26
May
Ambassador Patricia Haslach is a Senior Advisor to Almizan Advisors. She specialises in the nexus between stabilisation, international development, trade, and security, having operated in numerous conflict and post-conflict settings. In conversation with Almizan, Ambassador Haslach discusses her career trajectory and the ingredients for success or failure in overseas interventions.
Ambassador Haslach’s background in the U.S. Department of State spans a wide variety of geographical theatres, including the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Washington DC. She served as Ambassador to Ethiopia and Laos and to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum; Acting Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs; Director for the Office for Afghanistan responsible for the multi-billion-dollar reconstruction programme; Deputy Coordinator for Diplomacy for the U.S Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative; and Assistant Chief of Mission for Assistance Transition in Iraq. Later Ambassador Haslach served as Coordinator for Iraq Transition in the Office of the Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources, where she was responsible for coordinating all Washington-based aspects of the U.S. transition from military to civilian operations culminating with the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops at the end of December 2011.
What prompted you to become a diplomat?
A whole lot of reasons. I was interested in travel, languages and different cultures. I wanted to find a career that could combine those elements. But it was also, and it may sound trite to say this, about ‘saving the world’. You need to recall the context in which I grew up – the height of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis. There was a certain idealism that started in the sixties, when President Kennedy set up the Peace Corps, and there was a notion that service mattered, rather than simply getting a job that made a lot of money. Having said that, my father was initially against my joining the diplomatic service. He wanted me to go to law school. But I said I wanted to go to a graduate school to study International Affairs. So that’s what I did. And I never regretted that decision.
Decision-making across the political and military spheres when it comes to conflicts and crises tends to be a male dominated affair, although this has started to change in the last 10-15 years. I imagine you were one of relatively few senior women ‘in theatre’ in for example, your role on the Iraq transition process. Did you find this advantageous? Disadvantageous? Or did it not really play a role for you at all?
I was lucky in that I wasn’t one of the trailblazers. I joined the Foreign Service in the mid-1980s. Up until 1973, when you joined the diplomatic service, you couldn’t have a private life. If you got married and were a woman, you had to resign. Fortunately, by the time I joined, there were a lot of women diplomats and the number kept growing over my career. I was also lucky that I had several strong female role models and bosses. I worked directly for Secretary Hillary Clinton – there is no more inspiring a role model than Hillary – and with others such as Wendy Sherman who is the current Deputy Secretary of State, and Ambassador Barbara Leaf who is now Assistant Secretary for the Middle East and North Africa. I was also the first of five children – the first three were all girls. I was never held back by my family, and being the eldest instilled a certain level of confidence.
I worked extensively with the military during my career – both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. What is important about the military is that they respect rank. Your rank, in some ways, is more important than your gender. By the time I got to Iraq, my rank was equivalent to that of a three-star general. I found that the military was great to work with because they respected people who were experts in their fields.
That said, we have a lot more to do with regards to diversity, because by bringing in more women and people from a variety of backgrounds and skillsets we get away from groupthink. I’ll come back to this point later, but the arrogance and hubris of believing that ‘we have the best plan’, with no real consultation with all the stakeholders, has played a key role in many of the failures associated with some of the large-scale interventions that have occurred. We have seen this in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the list goes on – where decision-makers have been very homogeneous and there was little to no diversity.
Did you ever find that being a woman operating in more conservative cultures can be advantageous? For example, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where if you are a woman from abroad you are sometimes treated as a third gender.
That’s an interesting point. On many occasions, I would go to an event, where I would get invited to be with the men in the Majlis [room for receiving guests in traditional Arab culture], but I would also be asked to go see the women. So, I’d go and spend some time with the women, and then I would come back to the Majlis. You get a broader perspective this way. When I was visiting Afghan refugee camps on the border with Pakistan, I could go right inside the camps, I could talk to the young girls. I had a lot more access than my male colleagues.
The other advantage of being a woman in these spheres is that a lot of men in positions of influence simply aren’t used to dealing with women professionally. You can sometimes use that to your advantage to lower their defences and generate the outcomes you want to achieve. I always look back to when I was dealing with the Deputy Commander for Reconstruction in Iraq. He was a big man and he used to come into the office in his imposing field uniform. I would sit him down, give him a cup of green tea, and then we would start to talk about reconstruction and development projects. He was a fan of ‘women’s projects,’ and was anxious to show me a hair dressing salon project in West Baghdad. We agreed to visit. The experience was surreal. We arrived in a Humvee, with armed military protection accompanying us. All of us were wearing full protective gear. At the salon the women were dressed in full niqab, while the room was plastered with pictures of busty blonde Dolly Parton lookalikes. I told him the project was ridiculous and not sustainable. These types of projects are simply ‘check a box’ and do not empower women in any way. So, we worked together with the military to start investing in more impactful projects to help Iraqi women – and not just in West Baghdad. For real economic empowerment, I like the example of the principles behind Grameen Bank and its micro-lending projects, which started in Bangladesh. Small seed loans are given to individuals, often women, to set up a business tailored to their circumstances, cultural norms, and the local economy.
There is plenty of research [1] which claims that the greater participation of women in the mediation of crises and the establishment of post-conflict agreements means peace agreements are less likely to fail. Have you come across examples of where more inclusive engagement leads to better decision-making, and ultimately better outcomes for those worst-affected by conflict and crisis?
I can recall several examples from when I was the number two (Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary) in the Conflict and Stabilisation Bureau at the State Department. The Assistant Secretary was Ambassador Rick Barton who had set up the Office of Transition Initiatives at the U.S. Agency for International Development. We worked on a project that aimed to prevent violence which had occurred during the 2007 elections from being repeated during Kenya’s 2012 elections. We engaged with women’s groups, civil society, and youth to identify when and where violence might break out and mushroom into a much bigger problem and then try to prevent it from happening. It was a small project, but it was successful because it took into consideration what the Kenyans wanted – they designed it, with our support. I think that’s key. People on the ground often know best what they want and need.
The other example was in Sierra Leone. It was a similar intervention focused on preventing violence during national elections. This time we gave the mothers and the women household members mobile phones. They were able to call in when their son, brother, husband, was leaving to go join a group that was trying to disrupt the election process. We empowered them to get involved directly by preventing family members especially teenage boys from joining the violence.
Another good example was a programme addressing gang violence in Honduras. The idea came from mothers and sisters and wives who had seen their male family members killed. We brought in trainers from cities in the United States that had large gang violence issues such as Baltimore. They met with the communities in Honduras, and they came up with very practical ways of trying to address the violence. I really credit the female ambassador at the time, Lisa Kubiske, who pushed for this project to come to fruition.
I’ll give you an example of non-diverse decision-making and that’s South Sudan. When I was in Ethiopia, I sometimes had to step in for the special representative who was covering the South Sudanese peace process. I remember being invited to meetings which included the donors, and regional and government representatives from both sides of the conflict. Women from civil society groups were systematically excluded. The South Sudanese negotiators wouldn’t let them in the room. Look how unsuccessful that peace process has been. Look at the long list of failures over the last 30 years: Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. That’s a forceful argument for humility and a different approach. In each one of those cases, women were not fully included or if they were included, such as in Afghanistan’s case, they were a token presence.
I imagine you repeatedly have seen the ingredients for both success and failure, in overseas political and military interventions and international development assistance. What patterns or conditions for success and failure would you highlight?
One of the problems with large-scale interventions that start off first as a military conflict is that once that military-industrial complex starts moving, and the contractors get involved, and the money starts flowing, people lose sight of the mission. I also don’t think we do adequate monitoring and evaluation that allows for a reset if necessary. We monitor and evaluate ourselves, rather than having third parties do it, which is not very effective.
It is also important to separate work during a conflict, where you’re trying to disarm whichever groups are carrying guns, from the next stage: reconstruction and stabilisation, and then the ultimate stages of more traditional development assistance. You need to break down your intervention into distinct stages with distinct strategies and realistic goals. It’s also who you entrust to do that reconstruction. As a stop gap, while conflict is ongoing, you’re trying to get the guns away from the soldiers. You say: “Okay, here’s some money. Go dig a ditch. Give me your gun”. That works up until a point. But full reconstruction requires professionals designing and overseeing the work. Look at the lessons learnt from Afghanistan and Iraq: some individuals deployed as Civil Affairs Officers did a lot of good work, but they were not development experts. A dentist from Iowa is a dentist from Iowa. He should not be doing a women’s program or growing strawberries in the middle of Iraq where they don’t necessarily grow.
When you try to mix reconstruction with live conflict it often doesn’t work because the military and security narrative dominates everything else. We set up provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan. They were led by the military but with civilian participation. The commanders often did not listen to the civilian experts that were on their teams. In Iraq they were civilian led with military protection. But even in that case, the military would say: “No, it’s not safe. You can’t do this. We don’t trust that.” Security is one dimension and certainly an important one. People do want security, but they also want opportunity and empowerment. And for that you need experts in those subject areas, and for them to be heard.
Any approach that makes local people its primary concern is more likely to work. Governments need to use overseas assistance to leverage and jumpstart promising change. It shouldn’t be: “We’re going to design this for you, and we’re going to tell you how to do it”. My husband, who is also in this line of work, calls it the 5/5 rule. You need to have a relationship with the full range of people that are you’re going to be dealing with in a particular crisis. You will need stakeholders such as local politicians, religious leaders, civil society, elites, businesspeople, and other power brokers. Out of 10 stakeholders, you need to have at have at least five in those categories. They in turn need to have a good relationship with their people. You should aim to have at least five direct relationships with a diverse cross section of the community. If you don’t have at least a five and five in both categories, you have a problem. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, we brought in expatriate Afghans, Iraqis, and Syrians who hadn’t been in their country in years. That is not going to cut it – as we have seen.
I’ve often seen the mistake of operating in silos. We initially split up Afghanistan reconstruction and stabilisation support among the different coalition partners. The Italians handled justice, the Germans trained the police, and the US rebuilt the military. The Brits were responsible for the anti-drug campaigns. There wasn’t a unified process. In any stabilisation intervention it shouldn’t just be one agency – in the US case, the military, or the State Department. It needs to be a combination of different players, and that means, NGOs, former government officials and so on should be part of the information-generating process that feeds into decision-making. There also needs to be one entity (e.g., the United Nations) with a mandate to lead the mission. The reality of doing so is of course more complex than the theory, but ultimately it comes down to enlightened and inclusive leadership.
There continues to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics permeates every aspect of stabilisation assistance. I will end with a key takeaway from the 2018 US Stabilisation Assistance review undertaken by Dr Frances Brown: the need to acknowledge from the outset the inherently political nature of this work. That means doing the hard work of aligning host nation interests with that of donors, ensuring unity of effort, and the need to start small. I’ve always found that the small projects, where you first test, and perhaps eventually decide to scale, are the most impactful.
[1]: see for example https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-peace-processes/