />

for stabilization purposes to provide Iraqi households<br />

with enough activities to ensure basic food and<br />

economic security as the counterinsurgency program<br />

unfolded. Small grants, with a maximum award of<br />

$25,000, provided entrepreneurs the incentive and<br />

the means to invest in local economies and neighborhoods<br />

that had been cleared of insurgents. Medium<br />

grants extended to $100,000 and helped larger businesses<br />

willing to invest in Iraq’s industry sector.<br />

their grants. 8 After the program closed, a sample<br />

survey of CSP’s database determined that 89 percent<br />

of award recipients stayed in business during the<br />

critical first three to six months after their grants<br />

were completed. Given the inherent risks in small<br />

businesses, which are prone to early failure even<br />

in the most stable environments, the success rate<br />

of CSP-supported initiatives was very encouraging.<br />

“We had great success with business development<br />

programming, which was a bit shocking, because I<br />

intentionally kept our grants at an average of $3,000<br />

to $4,000,” said Warmke. “I didn’t let many $20,000<br />

proposals pass, because I didn’t believe we could do<br />

it properly and monitor results. With the micro grants,<br />

my original thinking was that we’d have some impact,<br />

but it probably wouldn’t be tremendous. I think I was<br />

proven wrong.”<br />

Dealing with weaknesses and those who wanted to<br />

“cheat the system”<br />

To secure a grant, applicants had to prepare a proposal<br />

that included a detailed business plan and list<br />

of operating costs. Each proposal projected its impact<br />

on employment, a critical factor in determining which<br />

grants were funded and at which levels. Each grant<br />

required a community contribution, either in cash,<br />

in-kind, or labor, and all recipients were required to<br />

attend business skills training—an adjustment IRD<br />

made based on lessons from the first year. “The<br />

people most likely to join the militias have limited<br />

education and few prospects for sustained income,<br />

and those were the people we had to reach,” Warmke<br />

said. “So we had to provide this segment of the population<br />

with more than financial assistance to start or<br />

grow a fledgling business. Basic skills training greatly<br />

enhanced the likelihood of their business succeeding.”<br />

IRD tried to staff the grants program in each city with<br />

workers who had specialized training in business,<br />

agriculture, and manufacturing. Sector specialists<br />

were best equipped to help applicants refine and<br />

review their proposal plans—a recurring need—and to<br />

provide counseling and assistance during the startup<br />

phase. Perhaps most important, sector specialists<br />

helped balance business diversity so that no neighborhood<br />

became saturated with too many similar shops.<br />

Location was critical: even a good idea like establishing<br />

a carwash would not be viable if another already<br />

existed. Innovation was equally important. If community<br />

members heard grants were being awarded for<br />

grocery stores, CSP staff would see a rush of applications<br />

for grocery stores. Coming up with new ideas<br />

was one of the program’s biggest impediments.<br />

42<br />

Most did. According to a sample survey conducted in<br />

2008, 98 percent of grantee businesses up to that<br />

point were still operational one year after receiving<br />

A required in-cash or in-kind contribution, which was<br />

equivalent to 25–50 percent of the grant, depending<br />

on the funding level, posed one of the program’s most


the aggressive grants program yielded<br />

very strong long-term job numbers even<br />

as it addressed the pressing need of<br />

stabilizing business <strong>communities</strong><br />

significant challenges. The provision was a rather standard<br />

development assistance tenet regularly followed<br />

by NGOs. But in Iraq, the stipulation proved to be a<br />

barrier. IRD made a concerted effort to encourage<br />

apprentices and new vocational training graduates<br />

to apply for grants and start their own businesses,<br />

but few apprentices could match the grant’s required<br />

25–50 percent contribution. “That was probably the<br />

weakness, the cost-share element, because it kept a<br />

lot of people out of the small grants program,” said<br />

Gartner. “There was a tendency among applicants to<br />

falsify documents to meet that cost-share criteria.<br />

[But] it wasn’t the right time for cost-share buy-in.<br />

That’s a traditional development approach, that the<br />

community should own it, they should buy into it. In<br />

Iraq, I don’t think that was appropriate at that time. I<br />

mean, let’s just get their shops open first.”<br />

In adapting to a COIN environment, the business<br />

development component faced challenges. Many<br />

stemmed from the same issues some CIES projects<br />

faced, such as the inability to fully police those who<br />

were out to “cheat the system,” as Mamadou Sidibe,<br />

IRD’s director of monitoring and evaluation, put it.<br />

Sidibe joined IRD in March 2008, toward the end of<br />

CSP’s implementation. His mandate was to clear up<br />

reporting inconsistencies and strengthen internal<br />

oversight of the monitoring process, especially crucial<br />

for ensuring the integrity of business grants. “CSP<br />

would give you a grant on the basis of how many longterm<br />

jobs you would generate, but people could cheat<br />

on their grant proposal,” Sidibe said. “A businessman<br />

might say he would create five permanent jobs, but<br />

once he got the grant, instead of hiring five, he might<br />

hire two. Or instead of opening the business he<br />

proposed, he might do something else.”<br />

Jessica Cho, who worked on IRD’s post-CSP review,<br />

cited generators as a perfect example because they<br />

were such a commonly requested item for in-kind<br />

grants—and in such high demand due to Iraq’s weak<br />

energy infrastructure. “Someone might say he had<br />

a small store and needed a generator to operate a<br />

freezer or refrigerator, but you know, you can use a<br />

generator for a lot of things,” Cho said. “They were not<br />

always used for their intended purposes, but because<br />

of the security situation, it was extremely difficult to<br />

monitor every specific item.”<br />

Most of the problems that the business development<br />

component faced involved small and micro grants,<br />

often in the more dangerous and less secure locations,<br />

which were sometimes impossible for IRD’s<br />

monitoring agents to visit regularly. For the kind of conflict<br />

environment in which CSP was operating, Sidibe<br />

said, it was simply impossible to eliminate every<br />

corrupt influence. And overall, the aggressive grants<br />

program yielded very strong long-term job numbers<br />

even as it addressed the pressing need of stabilizing<br />

business <strong>communities</strong>.<br />

Quick impact with a long-term view<br />

While the program sought to enhance knowledge of<br />

private enterprise, teach good business practices, and<br />

stimulate community-led growth, it focused primarily on<br />

shop owners whose established businesses had been<br />

destroyed or shuttered. In some cases, the shops<br />

had been abandoned. In others, the threat of violence<br />

drove shopkeepers away. And often, such as for street<br />

market rehabilitations, IRD used the grants program<br />

alongside CSP’s infrastructure program as a means of<br />

generating a rapid response for quick results.<br />

In early 2007, a suicide bomber detonated a truck<br />

bomb in Baghdad’s Sadriya Market, a popular commercial<br />

district with more than 300 shops, cafes, and<br />

kiosks. More than 130 people were killed and more<br />

than 330 wounded. The day after the attack, two IRD<br />

grants officers headed to the market to evaluate the<br />

damage and talk to shop owners about applying for<br />

CSP grants to help rebuild their businesses. “I just<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

43


Dr. Noor Abdul Aziz Baqir’s grant covered<br />

$3,800 worth of equipment, and it<br />

allowed her to quickly begin rebuilding<br />

her clinic, which was an important<br />

show of faith for her 19 workers<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

felt that the whole world was destroyed, my dreams<br />

and my life were destroyed,” said Dr. Noor Abdul Aziz<br />

Baqir, a dentist whose clinic had been at the market<br />

since 1983. “As I went to see my clinic, I felt, ‘This<br />

is the end of my career as a dentist.’ I couldn’t afford<br />

to reopen it.” Baqir’s grant covered $3,800 worth of<br />

equipment, and it allowed her to quickly begin rebuilding,<br />

which was an important show of faith for her 19<br />

workers.<br />

Reopening destroyed commercial districts like Sadriya<br />

often got high priority because of their visibility and<br />

importance to the community, but fast turnarounds<br />

like the quick grant Baqir received were not common.<br />

Given the intensive monitoring of the grant development<br />

and implementation process, a gap between the<br />

conception and execution of a grant was common. The<br />

minimum length was two months, but six months was<br />

the average. Still, the final evaluation of the program,<br />

conducted by International Business & Technical<br />

Consultants, Inc. (IBTCI), noted the important role that<br />

development grants played in the COIN effort to quickly<br />

normalize <strong>communities</strong> struck by sudden violence.<br />

kind of normalcy necessary to stabilize a community.<br />

“The small grants program worked very well because<br />

that got the businesses owners back,” Gartner said.<br />

“They wanted their shops back but they didn’t have any<br />

money to pay for all that damage, and besides, would<br />

you invest in reopening your shop? There’s a war going<br />

on. So here we are, encouraging them to come out and<br />

just provide us proof that they own it and will work at it.”<br />

When her dental clinic was destroyed, Baqir said she<br />

felt just like that. She wasn’t sure how she would<br />

continue to support her immediate and extended<br />

family, much less rebuild her destroyed business. But<br />

just one day after the bombing, when the two IRD staff<br />

approached her as she sifted through the rubble, she<br />

said her outlook changed, just that quickly. “I felt like<br />

there was a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said,<br />

not long after her clinic reopened—“in spite of the<br />

misery and sadness.”<br />

Vocational training: “A sustainable program<br />

when we left”<br />

44<br />

By the end of the program, the business development<br />

component had generated 74 percent of the 57,109<br />

long-term jobs documented by CSP. Even with the<br />

lengthy startup time between application and award,<br />

the grants program actually produced most jobs fairly<br />

quickly. Approximately 25,000 jobs were created in<br />

the first two years. Trade and service sector grants<br />

were found to be the most efficient at enabling this<br />

duality—quick-impact yet longer term employment<br />

opportunities, which proved to be extremely supportive<br />

of the COIN strategy.<br />

While they offered fewer macro links with the rest of the<br />

economy than did small-scale manufacturing or agribusiness<br />

grants, and though administering and monitoring<br />

them occasionally proved problematic, these grants<br />

resonated profoundly with Iraqis, offering a path to the<br />

In January 2009, IRD and USAID officers officially<br />

handed over administration of Iraq’s rebuilt vocational<br />

training program to the government’s Ministry of<br />

Labor and Social Affairs (MOLSA). The event coincided<br />

with the graduation ceremony for trainees in CSPsponsored<br />

courses at the Waziriya training facility in<br />

Baghdad. Ministry officials lauded IRD for rehabilitating<br />

the facility and restarting training programs. The<br />

handover was significant because it completed the<br />

swift rebirth of Iraq’s ability to create a sustainable<br />

workforce at the community level. In 2006, one year<br />

before CSP’s direct support, the ministry graduated<br />

7,000 vocational trainees. In 2007, after one year<br />

with CSP’s support, the number of graduates soared<br />

past 20,000. “We had to work through the ministry to<br />

achieve our targets, but we basically built their capacity<br />

to provide continuing training,” said Iqbal al-Juboori,


IRD helped revise the curricula of each<br />

training center it supported and introduced<br />

new systems for tracking student<br />

performance and training local teachers<br />

who worked in Baghdad as IRD’s deputy director for<br />

employment generation and vocational training. “There<br />

were no resources. Most of the centers were not even<br />

functioning properly. They didn’t have equipment. They<br />

had trainers sitting around doing nothing. We built up<br />

their existing centers, and we even rehabilitated the<br />

bombed ones, which was an achievement.”<br />

Training centers were sometimes targeted by terrorists,<br />

but many were destroyed or damaged simply<br />

because of their proximity to fighting. So even after a<br />

facility had been rebuilt, keeping it secure and operational<br />

was a challenge. Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Vocational<br />

Training Center had been looted and destroyed<br />

shortly after the war began in 2003. The center had<br />

been one of Iraq’s busiest training facilities and<br />

served roughly 60 percent of the city’s potential workforce.<br />

But the high-density location, “one of the most<br />

dangerous areas of Baghdad” according to al-Juboori,<br />

proved problematic, because such areas routinely<br />

drew terrorist attention. So when CSP undertook to<br />

rebuild the facility, the project was far from smooth.<br />

During the rehabilitation process, Al-Rashid came<br />

under attack on three separate occasions, leading to<br />

cost overruns, long delays, and apprehension among<br />

the contractors and workers trying to restore the<br />

building. But given its importance to the community<br />

and its vital link in the local job chain, work pressed<br />

on. Rehabilitation was completed in March 2007,<br />

and six months later the training center was handed<br />

over to the ministry. Upon opening, it offered a dozen<br />

vocational courses with a capacity to train more than<br />

700 people every two months.<br />

A lasting effect on institutions and processes<br />

The primary goal of CSP’s vocational training and<br />

apprenticeship program, also referred to as the<br />

employment generation program, was to stimulate<br />

economic stability by providing Iraqis with employable<br />

skills that could lead to long-term jobs (more than 90<br />

days). That goal was reached, with more than 41,400<br />

graduates completing course training in two general<br />

trade categories:<br />

• Construction (masonry, carpentry, steel structuring,<br />

plastering, roofing, tiling, plumbing, and electrical<br />

installation).<br />

• Nonconstruction (electronics, auto mechanics,<br />

welding, appliance repair, mobile phone maintenance,<br />

HVAC maintenance and servicing, computer<br />

maintenance and repair, and agribusiness equipment<br />

maintenance). Additional courses targeting<br />

women were offered in sewing, hairdressing, and<br />

cosmetology.<br />

The vocational training program had a profound effect<br />

on Iraq’s institutional capacity—one of CSP’s more<br />

notable but often overlooked achievements. IRD helped<br />

revise the curricula of each training center it supported<br />

and introduced new systems for tracking student performance<br />

and training local teachers. MOLSA was IRD’s<br />

principal partner during the first year of the project, but<br />

in the second year, a new alliance with the Ministry of<br />

Education enabled the program to expand its reach.<br />

IRD helped rehabilitate more than 45 training centers,<br />

both structurally and administratively, through the provision<br />

of new equipment and more thorough and efficient<br />

procedures. “When we came to the ministry and the<br />

venues, they didn’t have basic processes in place,”<br />

al-Juboori said. “For example, registering trainees—you<br />

might find documentation, and you might not find<br />

documentation on the students. How do you help them<br />

learn if you don’t even know why they’re there? So we’d<br />

sit down with [ministry officials] as they were meeting<br />

the trainee applicants. We worked with them and taught<br />

them how to follow protocols.”<br />

Even before the war, Baghdad had an established<br />

vocational program, but by most modern standards<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

45


all the training centers renovated under<br />

CSP were being used for some kind<br />

of vocational training more than two<br />

years after the program ended<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

it wasn’t effective. There were “a lot of key elements<br />

lacking,” according to al-Juboori, including the ability<br />

to pay trainee stipends or provide toolkits. Still, many<br />

residents in the capital were familiar with the benefits<br />

that vocational training provided, and that helped with<br />

recruiting. More than half the program’s graduates<br />

came from Baghdad, but IRD still graduated trainees<br />

in 14 cities total. And, except for a building in Ramadi<br />

that was involved in an ownership dispute among Iraqi<br />

ministries, all the training centers renovated under<br />

CSP were being used for some kind of vocational<br />

training more than two years after the program ended.<br />

“MOLSA continued the same way that we built it; they<br />

were doing everything we were doing,” al-Juboori said.<br />

“The systems that we put in place are inserted now<br />

within the ministry’s systems. Vocational training was<br />

a sustainable program when we left” (box 8).<br />

High demand and demanding challenges<br />

Even with four dozen renovated training centers and<br />

an expanded curriculum at each location, demand<br />

exceeded supply in the most popular training courses.<br />

The final number of vocational graduates exceeded<br />

targets by almost 4,000. While some courses lasted<br />

up to four months, many standard courses were<br />

condensed to two months so more could be taught<br />

over a shorter time. Some program workers, many with<br />

years of experience administering vocational training,<br />

expressed concern over the compressed schedule.<br />

Box 8<br />

CSP and the changing perception of sustainability<br />

Unlike results of many traditional COIN programs, CSP’s achievements in jobs created, infrastructure rehabilitated,<br />

and businesses opened appear to be long-lasting. The project’s final report notes this, as does the independent<br />

evaluation conducted by IBTCI, which commended CSP for evolving into a program “in which sustainability of the<br />

various components was given greater emphasis,” further noting that this sustainability was “essential to success.” 1<br />

USAID’s Office of Inspector General, as part of a program audit, also noted that “various elements of CSP provide<br />

a . . . foundation for more sustainable development activities.” 2<br />

Sustainability, an overriding concern of traditional development programs, was not a priority in the early days of<br />

CSP, which was designed, according to project documents as a short-term COIN initiative rather than a long-term<br />

sustainable development program. “USAID kept saying ‘This is stabilization, not development. Stabilization, not<br />

development,’” Jessica Cho said. “They made it clear that we were a quick-action solution, while other programs<br />

were focusing on development for the long term.”<br />

However, as CSP unfolded, it also became clear that the program could generate sustainable outcomes, bridging the<br />

gap between stabilization and development. While IRD didn’t work against donor wishes, many of CSP’s core activities<br />

had the potential for enduring impact. In separate studies examining the individual program methods of the CSP<br />

components, USAID came to a similar conclusion—IRD’s closely integrated design not only addressed immediate<br />

COIN support needs but naturally fostered sustainable outcomes. Graduating a certain number of Iraqis from vocational<br />

training courses, for example, fulfilled a key program mandate. But then those graduates took away skills that<br />

would serve them well beyond the CSP timeframe. And, as Iqbal al-Juboori explained, getting the vocational training<br />

centers up and running had the supplementary effect of increasing administrative capacity at the local and national<br />

(continued)<br />

46


“<br />

We showed the government the best ways to<br />

handle its services, we trained youth to think beyond<br />

the militias and about each other, and we trained<br />

business owners to market, grow, and expand their<br />

businesses. We accomplished things that would last”<br />

—Iqbal al-Juboori<br />

Yet they also recognized that the primary goal was<br />

to get as many people as possible off the street, as<br />

quickly as possible. This is one of many examples<br />

of traditional development thinking butting heads<br />

with CSP’s COIN objectives. Accepting the difference<br />

wasn’t incumbent on IRD’s implementation team<br />

alone. Despite the ministry’s cooperation, MOLSA<br />

expressed its doubts about the compressed schedule.<br />

“They would tell us, ‘We love what you’re doing, and<br />

we understand the importance of it, but let’s try to do<br />

something longer term,’” al-Juboori said.<br />

was complete, CSP supported half the costs of<br />

placing trainees in local businesses as apprentices.<br />

Apprenticeships were expected to provide a bridge<br />

from training to permanent employment. Almost 9,500<br />

trainees were placed in apprenticeships, but that<br />

number was lower than IRD targeted and less than<br />

25 percent of total vocational graduates. Even with<br />

CSP offering a 50 percent subsidy of the apprentices’<br />

stipends, local employers were reluctant to accept<br />

unknown persons as workers, preferring to hire friends<br />

or family members.<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

Another challenge was translating the high demand<br />

for vocational skills into longer term employment<br />

within the project’s short timeframe. Once training<br />

IRD tried to get around the obstacles in several<br />

ways. Staff made a concerted effort to encourage<br />

graduates to apply for grants through CSP’s business<br />

Box 8<br />

CSP and the changing perception of sustainability (continued)<br />

levels of government. The vocational centers also provided a way for <strong>citizens</strong> to engage directly with a government<br />

service that provided opportunities for individuals to turn their lives around. “Since all the work that was done under<br />

CSP was attributed to local government,” al-Juboori said, “we helped legitimize public officials.”<br />

The evolving perception of the importance of sustainability was perhaps best exemplified in the inspector general<br />

2008 review, which was undertaken to address issues related to worker documentation and IRD’s internal administrative<br />

process. Yet, of the audit’s two overarching objectives, one focused exclusively on whether CSP was<br />

designed and implemented to “ensure that Iraqis continue to benefit from its activities”—a question the original<br />

program design dismissed. The inspector general report praised the “linkages between various sectors” as a way to<br />

promote sustainability, including clauses written in subcontracts that required that a certain number of vocational<br />

program graduates be hired. Also noted were the numerous buildings rebuilt as permanent structures rather than<br />

as temporary facilities and the close involvement and education of province- and ministry-level officials in program<br />

operations.<br />

According to al-Juboori, “The real sustainability of CSP, even if it wasn’t written into the program design, was how we<br />

showed the government the best ways to handle its services, how we trained youth to think beyond the militias and<br />

about each other, and how we trained business owners to market, grow, and expand their businesses. We accomplished<br />

things that would last.”<br />

Notes<br />

1. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACN461.pdf.<br />

2. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACN242.pdf.<br />

47


IRD embarked on its own job placement<br />

program, opening what was officially<br />

known as Community Outreach Offices<br />

inside the districts and staffing<br />

those offices with field workers<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

development program and start their own businesses,<br />

though many graduates simply did not have the<br />

resources to meet the in-kind requirement. Individual<br />

CSP city programs promoted projects that would<br />

support vocational trainees as employees, but there<br />

was no formal transition process. “The apprenticeships<br />

and job placement, those were the biggest challenges<br />

because they were new concepts,” al-Juboori<br />

said. “Nobody had done job placement before. We<br />

tried to link it to the councils, but they had their own<br />

local contractors who would bring in their own labor,<br />

so they’d tell us to go talk to the contractors. Eventually,<br />

we started doing that.”<br />

As a result, some IRD staff became the equivalent of<br />

employment brokers, going to businesses or individuals<br />

to try and sell the skills of the program’s recent<br />

vocational graduates. Sometimes, it paid off. In one<br />

case, staff visited a contractor who had a contract to<br />

rehabilitate part of Baghdad’s University of Technology,<br />

one of Iraq’s largest schools. “We convinced him<br />

to hire our people, ‘for the good of Iraq’ we argued,”<br />

al-Juboori recounted. “And he took a lot of workers,<br />

so that was a success. But we definitely had to make<br />

adjustments.”<br />

Mini employment centers all over the district<br />

One of the most notable and successful adjustments<br />

IRD made was in Baghdad, during the final year of<br />

CSP, as an effort to get around the job placement<br />

roadblocks. Because so many local officials remained<br />

“attached” to local workers or contractors, vocational<br />

trainees were not getting fair assessments. So IRD<br />

embarked on its own job placement program, opening<br />

what was officially known as Community Outreach<br />

Offices inside the districts and staffing those offices<br />

with field workers. “We tried to directly serve the<br />

unemployed in that area, and, at the same time,<br />

convince local businesses to find jobs for those<br />

unemployed persons,” al-Juboori said.<br />

Although the setup may sound a lot like an employment<br />

agency, it wasn’t, at least not officially, because<br />

an actual employment agency was not allowed under<br />

labor ministry rules. And since no work of this kind<br />

could be associated with IRD, the offices publicly fell<br />

under the umbrella of the local government. When CSP<br />

began its closeout, district leaders contacted IRD field<br />

workers, asking that the offices remain open. The civilian<br />

and military support apparatus in Iraq backed the<br />

job placement plan as well. “A lot of PRTs loved the<br />

idea, and they even supported the outreach offices for<br />

two or three months when CSP phased out in some<br />

areas,” al-Juboori said. “They loved the idea, and<br />

they saw the impact. They were like mini employment<br />

centers all over the district. Register the unemployed,<br />

and at the same time, try to find them a job.”<br />

The job placement program was the logical extension<br />

of the community outreach efforts that the IRD<br />

employment generation staff made throughout the<br />

duration of CSP. In the beginning, IRD found that many<br />

people most in need of vocational training simply did<br />

not trust the labor ministry. So staff, on behalf of the<br />

ministry so as not to be identified as IRD workers,<br />

began directly calling potential participants to explain<br />

the benefits of the program. A promotional campaign<br />

in Baghdad, including billboards, flyers, and other<br />

types of announcements, tried to raise awareness<br />

and increase participation, especially in neighborhoods<br />

where training centers had been closed for a<br />

long time or where they had been destroyed. Perhaps<br />

most important to the overall success of the program,<br />

IRD sent staff into neighborhoods to talk directly to<br />

<strong>citizens</strong> and business owners to find out what kind of<br />

skills were in demand. “When establishing the vocational<br />

training program, IRD looked for the kinds of<br />

jobs available and if there was a market for the jobs,”<br />

said IRD’s Michele Lemmon. “The first training we did<br />

was for electricians or people to repair generators.<br />

Because most of Iraq had no electricity, everybody<br />

was buying generators, but no one knew how to<br />

48


Working with local NGOs and government<br />

officials, IRD organized a 10-day summer<br />

“peace camp” for 150 young men and<br />

women. Their hope was that the retreat<br />

might be a gateway to fostering tolerance<br />

maintain them. So we started vocational training by<br />

asking, ‘What types of jobs are needed?’”<br />

The business development component created many<br />

more long-term jobs than did the vocational training<br />

and employment generation component, as intended.<br />

The vocational training was intended to help at-risk and<br />

unemployed Iraqis gain marketable skills. But through<br />

the innovative methods IRD used to link training<br />

courses to market demand and unemployed <strong>citizens</strong> to<br />

employment opportunities, more than 8,000 vocational<br />

training graduates landed long-term jobs as a result of<br />

their training. In addition, the more effective registration<br />

and tracking processes for trainees that IRD put<br />

in place at all the rehabilitated training centers helped<br />

the labor ministry rebuild its capacity not only to teach<br />

Iraqis skills but also to help translate those skills into<br />

jobs. “We always tried to link the local market demand<br />

with what was provided at the vocational training<br />

centers,” said al-Juboori. “Because that was the<br />

objective. We needed to ensure that the unemployed<br />

youth would not be led back into the violence. We built<br />

the ministry’s training capacity 100 percent to stay in<br />

business. And they’re still in business.”<br />

Youth activities: Different from everything else<br />

Iraq’s Ninewa province is among the country’s most<br />

ethnically diverse regions. Tragically, that diversity<br />

helped fuel the rise of the sectarian violence that<br />

gripped the area in 2007. A suicide bombing in a Shia<br />

neighborhood of Tal Afar was blamed for more than<br />

150 deaths, making it at the time the single deadliest<br />

attack since coalition forces entered Iraq. The<br />

bombing led to a wave of retaliatory killings and kidnappings<br />

as gunmen stormed homes throughout Sunni<br />

neighborhoods. Meanwhile, in Mosul, the provincial<br />

capital, rising tensions between Arabs and Kurds led<br />

many Kurds to flee the city. As the situation deteriorated,<br />

Iraqi staff working for CSP in Ninewa developed<br />

a simple program with a lofty aim—to assemble area<br />

youth from different ethnic and religious backgrounds<br />

in an effort to bridge their cultural and religious gaps.<br />

Working with local NGOs and government officials, IRD<br />

organized a 10-day summer “peace camp” for 150<br />

young men and women from across the province. Their<br />

hope was that the retreat, on a small scale, might be<br />

a gateway to fostering tolerance between groups who<br />

were increasingly seeing each other only as enemies,<br />

not as fellow Iraqis.<br />

The first day of camp was a near-disaster. Muslims,<br />

Christians, Arabs, and Kurds were all along for the<br />

retreat, but the different groups refused to come<br />

together, mirroring the tensions so prevalent in the<br />

province. IRD staff spent the first day and night simply<br />

teaching the concepts of tolerance, acceptance, and<br />

religious understanding. “The youth programming<br />

was very different than everything else,” said Barzan<br />

Ismaeel, IRD’s national director for employment generation<br />

and youth. “The outcome was not necessarily<br />

employment, but we were still training people how to<br />

live and interact.”<br />

Through soccer, stronger social ties and teachable<br />

moments<br />

When asked to name CSP’s greatest success, IRD<br />

staffers repeatedly cited the number of jobs created.<br />

US political and diplomatic leaders, when discussing<br />

the program in public forums like congressional testimonies<br />

or media roundtables, used the same point<br />

of reference—jobs. Employment numbers, after all,<br />

offered the most quantifiable statistic in an environment<br />

where measuring results was an erratic, dangerous,<br />

often unreliable process. But the CSP design (and COIN<br />

strategy in general) presumed that the strength of<br />

Iraq’s cultural and community network was at least as<br />

important as employment for the country’s stability and<br />

social cohesion. Organizing safe and secure “communal<br />

activities” was a critical step on the road to reducing<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

49


CSP’s youth activities component aimed<br />

for something more than jobs—it aimed<br />

to help young Iraqis connect to their<br />

identity, culture, and community<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

sectarian strife. Therefore, CSP’s youth activities component<br />

aimed for something more than jobs—it aimed to<br />

help young Iraqis connect to their identity, culture, and<br />

community and to give them opportunities to form social<br />

bonds that might be strong enough to withstand the pull<br />

of the insurgency. “Thousands and thousands of people<br />

were unemployed, at all age groups, but especially<br />

among the youth,” Ismaeel said. “They were a tool that<br />

militias used. Many would be recruited just by being<br />

given a cell phone. ‘Here’s a phone, now you can work<br />

for us.’ Nobody else was paying attention to them.”<br />

CSP originally targeted young men and women ages<br />

17–25 for youth activities, but IRD recommended<br />

expanding the age range down to 12 and up to 35.<br />

Expanding the range allowed more activities to reach<br />

secondary schools and to capture a good number of<br />

unemployed, physically active men. In the eyes of the<br />

implementation team, all youth were assumed to be<br />

“at risk.” And since young males were far more likely<br />

to join a militia, most activities targeted ways to keep<br />

men engaged and occupied. Primarily, this goal was<br />

achieved with team sporting events and activities,<br />

most notably soccer.<br />

Before IRD’s intervention, a five-year gap in organized<br />

sports had existed in most Iraqi cities. The local<br />

directorates of the Ministry of Youth Services had<br />

staff but no operating budgets. Meanwhile, most<br />

parks and recreational fields were in disrepair. Cleaning<br />

up and restoring these fields, work that fell under<br />

the community infrastructure component, was quite<br />

common during CSP. During the first quarter of 2009,<br />

for instance, 11 playgrounds and nine soccer fields<br />

were constructed in one district in the city of Kirkuk<br />

alone. Restoring the fields provided short-term jobs<br />

and created a common pathway for the communal<br />

activities envisioned in the CSP design.<br />

with another NGO that had a relationship with Nike, IRD<br />

sent a shipment of some 8,000 soccer balls to Iraq in<br />

November 2007. Later, additional shipments of equipment,<br />

including sports shoes and athletic gear, arrived.<br />

But having a refurbished field or new equipment did<br />

not always guarantee the safety of the space. One<br />

particular soccer match in Ramadi, one of Iraq’s most<br />

unstable cities, ended with claims of cheating and<br />

unfair officiating. Unnerved by the rapid escalation of<br />

heated rhetoric, and spotting aggressive body language,<br />

IRD workers on site called Ismaeel to report a<br />

potential deadly conflict that was about to erupt. Local<br />

officials and CSP staff were able to diffuse the situation<br />

before it got out of hand, but the event led IRD<br />

to “embed” workers in other programs, like vocational<br />

training classes, to teach concepts like team building<br />

and sportsmanship along with employable skills. Since<br />

youth activities received less financial support than the<br />

rest of CSP, this kind of engagement was seen as a<br />

different way of mitigating conflict.<br />

The youth program activities represented only 10<br />

percent of CSP’s total funding for city programs, but<br />

many events, such as the popular soccer matches,<br />

had the spotlight and often benefited a large number<br />

of people directly and indirectly. According to Ismaeel,<br />

CSP was reaching 10,000 people a week through<br />

soccer matches and practices in Mosul. Mobilizing<br />

such larger numbers served a dual purpose: engaging<br />

different Iraqis in a common event and countering the<br />

militias. “The elements that were trying to destabilize<br />

the cities as well as CSP activities actually had a lot<br />

in common with us,” Ismaeel said. “They were using<br />

youth, and they were trying to reach, in a negative way,<br />

a large number of people. So we simply had to make<br />

the greater impact.”<br />

A broad approach to different needs<br />

50<br />

Even with fields repaired, a shortage of equipment was<br />

another hurdle to starting local leagues. By partnering<br />

Altogether, IRD’s youth activities engaged more<br />

than 350,000 participants. Soccer matches and


CSP was reaching 10,000 people a week<br />

through soccer matches and practices in<br />

Mosul. Mobilizing such larger numbers served<br />

a dual purpose: engaging different Iraqis in<br />

a common event and countering the militias<br />

tournaments were common high-profile events, but<br />

CSP sponsored a wide range of activities intended to<br />

challenge, engage, and unify. Some events accommodated<br />

hundreds, such as a 6K fun run in Kirkuk that<br />

drew 1,500 participants, while others appealed to narrower<br />

interests, such as a chess program in Ramadi<br />

implemented in coordination with local schools. Youth<br />

also took part in CSP-sponsored basketball games,<br />

boxing and wrestling matches, martial arts training,<br />

and swim meets.<br />

Not all organized events were sports-related. Life<br />

skills, culture, and art activities included programs<br />

that taught poetry, sewing, calligraphy, and pottery;<br />

training in first aid techniques, basic computer use,<br />

and Arabic literacy; video and music festivals; and<br />

a community theater run through the Iraqi Union of<br />

Artists. There also were programs limited for women in<br />

the more urban and progressive regions of Iraq, where<br />

such activity was considered culturally acceptable. In<br />

Salah ad Din, a volleyball tournament cosponsored by<br />

the Department of Education attracted 240 female<br />

students.<br />

“You couldn’t apply every type of activity or approach<br />

in all areas,” Ismaeel said, echoing a common theme<br />

among all IRD staff when discussing CSP projects.<br />

“It was critical that we respond to the needs of the<br />

people, what they wanted and needed.” One way that<br />

IRD did that was by stretching the boundaries for<br />

in-kind contributions, which most often were medical<br />

supplies or some kind of income-producing equipment—tools,<br />

appliances, machinery, and the like. With<br />

the World Vision organization, IRD supplied more than<br />

$9 million worth of McGraw-Hill books, according to<br />

Igor Samac, a senior program officer in IRD’s logistics<br />

and acquisitions department, to the University of<br />

Baghdad’s school library. With the Perkins School for<br />

the Blind, IRD supplied Perkins Braillers, essentially<br />

a Braille typewriter with keys corresponding to dots<br />

in the Braille code, to Baghdad’s Al-Noor School,<br />

the city’s only learning center for blind children. With<br />

the One Laptop Per Child organization, IRD supplied<br />

rugged, low-cost laptops to children throughout Iraq’s<br />

various elementary schools.<br />

Altogether, CSP’s in-kind gifts totaled $26.7 million,<br />

exceeding the goal of $20 million. According to Samac,<br />

IRD facilitated the shipment of 65 loads of goods to<br />

Iraq over the course of the three-year program—an<br />

average of almost one shipment every two weeks. Of<br />

course, most of the in-kind donations helped support<br />

the other CSP program components and their primary<br />

focus on job generation, but, as Samac pointed out,<br />

the distribution of items like soccer balls or library<br />

books had a broad impact on youth activities at a<br />

relatively low cost. “Many of these items were not<br />

of high value,” he said, “but they demonstrated a<br />

different approach to how in-kind contributions could<br />

address different needs. This shows a diversity that<br />

was important to carrying out CSP’s broad mission.”<br />

Tolerance as an alternative to violence<br />

To create a sense of local ownership and reduce<br />

corruption, CSP funded programs in collaboration<br />

with multiple government ministries, including the<br />

ministries of youth and sports, culture, environment,<br />

and health. In some areas, like Mosul, the working<br />

model was expanded to include partnerships and<br />

capacity building with local NGOs. These partnerships<br />

helped put an Iraqi imprint on the IRD-led activities,<br />

which was standard practice for CSP operations, and<br />

they taught local ministries how to efficiently organize<br />

sponsored sports teams, leagues, and events. One<br />

local civil society group in Haditha, following CSP’s<br />

lead, prepared a six-month “pipeline of activities” on<br />

their own, to plan, implement, and oversee once IRD<br />

had left. “Capacity building of NGOs and local leaders<br />

played an important role in our ability to stabilize<br />

these areas,” Ismaeel said. “In Haditha, they knew<br />

how to reach out. The ultimate goal was to engage<br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

51


most Iraqi <strong>citizens</strong> had an overwhelmingly<br />

positive association between CSP and<br />

reduced violence in their <strong>communities</strong><br />

3<br />

Successes and setbacks<br />

people for two or three years, but in many cases, we<br />

made a successful transition to keep activities going.<br />

CSP created jobs. CSP engaged youth. But at the local<br />

level, it really achieved something special.”<br />

IRD staff and USAID evaluators know the youth engagement<br />

program was well received; the sheer number<br />

of people who turned out for these events, as well as<br />

<strong>citizens</strong>’ consistent statements of support and gratitude,<br />

made that clear. What was unclear was exactly<br />

how far this work went in mitigating conflict. The IBTCI<br />

monitoring report suggested that future COIN-related<br />

programs should find a way to closely track changes<br />

in attitude and behavior, even though it acknowledged<br />

the difficulty in doing so, particularly in a conflict zone.<br />

Still, the report found that most Iraqi <strong>citizens</strong> had an<br />

overwhelmingly positive association between CSP<br />

and reduced violence in their <strong>communities</strong>. While the<br />

role of military and Iraqi security forces cannot be<br />

discounted or overlooked, all groups surveyed agreed<br />

that the program helped teach young people the value<br />

of tolerance as an alternative to violence.<br />

52


4<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

for future stabilization work<br />

A new road is cleared, paved, and reopened in Mosul


“We had challenges, but with the challenges we also had<br />

great successes. We learned from our experiences, and we<br />

moved forward with a stronger and better understanding of<br />

stabilization.”<br />

— Alaa Ismael<br />

When asked to recall a single CSP project that stood<br />

out as unique, Barzan Ismaeel, IRD’s national director<br />

for employment generation and youth, picked the restoration<br />

of a playground and athletic field in Mosul’s<br />

Hay al-Thawrah neighborhood. At first, this project,<br />

which wrapped up in early 2009, might seem to be a<br />

mundane choice, since playgrounds and sports facilities<br />

were some of the most common projects initiated<br />

under CSP. But this particular project was different,<br />

Ismaeel said: “It seemed to engage almost everyone,<br />

in a profound way. And in that location, at that time.”<br />

By the beginning of 2009, Mosul could not be called<br />

a safe city, but it was nothing like it had been just<br />

a year before. In early 2008, Mosul was considered<br />

the last urban stronghold of al Qaeda in Iraq, with an<br />

estimated 2,000 insurgents involved in regular IED,<br />

suicide, and small-arms-fire attacks. An escalation of<br />

American military force culminated with an Iraqi-led<br />

security operation dubbed Lion’s Roar in May 2008,<br />

which was followed by Operation Mother of Two<br />

Springs, a continuing operation throughout the year to<br />

clear out insurgent forces. According to the Institute<br />

for the Study of War, attacks in Mosul declined from<br />

an average of 40 a day in the week before the official<br />

launch of operations to 4–6 a day in the weeks after.<br />

As the military transitioned from “clear” to “hold and<br />

build,” the CSP team was asked to immediately realign<br />

the focus of all projects to help establish water and<br />

sewage, electricity, trash collection, healthcare, and<br />

education services. Projects that were not COINrelevant<br />

were canceled while alternative projects were<br />

developed in direct coordination with the US military.<br />

According to quarterly reports, military units so often<br />

requested CSP’s direct assistance due to IRD’s<br />

“ability, experience, flexibility, and speed of project<br />

development.” From April to June 2008, amid these<br />

major kinetic operations, IRD completed 68 infrastructure<br />

and essential services projects in Mosul, even as<br />

the military was still wrapping up the “clear” phase of<br />

the stabilization strategy.<br />

The mayor of Mosul routinely visited CSP public works<br />

sites to support local workers hired as part of the<br />

CIES program and to pass out “I am Iraqi” T-shirts.<br />

At the same time, other CSP program activities were<br />

taking place in the same area, such as a ribbon-cutting<br />

for a vocational computer training center and the<br />

summer youth peace camp. As in Baghdad, Ramadi,<br />

or any CSP city, IRD was trying to respond to immediate<br />

COIN needs while also bolstering the local sense<br />

of community. With the Hay al-Thawrah playground and<br />

athletic field, Ismaeel, an Iraqi native very sensitive<br />

to his country’s ethnic divisions and tensions, saw a<br />

project that happened in the right place at the right<br />

time. Less than a year after some of Mosul’s most<br />

intense fighting, this park, he said, offered residents a<br />

55


“<br />

Many people came out and participated<br />

in this project, from all ethnic backgrounds,<br />

from all ages. I saw a paradigm shift<br />

of people coming together. It was more<br />

than anyone thought CSP could be”<br />

—Barzan Ismaeel<br />

4<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

sense of cathartic relief and symbolized the idea that<br />

“they could move beyond the past” as a community.<br />

“Mosul is a city with a great variety of people,”<br />

Ismaeel said. “When we opened this space, we had<br />

Muslim Sunnis, Muslim Shias, Christians, all together.<br />

So many people came out and participated in this<br />

project, from all ethnic backgrounds, from all ages.<br />

And it was not just the youth. In many places in Iraq, it<br />

had not been allowed for people to mix this way. I saw<br />

a paradigm shift of people coming together. This thing<br />

I witnessed was not something normal. It was more<br />

than anyone thought CSP could be.”<br />

represented some of the most frustrating roadblocks.<br />

Although IRD acted swiftly to implement extensive<br />

revisions to its own internal administrative operations<br />

in the wake of the previous year’s audit, USAID’s<br />

inspector general in February 2009 said it was looking<br />

into new allegations of fraud in Mosul. The independent<br />

evaluator IBTCI reviewed some of the program<br />

components in that city and on June 30 announced<br />

that it had found some reporting “inconsistencies.”<br />

The program was scheduled to close out in some<br />

cities, including Mosul, the following year, but on July<br />

4, USAID suspended payments and called for an early<br />

shut down.<br />

56<br />

CSP’s three-year life cycle as a<br />

“force multiplier”<br />

Ismaeel’s recollection is one of the distinctly human<br />

observations that, in quarterly reports, are blandly<br />

referenced as “rehabilitations to a playground, a park,<br />

and soccer fields.” For any of IRD’s work on CSP,<br />

it’s important to grasp the weight of the individual<br />

moments that made up the $644 million collective<br />

whole. “In my opinion, all the people that I worked<br />

with as a soldier loved CSP,” Andrew Wilson said. “We<br />

loved what IRD was doing because they were a force<br />

multiplier and they were affecting individual lives.<br />

CSP was keeping people employed and happy, giving<br />

them some hope and promise. The big things and all<br />

the little things added up. You could just see it on the<br />

faces of the people.”<br />

During the first quarter of 2009 in Mosul, in addition<br />

to the Hay al-Thawrah playground, IRD implemented<br />

more than a dozen CIES projects, completed 63 business<br />

grants as part of a larger program to regenerate<br />

the city’s market area, created almost 200 long-term<br />

jobs, and tallied more than 1,300 participants in youth<br />

activities. At the time, Mosul represented so much of<br />

what was good and successful about CSP, but it also<br />

“There were huge constraints in Mosul,” said Dar<br />

Warmke, who had managed CSP in Basra before<br />

transferring to Mosul where he oversaw the program’s<br />

closeout in that city. “When I got there, I was able to<br />

see small errors that could be traced back to year<br />

one. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was all management-related.<br />

No one really saw it until year three.”<br />

Warmke had the unique perspective of witnessing the<br />

entire life cycle of CSP implementation in full, from<br />

different cities.<br />

He said CSP administration can be divided into three<br />

stages, one for each year in operation. Year one was<br />

the ramp-up: “The theme was spending a lot of money<br />

so we could start showing results.” Year two allowed<br />

implementers to focus more closely on “what we<br />

were doing and why we were doing it,” he said, which<br />

brought with it more attention to fiscal accountability.<br />

“Work plans and targets started to become the overall<br />

theme much more than simply spending money.” By<br />

year three, compliance had become the overriding<br />

concern. “There were certain elements we needed<br />

to pay more attention to,” Warmke said. “But I would<br />

say in Mosul, everybody was well-intentioned.” The<br />

problems, he said, were cumulative—issues that built<br />

up year over year. “You couldn’t always go back and<br />

repair it.”


CSP was unprecedented in scale,<br />

but it also withstood unprecedented<br />

criticism and second-guessing<br />

How can an NGO work and associate with the military?<br />

Operating in a counterinsurgency environment poses<br />

monumental challenges, uncertainties, and risks, and<br />

getting projects off the ground became just the first step<br />

in an arduous, dangerous, and extremely complicated<br />

implementation process. Monitoring and managing<br />

those activities, as well as trying to ensure a transparent<br />

and accountable financial operation in a country<br />

with little capacity and rampant corruption, proved more<br />

difficult than initially conceived. Moreover, IRD soon<br />

learned not only that it was expected to implement<br />

extensive COIN activities in an unstable environment,<br />

but also it was being held to the same basic operational<br />

parameters as a traditional development program.<br />

“The program was so big, and there were so many<br />

things that were not normal to an operating environment<br />

for an NGO,” said Alice Willard, a former senior<br />

IRD monitoring and evaluation officer during CSP. “The<br />

program was asked to provide standard information to<br />

the donor, USAID, but the military was also asking for<br />

the same information—on top of asking us directly to<br />

conduct different activities.” Willard said the desire of<br />

so many different actors to play a primary role in project<br />

direction—“an unrelenting pressure”—muddied the<br />

communication process and made it easier for critics<br />

to label CSP as unwieldy, disorganized, or ideologically<br />

compromised. To critics, an NGO working so closely with<br />

the military was anathema; indeed, some on IRD’s own<br />

staff rejected the notion outright. “The NGO community<br />

is very deeply divided as to whether people want to<br />

work with the military,” Willard said. “If you talk to one<br />

organization, they’ll say ‘Oh we never do this.’ Talk to<br />

another, and they’ll say, ‘Well we don’t do this officially,<br />

but…’ Finally, a third NGO might say, ‘Of course we’re<br />

working with the military. If we can help them bring relief<br />

to vulnerable people, then how could we not?’”<br />

Michele Lemmon, an IRD senior program officer, was<br />

one of the first at IRD headquarters to begin work<br />

on CSP, which included the immediate need to hire<br />

staff. “It was very difficult to recruit people to work in<br />

Baghdad,” she said. “It seemed like the entire NGO<br />

community was against IRD at the time, because we<br />

were the first ones to work with the military.”<br />

For critics, the sheer size and design of the program<br />

offered no shortage of opportunities to criticize. CSP<br />

was unprecedented in scale, but it also withstood<br />

unprecedented criticism and second-guessing. The<br />

program sharpened already widespread concern<br />

among the development community that the “militarization”<br />

of humanitarian assistance would further<br />

endanger the lives of aid workers already at risk by<br />

being in an unstable environment. Rather than being<br />

seen as impartial actors, critics say, workers can be<br />

viewed too easily as a party to the conflict. The debate<br />

only intensified during the latter part of the 2000s as<br />

aid worker deaths increased in Afghanistan and after<br />

the US Department of Defense unveiled a more formal<br />

civ-mil policy for aid organizations mandating cooperation<br />

“in all aspects of foreign assistance activities”<br />

where both civilian and military organizations are<br />

operating, and “where civilian-military cooperation will<br />

advance [US government] foreign policy.” 9<br />

In the end, extraordinary outcomes in the most difficult<br />

environments<br />

Most of the issues that led to the internal frustrations,<br />

the external red flags, and the public controversies<br />

were a combination of human oversight—inadequate<br />

data collection, inconsistent monitoring, insufficient<br />

quality control—and the reality of working in a conflict<br />

zone with the military as a partner. Some of the same<br />

qualities that military leaders praised about IRD,<br />

flexibility and speed, ran headlong into the systematic<br />

procurement, reporting, and approval processes that<br />

underpin traditional development work. Addressing<br />

this operational dichotomy up front, through processes<br />

and expectations that meet acceptable donor<br />

4<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

57


“<br />

We learned from our experiences, and<br />

we moved forward with a stronger and<br />

better understanding of stabilization”<br />

—Alaa Ismael<br />

4<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

requirements while giving fieldworkers the flexibility to<br />

operate, became one of IRD’s most important recommendations<br />

for future stabilization operations. “With<br />

CSP, there were challenges that any other program an<br />

NGO would normally manage would never face,” said<br />

Alaa Ismael, the nationwide manager for CIES activities.<br />

“But that wasn’t a reason to shy away, even if it<br />

was hard to manage.”<br />

Administrative closeout of a typical development<br />

program can take up to three months to wrap up the<br />

bookkeeping, finalize the paperwork, square up the<br />

payroll, and so forth. Once that all happens, final<br />

audit teams from the donor will come in and do a<br />

closeout audit, which normally lasts anywhere from<br />

a few weeks to up to a year, depending on the size<br />

of the program. Given the cost and scale of CSP, as<br />

well as the extra attention it generated, the closeout<br />

process lasted for more than two years and endured<br />

three “final” closeout audits. For many IRD staff, the<br />

program’s end marred what had been a productive<br />

and groundbreaking union of development principles<br />

and COIN objectives, which led to successful stabilization<br />

operations throughout Iraq—exactly what CSP<br />

was intended to do. “When you take a broad view of<br />

everything, it was definitely a success,” Warmke said.<br />

By September 2011, the US government agreed. Two<br />

firms, the Defense Contract Audit Agency and PriceWaterhouseCoopers,<br />

had contested approximately $59<br />

million in CSP costs and expenses. But in the end, IRD<br />

provided the full documentation required to have all but<br />

$239,000 disallowed. At just a tenth of 1 percent, the<br />

disallowance on CSP, the largest assistance program in<br />

USAID history, was well below the industry norm of 3–5<br />

percent. In a staff memo announcing the final determination,<br />

IRD President Dr. Arthur B. Keys reaffirmed the<br />

organization’s commitment to “100 percent compliance<br />

all the time on all programs,” and he reiterated that the<br />

findings were a testament to IRD’s ability to achieve<br />

extraordinary outcomes in difficult environments. “We<br />

had challenges, but with the challenges we also had<br />

great successes,” Alaa Ismael said. “We learned from<br />

our experiences, and we moved forward with a stronger<br />

and better understanding of stabilization.”<br />

Strategic recommendations for future COIN<br />

programs<br />

CSP’s challenges included maintaining community<br />

support while simultaneously maintaining an effective<br />

military collaboration. At the same time, insecurity and<br />

local corruption exacerbated difficulties with monitoring<br />

and evaluation, staffing, and project management.<br />

These challenges, which have been highlighted<br />

throughout this review, offer invaluable learning<br />

opportunities for future COIN programs, or even for<br />

development work in a conflict zone.<br />

Community support: Invest in it<br />

The hold phase of COIN’s “clear-hold-build” strategy<br />

relies on gaining local support by assisting the population,<br />

and as military and civilian leaders repeatedly<br />

pointed out, civilian agencies are much better equipped<br />

to enable that outcome. The military was flooding<br />

Baghdad and other cities with CERP funds, which<br />

dwarfed CSP’s expenditures, but that investment did<br />

not bring what CSP brought: an Iraqi face. From the<br />

beginning, IRD emphasized that CSP was implemented<br />

by and for Iraqis. IRD employed a large Iraqi national<br />

staff who could understand and empathize with the<br />

needs of the community. “The importance of those<br />

years with ICAP cannot be understated,” Iqbal al-Juboori<br />

said. “The base of support we had in Baghdad ahead of<br />

CSP was so strong, that’s what allowed us to expand.<br />

We already knew what it took to get people to trust us.<br />

They trusted us because we had worked with them.”<br />

IRD applied what it learned about the importance of<br />

earning local trust in Serbia and Montenegro to its early<br />

days in Baghdad. IRD built on that knowledge with ICAP<br />

58


“<br />

Without security, there is no<br />

development . So who’s best trained<br />

for that, the soldiers with weapons or<br />

the people with project plans?”<br />

—IRD staff<br />

and CSP, and it has since gone on to apply the knowledge<br />

to stabilization programming in volatile regions<br />

where it had no previous footprint, such as Afghanistan.<br />

Military collaboration: Make it work<br />

“Working with the military is hell. But you have<br />

to. The military has its own way of doing things,<br />

not necessarily in harmony with NGO practices.<br />

They don’t have boundaries. But if it helps<br />

people or saves lives, you do it.”<br />

“Stabilization is a totally different mindset.<br />

Without security, without the military, there is<br />

no development —in Iraq or any conflict zone.<br />

So who’s best trained for that, the soldiers with<br />

weapons or the people with project plans?”<br />

These quotations, each from different IRD staff, are<br />

opposed in ideology, yet both are pragmatic in recognizing<br />

the importance of maintaining a working relationship<br />

with the military in conflict-affected areas. For<br />

the most part, differences were overcome to ensure<br />

the greater goal was reached. As al-Juboori said,<br />

“Everyone has to be on the same side.” But even to<br />

those on the same side, communicating, informationsharing,<br />

and chain-of-command barriers arose as the<br />

pace of military operations exceeded those of typical<br />

development processes. Clear communication was<br />

critical for operational success and basic safety, and it<br />

often relied on developing mutual trust and an awareness<br />

of individual responsibilities. “If you’re willing to<br />

support the military’s efforts directly, and they see<br />

you as an asset with resources to bring to the table, it<br />

will work,” Travis Gartner said. “If you don’t show any<br />

value in what you’re doing, if they see you as another<br />

person they have to provide with a cot and meals and<br />

move around, it won’t work.”<br />

Establishing communication channels was one hurdle.<br />

Managing them in a war setting was another. For<br />

example, some of the protocols weren’t in place from<br />

the project’s launch, including ensuring the military<br />

knew that USAID was the primary point of contact<br />

for IRD. “A lot of times, the implementing team was<br />

asked to do something directly by the military or the<br />

embassy,” Alice Willard said. “You wind up then with<br />

city programs that are either coordinating with the<br />

military or taking orders from them. Either way, it puts<br />

staff at risk and complicates what has to be done on<br />

the back end. In future COIN programs, this has to be<br />

clarified.”<br />

Security: Prepare for all scenarios<br />

During the implementation of ICAP in Baghdad, IRD<br />

had encountered threats and kidnappings, insecure<br />

project sites, and local partners of questionable character.<br />

But when CSP began, security was so bad in so<br />

many areas that it was seen as less an external force<br />

than as a basic cross-cutting obstacle to carrying out<br />

the program. IRD took all possible precautions, hired<br />

private security support, and maintained the final word<br />

on expatriate staff movement in the red zone with the<br />

military. Thorough security planning became costly and<br />

time-consuming. “It would take one staffer anywhere<br />

from 30 minutes to four hours to get to the office in<br />

Baghdad,” Willard said. “Iraqi security checkpoints<br />

changed regularly, and you had to carry multiple IDs.<br />

If you were in a Sunni neighborhood, you had your<br />

Sunni ID. If you were in a Shia neighborhood, you had<br />

a Shia ID. Security protocols to get into international<br />

zones were inconsistent, and there were always the<br />

individual militias in different neighborhoods. We<br />

don’t normally experience this in the development<br />

community.”<br />

Local staff (and their family members) were also under<br />

constant threat of violence. Many staff engaged in<br />

daily routines associated more commonly with being<br />

a spy than an aid worker—varying routes to work or<br />

lying to neighbors about their employment. “Two of<br />

4<br />

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59


as long as CSP is studied, future<br />

COIN programming will be much<br />

better equipped to anticipate and<br />

manage civilian security issues<br />

4<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

my team members were kidnapped for two days by<br />

an armed group before being released,” Alaa Ismael<br />

said. “That was one of our most challenging moments,<br />

but there were others like that.” Ismael recalled<br />

“almost continuous” indirect intimidation of field staff:<br />

“Sometimes a person, maybe a community leader or a<br />

council member or a contractor, would say something<br />

like ‘don’t come here; the militias are looking for you.’<br />

But as Iraqis, we knew what that meant, that when a<br />

person tells you that, it’s a threat.”<br />

USAID and IRD planned for a difficult security environment,<br />

but the mental, physical, and fiscal toll of operating<br />

in a war zone was greater than expected. Specialized<br />

vehicles, equipment, and support structures<br />

(such as safe rooms) became common for program<br />

workers. In addition, the need to travel to the field<br />

for project implementation and monitoring created a<br />

natural tension between program and security staff,<br />

increasing the need for strong communication and,<br />

above all, preparedness. “When actual implementation<br />

is so dependent on the security environment, the<br />

donor and the implementing agency must make every<br />

effort to prepare in advance for whatever scenario<br />

they can envision,” Willard said. She added that as<br />

long as CSP is studied, future COIN programming will<br />

be much better equipped to anticipate and manage<br />

civilian security issues.<br />

Corruption: Address it head on<br />

Corruption is always a challenge in development<br />

settings, more so during a conflict. The vast sums<br />

being spent in Iraq by military and civilian authorities<br />

attracted attention. The war had damaged banking<br />

capabilities, forcing projects to use cash in many<br />

instances and requiring careful controls. IRD took<br />

extraordinary efforts during implementation to<br />

compensate, but as many program workers learned,<br />

fighting corruption often meant overcoming longestablished<br />

systems of doing business. “Corruption<br />

and government officials were a big issue,” Ismael<br />

said. “Officials had seen aid projects, so they knew<br />

the system; they knew all the tricks. Immediately when<br />

we’d start a project, they’d want it awarded to their<br />

own contractors, either relatives of the chairman or<br />

relatives or friends of somebody—or sometimes their<br />

own company.” To overcome this, Ismael said, IRD had<br />

to “legitimize the process.” In one example, IRD had<br />

the district advisory councils and the district governorates<br />

or municipality agree to a single, unified list of<br />

approved contractors.<br />

While strong, consistent controls included frequent<br />

internal reviews and timely external ones, security<br />

challenges posed limits on IRD’s ability to implement<br />

these controls. Because of security concerns, IRD<br />

could rarely conduct spot checks, unannounced site<br />

visits, and forensic auditing. These gaps provided a<br />

few locals an opening to game the system. Jessica<br />

Cho recounted a story involving poultry farms. “Different<br />

farmers received grants for chickens, but the<br />

monitors’ trips were infrequent due to security,” Cho<br />

said. “So when monitors would go make visits to a<br />

farm, the contractor that was hired to provide the<br />

chickens would move the same group of birds from<br />

place to place.”<br />

Corruption wasn’t limited to beneficiaries or local<br />

politicians, either. IRD encountered its own problems<br />

in the field that gave the organization valuable insight<br />

on the best way to anticipate and minimize corruptive<br />

influences for future programs. Gartner helped launch<br />

IRD’s stabilization work in Afghanistan, where “no one<br />

hesitated to address the corruption issue head on,”<br />

he said, adding that better quality assurance, quality<br />

control, and internal reporting systems were established<br />

from the very beginning.<br />

Mamadou Sidibe, a monitoring and evaluation director<br />

for CSP, said, “You have to be realistic; you set<br />

procedures to minimize what will happen, but you can’t<br />

60


IRD’s staffing woes could be broken<br />

down into three categories: getting<br />

people hired, getting the right people<br />

hired, and keeping people on the job<br />

control everything that will happen. There’s going to be<br />

corruption in a conflict zone. You should make every<br />

effort to minimize it, but you can’t alter reality when<br />

it’s inconvenient.”<br />

Monitoring and evaluation: Set the right baseline<br />

Insecurity and local corruption tied directly into some<br />

of IRD’s most notable monitoring and evaluation (M&E)<br />

challenges. Many staff recounted the danger in traveling<br />

to site locations and, as Vigeen Dola said, this<br />

created unique challenges in trying to perform routine<br />

tasks, such as documenting work with photographic<br />

evidence. “In certain areas in Iraq, you couldn’t take<br />

a camera out because you would be easily identified,”<br />

he said. “So staffers would pretend to make phone<br />

calls and then take a grainy cell phone photo. Or<br />

they’d find someone from the same area, a beneficiary<br />

they trusted, and ask that person to take a photo.”<br />

One of CSP’s operational strengths was its development<br />

of an independent M&E framework and a rigorous<br />

system for ensuring the quality of the reported<br />

data—valuable tools for future work in a COIN setting.<br />

However, these steps didn’t take place until the<br />

program was well under way, in multiple locations, and<br />

after the lessons of many months of insufficient practices<br />

had already been learned. Sidibe joined IRD with<br />

a mandate to correct the M&E problems and devise<br />

a stronger monitoring methodology. According to him,<br />

emphasis was placed on verifying and validating data,<br />

separating the M&E and quality control functions,<br />

standardizing processes and forms, training staff<br />

and collaborating with the CSP technical team (which<br />

captures the M&E data), and imparting the value of<br />

monitoring for results. Perhaps most important was<br />

the awareness IRD raised of the ineffectiveness of the<br />

initial program indicators. “You have to set an appropriate<br />

baseline at the beginning,” Sidibe said. “You set<br />

a target, and after a certain period of time, compare<br />

what you realized with what you expected to realize; if<br />

there’s a problem, you’ll have the feedback to correct<br />

it. It takes a lot of discipline.”<br />

Staffing: Identify needs and anticipate turnover<br />

IRD expected to face staffing hurdles while operating<br />

in a conflict zone, but one unexpected challenge was<br />

the high turnover among US government partners,<br />

which meant program directors were constantly<br />

spending time and resources bringing new civilian<br />

counterparts up to speed. As a result, maintaining<br />

institutional knowledge became a higher priority. “The<br />

donor staffing changed radically for USAID from the<br />

beginning to the end,” Willard said. “People who went<br />

to Iraq were there for six months and then shifted<br />

out. That didn’t give you a lot of time to do anything<br />

without feeling like you were starting over.” Other staff<br />

echoed similar concerns with the PRTs, which were<br />

vital to CSP design but burdensome when staffed<br />

with representatives who were unfamiliar with CSP or<br />

untrained in conflict-zone operations.<br />

IRD’s staffing woes could be broken down into three<br />

categories: getting people hired, getting the right<br />

people hired, and keeping people on the job. According<br />

to Michele Lemmon, staffing for stabilization<br />

operations was a consistent problem. “Turnover is a<br />

big problem,” she said, as are the quality of available<br />

staff and support for staff. “It’s because of the environment.<br />

You don’t see that level of turnover with staff<br />

in traditional development projects, where retention<br />

is greater and recruiting is easier.” CSP’s final report<br />

suggests the best way to minimize these challenges<br />

is to plan for a “significant investment in recruiting<br />

and training” and then to focus on identifying and<br />

hiring for certain skills that are difficult to learn in a<br />

conflict setting. Lastly, organizations should anticipate<br />

and plan for extensive, and ongoing, training: “Few<br />

staff will have a background in working under such<br />

conditions, and frequent rotation is required given the<br />

stress of the environment. Ensuring the continuity of<br />

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61


Those comfortable with military procedures,<br />

willing to take measured personal risks, and<br />

committed to the community-based model of<br />

more traditional development approaches were<br />

most adept at navigating CSP’s demands<br />

4<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

program implementation requires broad-based training<br />

to give staff the flexibility to cover additional responsibilities<br />

[as they arise].”<br />

The most successful CSP workers tended to be<br />

unusual development professionals with at least some<br />

military service—or maybe a stint in the Peace Corps.<br />

Those comfortable with military procedures, willing to<br />

take measured personal risks, and committed to the<br />

community-based model of more traditional development<br />

approaches were most adept at navigating CSP’s<br />

demands.<br />

Project management: Prepare and communicate<br />

Because the environment in any setting where a<br />

stabilization program is being implemented is sure to<br />

be fluid, long-term work plans should be thought of as<br />

guidelines, Willard said. They should be reviewed constantly,<br />

even daily, and updated based on regular conversations<br />

with stakeholders. The interaction between<br />

the donor and implementing agency has to be regular,<br />

strong, and clear, and military considerations have to<br />

be taken into account with—not on top of—civilian<br />

decisionmaking. The key to dealing with such considerations<br />

before they escalate lies in the strength<br />

of preparation: basic systems of logistics, finance,<br />

compliance, administration, and staffing should be the<br />

“first-out-of-the-gate” elements put into place. As staff<br />

members are hired, they should find systems already<br />

functional and tuned to country realities.<br />

As a result of the many lessons learned in Iraq, IRD<br />

established comprehensive procedures for beginning<br />

and ending projects, including an expert startup team<br />

deployed to the field ahead of program launches<br />

(box 9). The team provides technical and financial<br />

management support, assists in hiring and training,<br />

and puts in place systematic processes guided by<br />

internal checklists and codified in an extensive startup<br />

manual that is unique in the NGO field for its detailed<br />

attention to standardization. The new startup team<br />

had a major impact during the launch of the $300<br />

million extension of USAID’s Afghanistan Vouchers<br />

for Increased Productive Agriculture program. And<br />

in January 2011, the team helped launch Cultural<br />

Bridges to Reconciliation in Iraq, a governance and<br />

community-assistance program.<br />

62


Many key tactical lessons have already been<br />

applied to IRD’s stabilization programming in<br />

other areas, including Afghanistan and Africa<br />

Box 9<br />

Stabilization in Iraq: 20 tactical lessons<br />

4<br />

Reflecting on lessons during the course of any project implementation is especially important for such programs as<br />

ICAP and CSP, because both programs provide valuable points of reference when considering how to adapt and build<br />

on the stabilization work done in Iraq. The key tactical lessons here, divided into four operational areas, are culled<br />

from a combination of program reviews, external evaluations, and official and final reports submitted to USAID. Most<br />

important, they synthesize lessons learned by IRD’s implementing teams on the ground. Many have already been<br />

applied to IRD’s stabilization programming in other areas, including Afghanistan and Africa.<br />

Implementation strategies<br />

• Anticipate the need to build the capacity of local partners and avoid transitioning projects until competent<br />

oversight is in place. This includes the capacity to maintain essential service and infrastructure projects as well<br />

as the capacity to oversee training, business, and job placement centers.<br />

• Prioritize investment in vocational training to locations with established programs and strengthen on-the-job training<br />

and placement so that more unemployed or short-term workers are linked to long-term jobs.<br />

• Include business development grants in the initial strategy for quick-start employment programs, with a special<br />

focus on medium-size grants in sectors with the greatest potential for creating jobs, such as agriculture and<br />

small-scale manufacturing.<br />

• Develop a model for measuring the success of community-based youth activities that promote social cohesion,<br />

such as peace camps and sporting events. Anecdotal evidence in support of their impact is strong, but consistent<br />

data and indicators would yield empirical backing.<br />

• Integrate program components into the initial design of any stabilization program so that projects reinforce mutual<br />

goals and flow from one stage to the next. In a conflict zone, uncertain security situations can hinder execution,<br />

but integration should be the default goal.<br />

• Do not overlook the importance of women, particularly heads of households, as a key target audience in program<br />

design and implementation strategy.<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

Management systems and staffing<br />

• Develop a clear profile of the necessary staff skills most needed to build complementary and efficient program<br />

teams capable of overseeing COIN programming.<br />

• Formalize the startup process, including program implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and compliance<br />

issues before field placement. Consider deploying a city program “startup team” to help city directors with hiring<br />

and putting management systems in place during the first few months.<br />

• Harmonize basic management systems through institutional tools, such as training manuals, to offer consistent<br />

guidance and procedures on handling key operations, such as quality control, contracting, bidding, procurement,<br />

record keeping, and anticorruption measures.<br />

• Anticipate the need for continuing training and appropriate mechanisms for providing training, even as project<br />

activities are ongoing. Options include on-site technical assistance, learning exchange visits, and formal training<br />

sessions.<br />

63


4<br />

Box 9<br />

Stabilization in Iraq: 20 tactical lessons (continued)<br />

Converting roadblocks into a roadmap<br />

• Reduce security risks to staff in all facets of their jobs: at their home community, on their commute to work, at the<br />

project site, and during field visits. In addition, careful consideration should be given to addressing the mental,<br />

physical, and psychological challenges that can strain staff, diminish morale, and increase turnover.<br />

• Strengthen senior staff and backstop staff. Adding more senior staff positions as projects progress will motivate<br />

staff and minimize turnover. Additionally, future COIN programs must prepare an adequate budget for headquarters<br />

staff and technical assistance of field programs.<br />

Military and PRT partnerships<br />

• Maintain open lines of communication with military leaders and PRTs. Dialogue between city program directors<br />

and the military can increase staff safety and improve project supervision in dangerous areas. Directors should<br />

seek regular extensive briefings to ensure that they have up-to-date intelligence on local social, political, and<br />

tribal shifts.<br />

• Make sure lines of communication are clear, understood, and followed. Program directors should buffer staff<br />

members from direct contact with the military, however well intended. Similarly, PRTs should be made to follow<br />

requirements directing them to work through technical officers to provide direction to implementing partners.<br />

• Encourage PRTs to take a more active review role on projects and site locations when projects are still in the<br />

stabilization phase.<br />

Monitoring and evaluation<br />

• Develop a detailed monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plan as part of the initial application process. In addition, the<br />

implementing agency should collaborate closely with the donor in developing and reporting appropriate performance<br />

indicators.<br />

• Give top priority to hiring and training qualified M&E staff. Ensure that the program has an M&E director with an<br />

appropriate background in conflict situations. All relevant senior management and headquarters staff should be<br />

fully integrated into the M&E system design, and basic training in measurement and analysis processes should<br />

occur at least once a year.<br />

• Build M&E staff capacity to allow both for independent measurement and analysis and for collaborative measurement<br />

with outside contractors.<br />

• Focus on region-specific analyses when possible so project data in specific cities can be shared with program staff<br />

to assess local effectiveness and impact.<br />

• Develop a project system for archiving city-specific documents, as well as all official reports and complementary<br />

data systems, and include this system as part of the basic startup management package in each city program.<br />

The CSP archive, developed by the CSP reporting and information officer, is an example of this lesson in practice.<br />

64


Epilogue


CSP was in part a social experiment and an innovation<br />

in development programming. The stylistic dissonance<br />

encountered in coordinating with a fast-paced,<br />

command-centered, rapid results–driven entity like the<br />

Department of Defense—all the while responding to<br />

USAID’s direction and administrative requirements —<br />

called for agility and diplomacy. Yet the result is<br />

that CSP succeeded both as an exercise in military<br />

cooperation and as community-based engagement in<br />

a conflict zone.<br />

Hard Lessons, a 450-page report from the US government’s<br />

special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction,<br />

chronicles the relief efforts undertaken by the<br />

Department of Defense, Department of State, and<br />

USAID in Iraq. 10 In the chapter recounting the “civilian<br />

surge,” the programmatic work IRD oversaw is praised<br />

repeatedly. Relationships with Iraqis “that often<br />

eluded embassy personnel flourished just miles away<br />

in compounds maintained by USAID contractors,” the<br />

report observed, a reference to IRD’s implementation<br />

teams. A more explicit reference was then made to<br />

the positive impacts derived from both CSP and ICAP<br />

and how they directly underpinned the much larger<br />

stabilization efforts in Iraq. CSP and ICAP, the 2009<br />

report states, “employed Iraqis to work in neighborhoods<br />

not far from the Green Zone, as well as in other<br />

places across Iraq. By 2007, this approach to reconstruction—the<br />

strengthening of Iraqi civil society by<br />

operating within it—was viewed as a crucial tool. . . .<br />

Perhaps more than other reconstruction entities,”<br />

USAID and its implementing partners “believed that<br />

security could be achieved by muting the association<br />

with the coalition and by gaining community trust and<br />

cooperation.” Hard Lessons referred to this belief as<br />

a “sociological, rather than an exclusively physical”<br />

conception of security.<br />

As an IRD monitoring and evaluation manager, Vigeen<br />

Dola would conduct site visits as often as the security<br />

situation allowed. But Dola still took extensive precautions,<br />

informed by his own past “bad experience”<br />

working for another organization many years prior and<br />

his cultural awareness as a native Iraqi. “Whenever<br />

I’d go into the field, I would always keep a low profile,”<br />

he said. “I used to hide everything in my socks—my<br />

IDs, papers, anything that would give me away.” But<br />

one day in 2007, when Dola traveled to the western<br />

Iraqi city of Haditha in the dangerous Anbar province,<br />

he was taken aback when members of IRD’s city staff,<br />

who were accompanying him into the field, took no<br />

measures to hide their badges. At a checkpoint, with<br />

their IDs in full display, the staff were allowed to pass<br />

unobstructed, without being questioned or asked for<br />

additional documentation. “Everyone else had to go<br />

through a queue to be checked—but we did not,” Dola<br />

said. “When they said we could go through, I asked<br />

why. The men at the checkpoint looked at me and<br />

said, ‘Because IRD already has done more than the<br />

government to help rebuild our city.’”<br />

67


Acronyms<br />

ACV<br />

CAG<br />

Assistance to Civilian Victims<br />

Community action group<br />

CERP Commander’s Emergency Response Program<br />

CIES<br />

CIVIC<br />

COIN<br />

Community Infrastructure and Essential Services<br />

Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict<br />

Counterinsurgency<br />

CRDA Community Revitalization through Democratic Action<br />

CSP<br />

IBTCI<br />

ICAP<br />

IED<br />

IRD<br />

M&E<br />

Community Stabilization Program<br />

International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc.<br />

Iraq Community Action Program<br />

Improvised explosive device<br />

International Relief & Development<br />

Monitoring & evaluation<br />

MOLSA Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs<br />

NGO<br />

PRT<br />

Nongovernmental organization<br />

Provincial reconstruction team<br />

USAID US Agency for International Development<br />

68


Notes<br />

1. www.sigir.mil/files/HardLessons/Hard_Lessons_Report.pdf.<br />

2. www.humanitarianinfo.org/sanctions/handbook/docs_handbook/HR_im_es_iraq.pdf.<br />

3. www.sigir.mil/files/HardLessons/Hard_Lessons_Report.pdf.<br />

4. The total number of ICAP beneficiaries exceeded the population of Baghdad, then between 5 and 6 million,<br />

four times over, a result of multiple projects providing different benefits to the same people.<br />

5. http://articles.latimes.com/print/2009/jul/13/local/me-streeter13.<br />

6. www.economist.com/node/3936146.<br />

7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/19/newsid_3504000/3504255.stm.<br />

8. The sample survey of CSP’s main database was conducted for CSP’s final report and included all projects<br />

at the time of closeout. Some of the businesses included had not yet been in operation for six months.<br />

9. www.huffingtonpost.com/virginia-moncrieff/military-civilian-policy_b_152749.html.<br />

10. www.sigir.mil/files/HardLessons/Hard_Lessons_Report.pdf.<br />

69


This report details IRD’s implementing role in Iraq<br />

from 2003 to 2009 on the US Agency for International<br />

Development’s Iraq Community Action Program, which<br />

brought essential services and civic empowerment to<br />

<strong>citizens</strong> in the immediate aftermath of war, to the end of<br />

the Community Stabilization Program in 2009. Through<br />

first-person accounts from those who were there, the<br />

report describes the need for a civilian-led component<br />

to counterinsurgency efforts and reviews how IRD<br />

built a strong enough foundation in Iraq to take on a<br />

$644 million program, overcome the risks and challenges<br />

of working in a conflict setting, and emerge with a wealth<br />

of applicable knowledge to share.<br />

International Relief & Development<br />

1621 North Kent Street. Fourth Floor<br />

Arlington, VA 22209<br />

703-248-0161 • 703-248-0194 fax<br />

www.ird.org

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