During Friday’s meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, University alumna Deanna Gordon was one of the officials participating in the presidents’ discussion about the progress of civil interagency groups in Afghanistan.
Gordon, a Foreign Service officer for the United States Agency for International Development who was stationed in Afghanistan for about 2.5 years, said the meeting was held “to talk about progress that has been made to the PRT [provincial reconstruction teams] program in Afghanistan.”
Officials from a number of U.S. federal agencies, such as the National Security Council, State Department and USAID participated in the meeting, as did officials in Kabul, who communicated through a live broadcast teleconference, Gordon said.
“It was an opportunity for the president to speak directly with individuals who are helping the Afghan people rebuild their country,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said.
The discussion primarily focused on the recent successes of the PRT programs in various regions of Afghanistan and on what the future holds for the war-torn country, Gordon said.
“It was really more of an operational discussion,” she said, in which officials spoke in great detail and were able to point out significant successes.
“There was a very positive note to the whole meeting,” she added. “Both presidents were interested in what people had to say.”
Despite the current optimism, reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan have not always gone smoothly.
“In Afghanistan, like Iraq, reconstruction has been very unsteady,” University Assoc. Politics Prof. David Waldner said. The problems, he said, have been with resources for reconstruction and “insufficient management of resources.”
Still, “PRTs have been among the most successful type of reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Waldner said. He cited decentralization of PRTs to the local level as reasons for success.
During her first year in Afghanistan, Gordon worked as a special projects advisor with a U.S. Special Forces team in the southern region of the country, she said. The rest of her time was spent with the PRT program in various — often remote — parts of Afghanistan, she said, where she worked with other officials to implement development initiatives and establish better relationships with the Afghan people.
Overall, Gordon said her general impression of Afghanistan was positive.
“There are a lot of bad things going on, but despite all that, there are a lot of good things going on in Afghanistan,” she said.
Many of the positive developments in Afghanistan, she said, tend to get less attention because they are often harder to measure and even harder to communicate.
“It’s not always possible to measure the level of success in establishing a government,” she said.
Waldner also said he sees continuing obstacles for reconstruction in Afghanistan.
“You won’t see steady reconstruction until you solve the problem of security,” he said.
In Gordon’s experience, foreign service officers or military forces often did not have to work the hardest or sacrifice the most to achieve success — rather, the native residents did.
“The Afghans take the greatest risk,” Gordon said. “People that get overlooked are the Afghans that work for us. It changes their lives forever. They are really the ones that are making this happen over there.”
Gordon said she returned from Afghanistan in April and now works in the East Asia Office of USAID and will be headed to Iraq in January. She graduated from the University with a degree in foreign affairs, and during her years as an undergraduate, she said, she mainly focused on Latin American affairs. Studying general foreign policy helped her make the career choice to work with USAID.
“That’s really what got me interested in this,” she said.
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