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After Retirement, Kurtz Returns to Serve in Afghan PRT
FrontLines - July 2009
By Jan Cartwright
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Bryan Kurtz (left), with fellow PRT trainee Jay Kryk, is geared up for a ride.
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After a long and varied career, Bryan Kurtz has decided not to slip quietly into retirement.
He officially retired from the Foreign Service in 2003 after many years leading USAID programs that generated private sector jobs. But on May 21 this year, he was again sworn-in to government service.
“When I started hearing about the so-called civilian surge for Afghanistan, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I see this as my way of making a contribution,” said Kurtz, who is 65 and lives in Washington, D.C., when he is not working overseas.
Kurtz will serve as a development
advisor on a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Afghanistan, working to bolster the private sector and build Afghan capacity.
“I’m hoping to be able to contribute to economic growth and employment generation on the ground,” said Kurtz. “I look forward to working with local and provincial leaders to help develop their administrative capacity.”
“What excites me most,” he added, “is building bridges between cultures and between the public and private sectors … and between civilian and military cultures within our own public sector.”
In addition to being a Foreign Service Officer, he also worked in international banking for over a decade, including three years with the World Bank.
Kurtz was always drawn to countries in transition such as Afghanistan. He served in the Peace Corps in Botswana immediately following its independence.
He supervised the contract for a commercial banker training program in the former Soviet Union in 1993, just as free markets there were starting up. Shortly after the war in the Balkans subsided, he designed and led a $300 million banking and business development project in Bosnia which helped businesses
obtain commercial loans, generating over 20,000 jobs.
He worked in Iraq twice and launched USAID’s Threshold Program for countries seeking to qualify for assistance through the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Kurtz said his PRT assignment
is an opportunity to build bridges between civilian
agencies such as USAID and the Departments of State, Agriculture, and Defense. As a first step, he attended a three-week joint training session, run by Defense at Camp Atterbury
in Indiana.
“I am really looking forward to the teamwork environment of a PRT,” said Kurtz. “I think that the PRTs are at the cutting edge of the administration’s emphasis on integrating our efforts along the civilian-military nexus.”
Finally, Kurtz looks forward to learning more about Afghan culture. “I plan to do twice as much listening as talking—that’s why we have two ears and just one mouth.”
★
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