Alternative Fronts

I have, like everyone else, versions of my resume in Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx), Microsoft Word 2003 (.doc) for the technically challenged, .pdf format, and .txt if I need to upload it somewhere. But I recently saw a resume done completely in flash and it inspired me to look at alternatives to the standard.

I did a Google search on Flash Resume, and a few sites came up, nothing overwhelming. However there were two that I liked. One is called VisualCV. It looks an awful lot like a paper format which doesn't entirely excite me. Its got some neat feature on it to allow you to add on a few things you couldn't to a paper resume. I've done about half of it so far (its slow) and I'll probably finish it up. I'd be surprised if it gets much use. You can see it here. or the not too intuitive http://www.visualcv/nye43d0

The other thing I found - and this didn't come off the search, someone recommended it. Its at http://about.me. This is GORGEOUS done right, and you can randomly flip through profiles (and feel green with envy) at what someone who knows something about graphic design can do with this. I think this is the perfect front page for an electronic resume, and while it inhabits a different space than your cv up in the cloud or wherever, I absolutely love the combination of simplicity and potential beauty. I made my page at the much more intuitive http://about.me/marcshiman.

Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan Evalulation

I just spent the morning reading something that theoretically took 2 years to research and write. I find that a little hard to believe. The report frequently cites newspapers for its quantified facts and reports "conversations with officials" as fact. Stated differently, I now better understand Administrator Shah's dissatisfied with the current state of evaluations.

Besides lacking any specificity, this thing is just full of contradictions. It sure looks to me like it took the evaluators two years to find the supporting information for the Senators' pre-conceived notions. Some of the contradictions are a bit laughable.

Sustainability:

- "According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product (GDP) is derived from spending related to the international military and donor community presence"

and then

- "Focus on Sustainability."....The Afghan Government must have sufficient technical capability and funding to cover operation and maintenance costs after a project is completed.

If the foreign community is outspending the whole rest of the Afghan GDP by a factor of 32 times, the notion that somehow Afghan Government revenues are going to rise by a factor of say, 2000% over the next couple of years in order to take over these projects is pure science fiction. Ain't never gonna happen. There is no "sustainability" when foreign governments pump billions of dollars into poor countries. (The report actually used the word "Pump")

I don't mean to be simple-minded - but handing out money isn't usually a sustainable activity. It can't be made sustainable. "Sustainable" and "winning the hearts and minds" have no business being in the same zip code, never mind the same report.

Composition of Spending

- "After 10 years and roughly $18.8 billion in foreign aid..."

- "The US strategy is focused on building the capacity of the Afghan Institutions to deliver basic services. The State Department and USAID are currently spending approximately $1.25 billion currently on such efforts"

- "The State Department and USAID are spending approximately $320 million a month on foreign aid in Afghanistan...."

- "Roughly 80 percent of USAID's resources are being spent in Afghanistan's restive south and east. Most of the funds in Afghanistan's south and east are being used for short-term stabilization programs..."

These numbers don't add up well at all - but what bothers me is this - The US strategy is capacity building. But the vast sum of our resources is going elsewhere. That's just poor strategy execution. The rest of the money goes "to winning (buying) the hearts and minds of the Afghan people"

And Mr. Afghanistan Assistance Evaluator - how is our strategy doing? How well have we built the capacity of the Afghan Government? I can't seem to find this in your report. Is the problem that the Washington Post hasn't done this research for you yet? If you really want to effectively evaluate a program, you MUST ask whether or not we are achieving our strategy. Or am I missing something?

Its the Contractors Fault

- "By contracting with US and international contractors at western prices (the "primes") donor funds can be lost to corruption.....

against

The third most corrupt country in the world, trailing only Somalia and Myanmar is Afghanistan - Transparency International.

Apparently the Foreign Relations Committee feels that if US contractors were a country, they would be more corrupt than Afghanistan. Better to just deposit billions of tax-payer dollars in Afghanistan Government bank accounts and hope for the best, I guess. The Kabul Bank is cited for "massive fraud" (syphoning off 5% of the nation's GDP for shareholders). But it was Deloitte's fault for not reporting it! Better we put billions (that is billions with a "B") through institutions like the Kabul Bank than through companies like Deloitte given the comparison of the two offenses, concludes our Foreign Relations Committee.

Yes, our government wants to put Billions with a "B" of taxpayer's dollars through the third most corrupt country's budget (something we completely lost control of once done) rather than run it through American contractors because the contractors are difficult to manage.

My Recommendations

The report has some of its own recommendations - here are mine

1) If your strategy is to build the capacity of the government, then use the money for THAT.

2) Once you decide to focus on capacity building, measure that. This report makes absolutely no effort to measure the effectiveness of the US Strategy in Afghanistan.

3) Winning (Buying) the hearts and minds doesn't work. Stop it. If France came over to a poor community in the USA and handed out food, medicines, and Fiats would everyone suddenly become French?

4) Trust the people who have been doing this for 50 years. We have made mistakes over the years, but we've learned. I can't say this for all of the actors in Afghanistan, and I certainly can't say this for the newly formed, very corrupt Afghan Government.

Shame on the Foreign Relations Committee

USAID and its implementing partners have lost over 370 personnel in Afghanistan over the last 7 years

Administrator Rajiv Shah, Ninth Annual Princeton Colloquium to address ‘‘Rethinking U.S. Foreign Aid and Policy,’’ Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, April 9, 2011.

Turkish: We've lost Gorgeous George.

Brick Top: Well, where'd ya lose him? He's ain't a set of car keys, is he?

From the movie "Snatch", 2000

Buried deep in a footnote in The Foreign Relations' Committee's evaluation of foreign assistance in Iraq is the fact that 370 people lost their lives defending the principles of the United States through peaceful interventions. As one who works in the same profession in another country that puts me at risk of "getting lost" on a daily basis, The Foreign Relations Committee's evaluation of foreign assistance in Iraq is deeply offensive.

Let me begin by paying tribute to my fallen colleagues - a tribute our Senate has never even thought of paying - by suggesting these heroes' without guns contributions will never be forgotten by the small community of us that invest our lives in our neighbors' development to the benefit of the United States of America. Not a single one of these 370 lives came home in a flag-draped coffin; not a single one received a hero's welcome; none of us go on NBC during a football game to call our families over Thanksgiving.

If it were just the single wording of "...lost over 370 personnel" that was wrong with this report, this post would not be necessary. But the audacity of this Committee mentions this figure in the context of a report in which they refer to the contractors that employee these people as essentially more corrupt than the Afghan government (ranked the 3rd most corrupt country in the world behind Myanmar and Somalia), and describe many of the experts themselves as "expensive", "difficult to supervise", and "believing their allegiance is to the Afghan Ministry rather than the US Government".

At one point, this report cites the following editorial content from the Washington Post "There are a thousand Defense Department personnel for every one USAID employee around the world....inadequate civilian capacity means more American soldiers deployed and, regrettably, more dead and wounded". May 3, 2011.

So... what are we saying here? There should be more civilians deployed so they can die rather than our soldiers? Shall we deploy more unarmed and under-protected civilians in danger zones so that we get our armed and armored soldiers out of harm's way?

Senator Kerry, how can you and your senatorial colleagues have the bare audacity to bury AID worker's collective sacrifice to our country in a footnote in the same report you chastise them? This is frankly insensitivity of the grossest sort.