Reconstruction in Iraq: How Much is Needed, How Can it be Measured?
BY DAVID DAVIS
The coalition intervention in Iraq of the spring of 2003 was carried out to depose a cruel and heinous dictator, Saddam Hussein. There has been much press and conjecture about other reasons for the intervention. What is little debated however, is that the Iraq that the coalition found was in great need. The efforts of the U.S.-led coalition and the international community to help reconstruct Iraq are, in their sum, one of the most expensive activities since the Marshal Plan in postwar Europe. U.S. appropriations for the various Iraq relief and reconstructions funds exceed $20 billion here almost 30 months later. If this had been expended over time—and it was not—the amount is equivalent to more than $15,000 per minute for the entire 30-month period.
This article analyzes reconstruction effort in terms of the dollar amounts planned and expended. Several base documents are used, including the 2207 reports that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), now U.S. Embassy Baghdad, provides to the U.S. Congress quarterly, and the assessment in late 2003 by the United Nations (UN) and World Bank (WB). (These documents are available on the web in one form or another.) The Conceptual Model of Peace Operations is used as the base framework.
UNITED NATIONS AND WORLD BANK ASSESSMENTS
This assessment was a joint effort of the UN, WB, and CPA. The priority sectors are: local administration; rule of law and civil society; health, education, and employment; infrastructure (transport and telecommunications, water, sanitation, solid waste, electricity, urban management, housing, and land management); agriculture and water resources; private sector development; and mine action. The CPA added security and police; oil; culture; environment; human rights; foreign affairs; religious affairs; science and technology; and youth and sport.
The total estimated needs for the UN–WB’s sectors were $35.6 billion; for the CPA’s sectors, total estimated needs were $19.4 billion.
IRAQ RELIEF AND RECONSTRUCTION FUND
Congress appropriated money for Iraq through the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF). IRRF 1, in 2003, was for $2.47 billion. IRRF 2, in 2004, was for $18.44 billion. This latter figure is most often quoted in the news. All of IRRF 1 has been obligated, and all but $60 million has been disbursed. The third quarter fiscal year 2005 2207 report (July 2005) shows $13.6 billion obligated from IRRF 2. Of that $13.6 billion, $6.35 billion has actually been disbursed. Of interest here are the reporting categories for the 2207 report: security and law enforcement; justice, public safety, infrastructure, and civil society; electric sector; oil infrastructure; water resources and sanitation; transportation and telecommunications projects; roads, bridges, and construction; health care; private sector development; education, refugees, human rights, democracy, and governance; and administrative expenses. In both the assessment and the IRRF, security sectors apply to the development of the Iraqi security institutions and do not represent the cost of the counter-insurgency efforts of the coalition. These have been variously estimated at over $200 billion since early 2003.
INTERNATIONAL DONORS
The international community has also pledged to provide funds. As of June 2004, the total amount pledged in the UN consolidated interagency appeal was approximately $2.22 billion. The categories of this appeal were family shelter and nonfood, food, health, protection, human rights rule of law, multisector IDP, education, agriculture, economic recovery and infrastructure, water and sanitation, security, mine action, and coordination and support services. Unfortunately, donor performance is usually no better than 30 to 40 percent of pledged funds. Actual disbursements based on this appeal are not known.
SUFFICIENCY
The funds and allocations listed above provide an interesting backdrop to the daily news from Iraq. Each reporting and executing agency seems to use a different set of sectors. This makes it very difficult to compare or to ask: Is this enough? Are the funding allocations properly and efficiently distributed? To regularize this, I have reviewed each of the categories and the funding against them in terms of the Conceptual Model of Peace Operations (CMPO). The CMPO is a functional cover, or framework, of the Peace Operations domain that has been used at the Peace Operations Policy Program since the mid 1990s. The CMPO decomposes the domain into four high-level functions:
- Peace making: bringing parties together for conflict transformation and the creation of agreements. Usually, although not always, a job for the diplomat.
- Peace building: activities required to sustain a peace; often called nation building.
- Peace keeping: activities required to give peace maker and peace builder space within which they can work. Security, protection, and use of force.
- Peace support: activities that cross all users and support the operation as a whole such as management, liaison, and logistics.
Each of these functions is further decomposed into subordinate functions. For this paper, I have used the third level of the CMPO as an organizing theme. The sectors and categories of funding and needs tend to be overwhelmingly in the peace building process. There are no peace making elements explicitly addressed in any of the funding. Peace keeping is limited in this analysis to only two or three sub functions, as is peace support. The table that follows relates the CMPO functions to the aggregated funding derived from the UN assessment, 2207 reports, and the OCHA report of the consolidated appeal. The CMPO function 3.2.4 (self governance and institution building) is a very broad category for this analysis. Therefore, I broke out the security institutions and relabeled them as 3.2.4.S. Note that this does not include the counter-insurgency actions of the coalition, which would be found in the sub functions of 3.3.
The Figure 1 shows each of the table columns where the percentage is calculated based on the entry of a cell divided by the column total. Therefore, the comparison to be made is on the relative proportions of the columns that each category (CMPO function) has to the other categories in that column. For an explanation of the CMPO numbers in the figure, please see the CMPO column in the table.
The information shows that funding allocations have changed significantly from the original, as represented by the April 5, 2004, data, and the current, as represented by the July 5, 2005, data. The allocations across functions seems changed only slightly everywhere except for institution building and infrastructure. The general institution building (3.2.4) changes only marginally, whereas the security aspects are significantly increased. The increase is at the expense of the infrastructure (3.2.6). This change represents the opinion in the summer and fall of 2004 that the security situation was not being given sufficient priority, and that more resources were needed to train and equip the Iraqi security institutions—their armed forces and police. When we compare these allocations as a percentage of their internal totals to the UN-World Bank assessment, we see that the assessment was even more focused on infrastructure and less focused on security than the original 2207 allocation. One interpretation of this is that in the early days of 2003, the security situation was still not clearly understood by the international community any more than it was understood by the coalition itself.
Also of interest is the actual funding that has been disbursed by function as a percentage of total disbursement. This trend is directly opposite from the trend in the planning, at least for the two functions of interest, security institution building (3.2.4.S) and infrastructure (3.2.6). In this case, the coalition has expended, percentage wise, much more in the security side than in the infrastructure side.
The CPA and its successor, the U.S. Embassy Baghdad, have been using the resources allocated to them to assist in the reconstruction of Iraq. The assumption is that reconstruction will precede stabilization. The amounts being spent are slowly being experimented with to find the mix that enhances this linkage. What is not known is the real tradeoff between the functions. Is the distribution among economic stability, institution building, and infrastructure the proper amount? The only benchmark available was the UN-World Bank assessment. However, as can be seen on the graphics, this assessment was made under the same flawed assumptions as the original 2207 plan.
A major effort to determine the real contribution of these funds to the overall goals of the coalition still must be accomplished. This analysis, as many others, is using only the input measure of funding. What is missing is the outcome measure of overall impact to the mission of the coalition and the stability of Iraq. The changes in 2004 are a movement in the right direction, but still with no auditable rationale. The slow expenditure rate may actually be to the coalition’s advantage. It may still be possible to make these changes.
David Davis (ddavis@gmu.edu) recently returned from Iraq where he was the Lead Risk and Conflict Analyst in the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Office of Policy, Planning and Analysis. He is also the director of the Peace Operations Policy program in the School of Public Policy (http://policy.gmu.edu).
