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Afghans and Americans prepare for the destruction of precursor chemicals found at an illegal narcotics lab.

SIDEBAR

Solving Contractor Issues Is Mainly One of Government Management

Government investigations have found several problems with contracting in the Afghan counternarcotics program, but most concern how the government writes and administers the contracts, and not the contractors themselves.

Increased public awareness and congressional oversight are helping to make changes. So are the contractors, who believe it in their best interests as both businesses and as Americans to have clear rules of the road and lines of accountability.

A survey of government reports shows that many of the problems stem from the immediacy and urgency of solving pressing counterterrorism and counterinsurgency matters on a war footing. Without established laws and rules, innovative officials have had to wing it, and have given the contractors a bit of latitude. The objective was to get the efforts up and running.

Now that Congress is modernizing the laws, the immediate post-9/11 extreme urgency has passed, and the programs have track records from which to learn successes and mistakes, a state of equilibrium is forming.

A 2007 report by the inspectors general of the Departments of State and Defense found that a public information (PI) program in support of State’s Bureau of International and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) eradication efforts suffered from serious flaws. Contracts “were loosely written,” according to the report. “Within the embassy [in Kabul] there was considerable dissatisfaction with the contracts and the contractors” in the information support program carried out by INL through the Hill & Knowlton (H&K) public relations company. “The contract’s only firm metric was the number of hours worked by H&K’s international staff,” as opposed to how effective the contractors were in training Afghan officials to communicate with their public. “Much of the embassy’s frustration with H&K centered on the impression that the PI campaign was insufficiently vigorous. However, there was no evidence that the embassy had instructed H&K to change its priorities.”

This gets back to the need for government officials to become more accustomed to administering the contracts.

A second PI-related contract concerned logistical support and security for the Poppy Elimination Program (PEP). “The PEP manager and team members were unhappy with DynCorp International’s alleged repeated failures to respond promptly to complaints and to address problems adequately,” according to the State and DoD inspectors general. However, “Company officials asserted that the PEP program manager ordered PEP team members not to communicate their concerns directly to the contractor, and that the PEP manager denied the contractors regular contact with the teams on site by restricting their access to flights to the provinces.”

The report isolated a problem and proposed a solution: new contracts “should provide for regular oversight by an embassy officer.”

This collaborative rather than punitive approach, learning from mistakes, will make public-private partnerships more effective in fighting illegal drugs.

Back to "Partnership Against Heroin"

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From the March/April 2008 issue of Serviam.