Please email this letter along with your own thoughts to Mr. Alonzo Fulgham, president of USAID, asking him to direct one half of the $1.5 billion Afghanistan reconstruction funds contained in the recently passed Supplemental Appropriations bill to fund cash-for-work projects in Afghanistan, which efficiently puts money into the hands of the poorest Afghans. USAID is the agency through which the vast majority of your reconstruction tax dollars are disbursed to Afghanistan. Also please send a copy to President Obama, and to your congressman. Home: Jobs for Afghans.<
Letter
from
Americans to Congress on Afghanistan, The Five Percent Solution (Start
a committee in your community to sign this or your own letter. A
committee can be just 2 people. Highlight page,
copy-and-paste into your congressman's (email form here.)
Dear
Congressman/Senator,
The
mismanaged war in Afghanistan is spinning out of control.
We
your undersigned constituents are supporters of Jobs for Afghans,
and as our representative we would like you to call for a new approach
which will
secure stability, help the Afghan people, and enable our troops to come
home within one year. General David Petraeus,
General Karl
Eikenberry,
Vice President Joe Biden, and Time Magazine all agree: 70% of the
insurgents are men who fight mainly because the Taliban pays a daily
wage so they can feed their families. The unemployment rate is
40%. Hunger and malnutrition is the norm, and starvation is not
uncommon. One village elder in the Korengal Valley was
quoted in the April 2009 issue of Time Magazine as saying: "Give them
jobs, and they will stop fighting."
General
Eikenberry, former commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan, said to Congress in 2007, "Much of the enemy force is
drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support
their families." General Petraeus said that those who are
simply
fighting to support their families should be given an economic
alternative. Providing jobs paying between $5 to $10 per day,
which is
an good wage in Afghanistan, is one such means.
Jobs
for Afghans demands that our U.S. Congress earmark 5%
the amount appropriated for military operations in Afghanistan, our tax
dollars, to a fund which benefits ordinary Afghans with simple day
labor jobs, paid in cash at the end of each day. Such
programs have already been implemented on a small scale in various
provinces with great success, in Jawzjan Province, Uruzgan, and Balkh
Province, to name a few. They address a root cause of the
insurgency: 40% unemployment and desperate poverty. The goal of
Jobs for Afghans is to help Afghans achieve a stable enough economic
and political footing to allow U.S. forces to withdraw within one
year.
Cash-for-work projects are tried and
proven. The challenge for Congress is to implement them on a wide
scale. Cash-for-work programs
have the advantages of:
- Being tried and proven
on a small scale.
- Accountability.
Cash-for-work projects are labor-intensive and easy to audit, since
little machinery or building materials are required. Most
cash-for-work projects require only hand tools, involving projects such
as clearing debris and rubble from canals, or digging miles of ditch
for future water and electricity infrastructure.
- Being
inexpensive. A competitive wage in Afghanistan for day labor is
$10 per day. $5 per day compares with pay on the Afghan
National Police force.
- Allowing the
prioritization of projects which are useful to the community.
Afghanistan is currently in a pre-development stage of economic growth,
in which basic infrastructure in water, sewage, and electricity are
more important than state-of-the-art factories. Three-fourths of the
population has no access to safe drinking water, and many die from
preventable, water-borne disease.
- Easy to manage and
supervise. Most supervision is indigenous once the project is
defined, so that many foreign engineers are not needed in the field,
which is a security risk.
- Economic
sustainability. Such a program will encourage small capital
formation which is critical to the evolution of the small business
sector, and will complement all other development initiatives.
Jobs
for Afghans is proposing that this fund, equal to no less than $4
billion, be administered by the US agency USAID, through which most
reconstruction funds are already administered. Funds would then
be disbursed to a mix of NGOs and Afghan government departments
submitting qualifying proposals, and agreeing to USAID reporting
requirements, including random headcounts of workers at work sites and
spot audits.
If
the U.S. Congress can spend $700 billion of taxpayer money to bail out
the bad investments of banks, it can spend $4 billion to stop a war.
We
call our solution The Five
Percent Solution, as the amount is roughly 5% of what the
United
States already spends for the war each year. The Obama
administration has already affirmed that this war
cannot be fought "by military means alone."
Some
say that the security situation in Afghanistan will not allow for
large-scale reconstruction work to take place, but this is not
true. Some parts of the country are more stable than others,and
these are where these projects should begin.
Eight
full
years after liberation from the unpopular and oppressive Taliban, the
vast majority of Afghans remain in desperate poverty, and this has
given the insurgency its opening. One out of five
children dies before the age of five, one of the highest infant
mortality rates in the world, more women die in childbirth than
anywhere in the world, due to lack of basic medical supplies, and
three-fourths of the country has no access to clean drinking water,
resulting in many people dying of preventable, water-borne disease.
The Marshall Plan after World War II showed that economic strategy is
as
important as military strategy in securing peace and prosperity after
conflict. The benefits of peace are
on
display in the long period of expansion and prosperity following the
Marshall
Plan in Europe. The Afghan people have for 30 years been invaded,
occupied, and treated as pawns by the international community.
The time
has come to reach out and to offer what has never been offered before:
help
which allows Afghans to help themselves and to build their own country,
with
dignity and pride, through the sweat of their own brows. The
world will
be rewarded with stabillity, prosperity, and a new start in relations
with Muslim
nations, so that humanity may face the pressing challenges of the new
Millenia
as one.
The
following senators are on the Senate
Appropriations Committee, which is a key comittee in passing a program
such as the Jobs for Afghans initiative. Please present our
program to them, and use your point of personal privilege to take the
floor of the House of Representatives to make a call for "The
Five Percent Solution.".
Your district demands it. Please keep us appraised of your
progress, and report to us as to which of these
senators is
on-board, so our organization can lobby those who are not. Thank you.
Signed,
(Name/Names of constituents)
In Support of Jobs for Afghans
http://jobsforafghans.org
Senate
Appropriations Committee:
Sen.
Daniel K. Inouye (D- HI)
202-224-3934
Sen.
Robert C. Byrd (D- WV)
202-224-3954
Sen.
Patrick J. Leahy (D- VT)
202-224-4242
Sen.
Tom Harkin (D- IA)
202-224-3254
Sen.
Barbara A. Mikulski (D- MD)
202-224-4654
Sen.
Herb Kohl (D- WI)
202-224-5653
Sen.
Patty Murray (D- WA)
202-224-2621
Sen.
Byron L. Dorgan (D- ND)
202-224-2551
Sen.
Dianne Feinstein (D- CA)
202-224-3841
Sen.
Richard J. Durbin (D- IL)
202-224-2152
Sen.
Mitch McConnell (R- KY)
202-224-2541
Sen.
Richard C. Shelby (R- AL)
202-224-5744
Sen.
Judd Gregg (R- NH)
202-224-3324
Sen.
Robert F. Bennett (R- UT)
202-224-5444
Sen.
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R- TX)
202-224-5922
Sen.
Tim Johnson (D- SD)
202-224-5842
Sen.
Mary Landrieu (D- LA)
202-224-5824
Sen.
Jack Reed (D- RI)
202-224-4642
Sen.
Frank Lautenberg (D- NJ)
202-224-3224
Sen.
Ben Nelson (D- NE)
202-224-6551
Sen.
Mark Pryor (D- AR)
202-224-2353
Sen.
Jon Tester (D- MT)
202-224-2644
Sen.
Thad Cochran (R- MS)
202-224-5054
Sen.
Arlen Specter (R- PA)
202-224-4254
Sen.
Kit Bond (R- MO)
202-224-5721
Sen.
Sam Brownback (R- KS)
202-224-6521
Sen.
Lamar Alexander (R- TN)
202-224-4944
Sen.
Susan Collins (R- ME)
202-224-2523
Sen.
George Voinovich (R- OH)
202-224-3353
Sen.
Lisa Murkowski (R- AK)
202-224-6665
Links:
General Petraeus speech:
http://www.defenselink.mil//news/newsarticle.aspx?id=54107
