Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios,
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development

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Asia Foundation
May 18, 2003

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Thank you very much, Bill. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. I do want to say, though, as a regular practice I never give speeches on Sundays. But because the Asia Foundation has done such exceptional work, and my staff said, "You know, there's a luncheon that Colin Powell is having on Monday for the President of the Philippines, and you have to go." I said, “Well if the Secretary wants me to go, of course I will go.” “But that means you can't give the address to the Asia Foundation.” And I said, "No, well, I don't want to say no to Bill Fuller, who is one of my favorite people." And they said, "Well, they want you to come Sunday night." And I said, "Well, not Sunday night." But then I said "okay."

I do want to give a little acclamation to the trustees and the board for Bill's own career. He is widely regarded as one of the most able CEOs that we deal with in AID among our partners. So, I wouldn't have come here -- there are about a half a dozen NGO foundation groups that I have addressed; many of them I just say no to because I don't want to be dishonest intellectually and go up and say nice things about an organization that has a mixed bag.

But Asia Foundation is no mixed bag. You do really exceptional work in all of the countries. The Asia Near East Bureau in AID wrote a long speech describing all the wonderful things that the Asia Foundation has done with AID, but I'm not going to give the speech, because you already know what you're doing what you're doing with us. So I thought it would be a little redundant.

What I usually do is: whatever annoys me most recently is what I speak on. And what annoys me the most is the critique, I think the unreasonable critique, that's being done of the U.S. government's work in Afghanistan. So that's what I'm going to talk about tonight.

But before I do that I want to introduce a few comments here. The National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, called several people -- Richard Haas, who's shortly to be the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Pete Pace, the four-star Marine Corps General, who is on the Joint Chiefs, I think he's the Vice Chairman, and who is a fine man -- the three of us were called in. I'm not sure I'm supposed to tell this story, but I'll tell it anyway. I've had a couple of glasses of wine. You're going to get a very candid speech tonight.

This was three weeks after the war in Afghanistan started. None of us knew why were invited in. And Condi said, "I'm inviting you in to tell you that there are three pillars of the U.S. response to the War on Terrorism, and to foreign crises. The first is diplomacy; the second is defense; and the third is development, development and relief from AID.

I said, "Dr. Rice, why are you telling this to us?" And she said, "I want you to understand that you have a central role to play and we want you to play it." She dispatched me the Central Asian Republics, which was quite an interesting trip for me. This was in early November. I was the first civilian senior official to go into Afghanistan in many, many years. It was a three-hour trip into a city right along the Tajik border in Afghanistan; it was the city in which General Masood, the great figure within the Northern Alliance, was assassinated three days before the attack on September 11.

You know, when he was assassinated, we all said, "This is a little odd. After 25 years, they finally got to him. Why did they assassinate General Masood?" And then September 11 took place, and immediately we all knew why. Because they knew, the Taliban and al Qaeda knew, that we would have turned to General Masood to lead the effort to take out al Qaeda and the Taliban; that's why they assassinated him.

I went to his home city, where he was assassinated. I have to tell you a story. I was there for only three hours, and as I arrived in the city, there was a French NGO that met us. I guess I shouldn't have said French NGO. A very pro-American French NGO. Let me just say that. Okay, very pro-American. And they met us. After we toured the city and saw our projects, they said, "We know, Mr. Natsios, that you have a Greek name. Are you interested in archeology?" And I said, "Of course, you know I'm interested. All Greek Americans are interested in archeology. Why are you asking?" He said, "You know, one of the Alexander the Great's Greek cities is 6 kilometers here." It's in the middle of the zone, because the war was still going on; we could hear the artillery fire at night. The Taliban still had a large Army up there.

And this guy, this French NGO CO loved classical architecture. He had collected the remnants of Alexander's City, which had not been excavated. I want to go see it, because now it's a peaceful area. And they showed us the columns, which were just as stunning. It was classical Greek architecture mixed with Persian architecture, from about the Third Century B.C. And you could see this mixture of Greek and Persian together, in the architecture of this city that lasted 400 years. It was there for 400 years.

I'll never forget this. The little girls in this city that we went to -- we went to a school --and the girls had green eyes and blond hair. This is in Afghanistan now. And I said to the adults, I said, "This is ethnically a little unusual." And they said, "This is the remnants of Alexander's army." I thought this was sort of joke, that no one would take this seriously.

And they said, "If you look in the villages, you will see," because the Macedonians even in Greece now have blond hair, many of them have green eyes up in the mountains. And I looked at the kids and I could not believe that I was seeing the ancestors of Alexander the Great's army in this village in northern Afghanistan in the middle of a terrorist war.

So I have seen sights that you can't even imagine, all over the world. I'm sure when I go to Iraq I'm going to see the same sights.

I met and I was speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations recently in Chicago, to roll out our New Millennium Challenge Account report. We call it the Foreign Aid in the National Interest Report, which is on our web site. I would commend the report to you; we had national scholars writing it. And when I was finished speaking, a man came up. It was on the reconstruction of Iraq. And the young man went up, and he said, "I am an Iraqi American." He said, "I came here when I was three years old, and I want to help you rebuild Iraq." This was after the war had started but before it was concluded.

And he said, "I am an Assyrian." And I said, "Well, tell me what that means." He said, "My language is not Arabic. Assyrian Iraqi." There are, I think, one million Assyrians. Their language is Aramaic. Any of you who are Biblical scholars know the language Christ spoke was Aramaic. I said, "You actually speak Aramaic! In your family." He said, "Yes we do. You know, it's changed after 2000 years."

And I said, "Are you Muslim, or are you a Christian?" He said, "I am a Christian, and our church is loyal to Rome. But"--and I am an Orthodox Christian--"the liturgy we use is St. John Crisostomo's Liturgy of the Eastern Church," the liturgy I listen every Sunday. And he said, "But we first sing it in the language of Christ, Aramaic." This is the ancient church, founded by St. Thomas in the First Century in Iraq. It is still there. It's still there.

So, these are the cultures we're dealing with, Alexander the Great's conquest, and every taxi driver I met in Afghanistan knew Alexander the Great! Six-year-old kids! You know, my kids are named Alexander and Philip, my two sons. Named after -- you can guess -- Alexander and his father. At six years old, they didn't know who Alexander and Philip were. Six-year-old kids now in Afghanistan know who Alexander the Great is, in detail, in detail.

There's a greater sense of history in these countries than what our own children are aware of here in the United States. So we have to be a little humble when we deal with these countries.

Afghanistan is a country I have come to love, and the Afghan people I've come to love. It is a frustrating place to work in some ways. But it's an extraordinary culture, an extraordinary culture.

I have to just tell you, before I start talking about what we're doing in Afghanistan with your support and help, about Ashraf Ghani, who is the Finance Minister. He was with the World Bank for 20 years. We have good days and bad days. Ashraf and I have arguments some days and other days we get along very well. He was recently on a good day with me; we were talking about the things we were working on together, and economic governance and all that. And I don't know how it came up, but I said, "Ashraf, is it Dr. Ghani?" And he said, "Yes, it is." I said, "Where did you get your degrees?" He said, "We'll, I never told you this, Andrew, but I'm in a good mood today, so I'll tell you the truth. I got my undergraduate and master's degree with an AID scholarship 25 years ago. So I would not be here except for AID. Under the King. I got my degree at the American University in Beruit." Which is an institution, while it's independent of AID, we have been a heavy subsidizer of American University in Beirut for 40 years. For 40 years.

And Ashraf said, "I'm very proud of that. Most of my graduating class of Afghans at that university are in senior positions in the Afghan government.”

I was at a meeting in Rome, I think it was June of last year, an international summit on hunger. It was just after our agriculture subsidy bill went through, and a guy came up from Central America, and I thought he was going to yell at me, because this bill was not particularly popular in some parts of the developing world. So I was controlling my temper, because I don't tolerate anti-Americanism very well, unless I prepare myself. And he came up to me, "I want to talk to you." I said, "Yes, but why do you want to talk to me?" He said, "I'm the Minister of Agriculture in Guatemala." And I thought: “Oh, no, here it comes, another attack and I have to listen to this lecture and be nice and polite and all, and diplomatic.” He said, "I came here to thank you. I got my degree with an AID scholarship. I was a Foreign Service National on the AID mission in Guatemala 20 years ago, and I learned my skills in agricultural development in the AID mission. That's why I am Minister of Agriculture now. So, I came here to thank you.”

I said, "You mean you're not going to talk about the agricultural subsidy bill?" He said, "No, we'll just forget about that. I just want to thank you now for helping me get to where I am now."

We're working in Afghanistan, and we've been working there since September 11th, three weeks after September 11th, when it was clear where the attack on the United States came from, and it was clear that the center of Taliban had moved. You know, it was in Sudan originally, another failed and failing state. And then it went to Somalia, another state that hasn't had a government for 12 years, to another country without a national government in a formal sense, Afghanistan. It is interesting that this terrorist network moves among failed states.

The President's National Security Strategy says in it that the United States is less at risk from conquering states than it is from failed and failing states. It's in the National Security Strategy. We have it all over AID in all our documents. Because we not only believe it, but we've created a new bureau; it's my old bureau that I led in the first Bush Administration reconfigured with new offices. Its mandate is to deal with failed and failing states, of which there a couple of dozen in the world. It is not that poor people become terrorists. It is not that poverty causes terrorism, because it does not. Okay? If it did, we'd have an awful lot of terrorists in the world, since there are a lot of poor people in the world. It is that unstable and failed and failing states are places that are havens for terrorists. Why is that? It doesn't require a genius to realize that if you're doing bad things, you want a state that doesn't have any law enforcement system, or a judiciary to prosecute people, or a police department that can capture people and put them on trial, put them in jail. Some of these states have no jails or prisons. There's no judicial system. There's no prison system.

So it is dangerous to American national interests, narrowly defined, to have two dozen countries in the world that are either in chaos or on the edge of chaos.

Zimbabwe, for example, was a functional state. It had a 92 percent literacy rate, and it was rapidly developing in the early '80s. And then Robert Mugabe began to collapse the state through a series of predatory and tyrannical efforts to destroy the agricultural system. And now he has a country on the edge of complete collapse. So, failed national leadership can cause this.

Afghanistan is a challenge for the United States and for AID, and for State and Defense. But we've done things, and it is not widely understood what we've done. So, let me talk a little bit about what we've done in Afghanistan.

I sent in a young woman, who used to work for me as a micro-economist. She is a micro-economist of famine. Her name is Sue Lautze. She now is at the Feinstein Famine Center at Tufts. Sue is a woman of great analytical ability. I sent her in, and I said, "Sue, I read all these reports, and I don't believe them, or they seem distorted, or incomplete. And I want someone to tell me what the hell is going on in Afghanistan." This was in the spring of 2002, when the war had just ended.

She went in with a team of half a dozen people, and she trained 40 Afghans, carefully chosen from all regions and ethnicities of the country, educated people, in how to interview people. They interviewed 1,400 people across the country, for three hours each. From different ethnic backgrounds, different religious traditions: Shi’a, Sunni, Hazara, Pushtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks. You go through the list. She came out with a very thick report that's still on our web site. It's a fascinating piece of research on what was really going on in Afghan society.

One of my areas of expertise is in famines. This is the book that I wrote in North Korea. I said, "We assumed from the indicators that a famine was developing." And she said, "Yes, it was. But it appears you've stopped it with that massive relief program." That started actually in the summer of 2000 before September 11, but it was accelerated, because we get a lot more money when the supplemental went through.

The President said, "How much money do you need?" And we said how much. Much to my shock, we got everything we asked for. Not only that -- the President is the first president with an MBA -- and he wanted to know exactly what was going on week to week. Colin Powell would come and say, "Andrew, do you have any more detailed operational indications of what you're doing?" I said, "The President is really interested in the mundane reality of how you run a famine relief effort." He said, "Yes. And the more specific you're going to be, the better off, because I cannot answer some of these questions unless you put some mechanism for reporting together."

We did that, through mapping systems, and it worked very well. The President was fascinated by the details of how we ran the famine relief program. What was developing before September 11th was a massive famine sweeping across the country, and we were able to stop it.

Sue Lautze in her report says that before we started our effort, 25 percent of the country was receiving food aid. When we were at the height of it six months later, 60 percent of the people were receiving food assistance from the United States.

Why was there a famine in Afghanistan? Through 25 years of civil war, number one. Two: five years of drought; collapse of the agricultural system. The country had a 50 percent food deficit, which is to say it had to get that much food, or people would die. And people were dying.

This is a terrible story that was reported in Save the Children reports and in Sue Lautze's report. In some areas, some areas in the Tajik and Uzbek area north of the Hazarajat, near Mazar-es-Sheriff, in the mountain areas, women were giving small amounts of opium to their babies. And I said, "Why would they do that?" To prevent them from crying, because they were knitting wonderful Afghan rugs. That's how they survived, because the crops had all failed. And they said , "The only thing left we have is we make these rugs, we sell them, we get the money, we buy food with it. That's how we're going to survive." And when the children cried they just couldn't get the rugs done. Just a small amount of it, just to calm them down and make them sleep.

I said, "This sounds like a famine's developing." They said, "It is developing." The problem is they flooded the market with these rugs, and the price collapsed for the rugs. They're beautiful rugs, but there's only so much of the market for them. And I said "That's a famine indicator. We're facing a massive crisis." This was reported in April of 2001 before the terrorist attack.

This Lautze report said there were three things going on in Afghanistan, which were massive consequences to the drought. The Hazarajat, which is the alpine plane in the center of Afghanistan, where it's 20 degrees below zero in the wintertime with 30 feet of snow in a normal winter --30 feet of snow, if you can imagine that -- this is the Hazarajat. These people are Shi’a muslims, not Sunni Muslims. Discriminated against historically and allied religiously with the Iranians over centuries. And this winter there were three feet of snow on the ground. There were huge irrigation systems built by the Afghan kings in the 16th and 17th century. The most elaborate and sophisticated irrigation systems I've ever seen anywhere in the world. And they were built underground to avoid the evaporation of water.

The water from all of these irrigation systems was from the Hazarajat. All of the snows would melt in the spring and the rivers formed by the melting snow would go underground, into these underground rivers, artificially created by the Afghan kings, to take whole deserts. Hundreds of miles of desert were, in fact, for three or four hundred years extremely rich agricultural areas. The Taliban burned down and cut down and blew up hundreds and hundreds of miles of these extremely rich Eden-like agricultural areas north of Kabul.

I visited them. I couldn't believe it. It met a 70-year-old man who was the local Mullah in his mosque. And the mosque was rubble. And I said, "What happened?" And he started to cry. It was very painful to see a 70-year-old man crying in front of me. He had been a mullah in this mosque for 30 years. And he said, "Taliban came here and because we did not agree with them" -- these were all Tajiks -- he said, "they burned the village to the ground and then they blew up the mosque in front of me." I said, “some Muslims, huh? Some Muslims.” They burned, they destroyed his mosque. And we sat together as he spoke in the ruins of his mosque, in the ruins of his village. The vineyards! I mean I said to one of the farmers, I said, "What did you, eat grapes from the vineyards, and raisins?" He said, "No, we also had wine." I said, "This is nonalcoholic wine." He said, "No, no, it was alcoholic wine. We had wonderful vineyards here, and wineries. And we would like to have them again if we could only keep control of Taliban. Of course it will be for export." I said, "Of course, of course, it will be for export."

I said, "We'd be glad to import in the United States if it's of high quality. We do have a free market in our wines.”

And it was sort of interesting because it appeared, I saw in Kabul all of the vines cut down and used for firewood. I said, "They're all dead. And all of these canals had been blown up. They'd been destroyed. "You'll never recreate this." And the farmer said "It will take three years, and we will have them, because the roots are still alive. And if you help us rebuild this irrigation system, all of this vast valley will be one rich Eden-like place."

And you know what? It's all coming back now. We did our reconstruction work at the village level, agriculturally; we've cleaned out the irrigation canals; we've rebuilt the ones that were blown up. The Hazarajat had a good year last winter. The water is coming back into them.

I saw apples this big. And I thought they were imported from Washington State or from Oregon. They were Afghan apples which they used to export. Extraordinary apples and other kinds of fruit – pomegranate, quince, and almonds, and all sorts of nuts. Vast exports in this whole area. It is coming back now, if we can maintain an agricultural system or rebuild an agricultural system that was so productive at one point.

The Lautze study said drought was destroying the country. Debt -- that's the one thing we did not see. We could not understand this, but the way Afghans survived is they borrowed money; it was a class-based system and the poor borrowed it from the middle class, the middle class borrowed it from the upper class. By the summer of 2001 even the upper class in Afghanistan was bankrupt. There was no more money. If we had not put in massive food assistance, there would have been large-scale starvation in Afghanistan. And we avoided that.

So it was food insecurity, it was debt, and it was drought. The animal herds in the south in many areas, 90 percent of them are dead. So rebuilding those animal herds is an important part of the agricultural reconstruction of the country.

What are the objectives of U.S. policy in Afghanistan? The first is to develop a competent functional central government that has an ability to provide public services outside of the capital city, to make a difference in the villages -- eighty percent of the people live in villages in the rural areas --and maintain a national army and a police force and a judicial system.

Now, people think development takes place over a couple of years. It doesn't. You can't reconstruct a country that's been destroyed over 25 years of civil war in two years. It's going to take a decade to do this. But we are making some progress. We have had a problem with instability and insecurity in the last three or four months. It is deteriorating. I have to tell you. There are different theories as to why that's happening. State and AID tend to take the view that it is the warlords that's the problem. The Defense Department tends to say that it's the al Qaeda, the remnants of al Qaeda and Taliban. There's a debate going on. I probably shouldn't tell you such candid things. But there is a debate as to what's really happening. We're not sure. No one has gone out and interviewed these people who are killing people and kidnapping people, asking them who are they loyal to, the warlords or al Qaeda or Taliban. And that's there's a debate over what's really happening.

The second objective of U.S. policy is to revive the economy, which means revive the agricultural system broadly defined, because without that people don't have jobs.

The third is the stabilization of the population. What does that mean? It means resettlement of refugees, repatriation of refugees. Several million refugees have returned spontaneously from neighboring countries, having been away for 20 years.

Next is to resettle displaced people, and demobilize the armies of these warlords that controlled parts of the country for long.

And finally to improve the human misery index. Afghanistan has the distinction of the worst indicators in terms of the human misery index in the entire world. They have the lowest caloric intake of any country in the world. The lowest caloric intake. It's a sad commentary. The malnutrition rates were so astronomically high when we first started working. Actually we spent a billion dollars in the '90s keeping people alive, even during Taliban, the U.S. government did, through several administrations. But the reality is you can't really do that effectively unless there's a competent national government. They have the highest, with Sierre Leone, the highest maternal mortality rate, in other words, pregnant women dying in or before birth in the whole world. Only Sierre Leone has that same rate. And child mortality is 25 percent; 25 percent of the kids die before they're five. It's one of the highest in the world. And you can go down the list. Almost every indicator is horrendous.

Now, what are we doing in terms of reconstruction? We're running a huge education reconstruction program, training 50,000 teachers, many of whom were never trained as teachers; they are simply the literate person in the village, teaching. That's what it is in most cases. Two-thirds of them are women. We have also printed textbooks -- thirty million of them. I thought it was 25 million, but was corrected by my staff on Friday; it's 30 million textbooks, 15 million earlier last year and then 15 million this year.

We intended these textbooks to be a temporary thing for one year, but the minister of education and the president, President Karzai, liked them so much he said, “This is the permanent curriculum for the country.” It's 175 books, they're in Pushtu and Dari, the two major languages. We did them to open schools.

AID had a lot to do with the opening of schools, not just for educational purposes. It was also to get the kids off the streets, because Afghanistan has more land mines than most other countries in the world. And to get the kids off the streets, out of the fields where they were getting blown up or getting their legs blown up, or the young men who are teenagers getting recruited into the warlord armies, we put them in the schools and they are less likely to do that.

There's a huge thirst for education. So we're building 1200 schools, we're training 50,000 teachers, and we've printed 30 million textbooks.

We're working on the agricultural system. There was an 82 percent, 82 percent increase in wheat production, the major crop in the country in the last year. No one knows that. No one talks about that. Now, part of that was the rain coming, the irrigation systems being restored after the war was over. There was a massive effort to do that through the NGO community. And it worked.

We are now in the process of replacing the seed stock of the country, which is among the worst. Only Iraq and North Korea, interestingly enough, have worse quality seed than Afghanistan does. Two-thirds of a ton per hectare production in those three countries. And with the new seed, which is drought-resistant by the way, we should get three to four tons per hectare, a massive increase. The country will be self-sufficient in another year to two years, maybe even exporting.

The third is in the area of economic governance. We're working with the Treasury Department to set up the infrastructure for investment. We helped the Central Bank develop the new currency. We're going to work to sell off the 200 parastatals that were owned under the Soviet system. The cement factories, for example, are all government-owned. They're all bankrupt.

And the other thing like a uniform commercial code, having a uniform budgeting and accounting system for the national government, those sorts of things.

We've also worked to stand up we call “ministries in a box.” After the war the ministries were all blown up, there were no computers, there were no desks, there was no paper, there were no telephones. There was no system for the ministries to talk to the regions. And so we set up all those systems working with the United Nations Development Program and our own Mission.

I was told, ordered, last September to build a road from Kabul to Kandahar. It's 300 miles. It was first built by President Eisenhower in 1959; in 1961 it was finished, but it hasn't been maintained at all since. It takes like seven hours to go a length that would normally take two hours or an hour. This is very important to the Pushtuns, who dominate that area. President Karzai is a Pushtun, but he's not very popular in some of those sub-clans within the Pushtuns since they were the base of support of Taliban. At 300 miles, it's like building a road from Boston to Washington. We have eight months to do it. It's going to be done by December. And it will get done one way or the other.

And finally is health care. We need 1,100 clinics at the village level to provide health care for the country. We're building 400 of them, and they will done in two years to lower these terrible child and maternal mortality rates.

I've gone way over my time, but perhaps I can answer questions now. Anyway, those are our objectives. I think we're beginning to show some progress in a number of areas. But there's a good story to tell; it's just not being told very well. That's my fault. We're trying to correct that.

You at the Asia Foundation had a lot to do with the Loya Jerga, which elected President Karzai. You did the monitoring in the villages to make sure that no one was manipulating the results. You helped with the logistics systems for the Loya Jerga. You're helping with the constitutional convention to write the new constitution, which we are funding. You have an expert from Australia, I believe, and someone from Kenya who is helping. And I think you are providing those technical experts with an AID grant. So you are, on the governance side, probably our most important partner. This is critical to develop a competent central democratically elected state that can govern the country over the longer term.

So thank you all.

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