Empowering citizens Engaging governments Rebuilding communities

“
We learned from our experiences, and
we moved forward with a stronger and
better understanding of stabilization”
—Alaa Ismael
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Converting roadblocks into a roadmap
requirements while giving fieldworkers the flexibility to
operate, became one of IRD’s most important recommendations
for future stabilization operations. “With
CSP, there were challenges that any other program an
NGO would normally manage would never face,” said
Alaa Ismael, the nationwide manager for CIES activities.
“But that wasn’t a reason to shy away, even if it
was hard to manage.”
Administrative closeout of a typical development
program can take up to three months to wrap up the
bookkeeping, finalize the paperwork, square up the
payroll, and so forth. Once that all happens, final
audit teams from the donor will come in and do a
closeout audit, which normally lasts anywhere from
a few weeks to up to a year, depending on the size
of the program. Given the cost and scale of CSP, as
well as the extra attention it generated, the closeout
process lasted for more than two years and endured
three “final” closeout audits. For many IRD staff, the
program’s end marred what had been a productive
and groundbreaking union of development principles
and COIN objectives, which led to successful stabilization
operations throughout Iraq—exactly what CSP
was intended to do. “When you take a broad view of
everything, it was definitely a success,” Warmke said.
By September 2011, the US government agreed. Two
firms, the Defense Contract Audit Agency and PriceWaterhouseCoopers,
had contested approximately $59
million in CSP costs and expenses. But in the end, IRD
provided the full documentation required to have all but
$239,000 disallowed. At just a tenth of 1 percent, the
disallowance on CSP, the largest assistance program in
USAID history, was well below the industry norm of 3–5
percent. In a staff memo announcing the final determination,
IRD President Dr. Arthur B. Keys reaffirmed the
organization’s commitment to “100 percent compliance
all the time on all programs,” and he reiterated that the
findings were a testament to IRD’s ability to achieve
extraordinary outcomes in difficult environments. “We
had challenges, but with the challenges we also had
great successes,” Alaa Ismael said. “We learned from
our experiences, and we moved forward with a stronger
and better understanding of stabilization.”
Strategic recommendations for future COIN
programs
CSP’s challenges included maintaining community
support while simultaneously maintaining an effective
military collaboration. At the same time, insecurity and
local corruption exacerbated difficulties with monitoring
and evaluation, staffing, and project management.
These challenges, which have been highlighted
throughout this review, offer invaluable learning
opportunities for future COIN programs, or even for
development work in a conflict zone.
Community support: Invest in it
The hold phase of COIN’s “clear-hold-build” strategy
relies on gaining local support by assisting the population,
and as military and civilian leaders repeatedly
pointed out, civilian agencies are much better equipped
to enable that outcome. The military was flooding
Baghdad and other cities with CERP funds, which
dwarfed CSP’s expenditures, but that investment did
not bring what CSP brought: an Iraqi face. From the
beginning, IRD emphasized that CSP was implemented
by and for Iraqis. IRD employed a large Iraqi national
staff who could understand and empathize with the
needs of the community. “The importance of those
years with ICAP cannot be understated,” Iqbal al-Juboori
said. “The base of support we had in Baghdad ahead of
CSP was so strong, that’s what allowed us to expand.
We already knew what it took to get people to trust us.
They trusted us because we had worked with them.”
IRD applied what it learned about the importance of
earning local trust in Serbia and Montenegro to its early
days in Baghdad. IRD built on that knowledge with ICAP
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