Afghanistan wary of US plan to send more advisers

“The minister just did it his way,’’ Yeager said. “He didn’t even want to hear about it.’’

Since 2003, about two-thirds of the nearly $30 billion in international aid to Afghanistan has been routed through foreign consultants, companies, and organizations hired by the US government and its allies to help Afghan officials write laws, set up banks, and otherwise help run the country. The foreign advisers became so powerful and numerous that they constituted a de facto shadow government.

Now, the Obama administration plans to send hundreds more American advisers as part of a so-called civilian surge, increasingly seen in Washington as perhaps as important as the pending decision about whether to send more troops.

But Afghan officials have begun to push back, complaining the Americans are often overpaid, underqualified, and unfamiliar with the culture of the country. Even the best, most qualified advisers can sow mistrust because they answer to the US government or firms rather than to Afghan officials.

The American practice of hiring its own as consultants also risks undercutting the Obama administration’s message that Afghan president Hamid Karzai must root out corruption, some analysts say, because many Afghans view it as cronyism.

“Whenever we raise the issue of corruption with Karzai, he flips it and says it is American contracting practices that are the true corruption in the country,’’ said John Dempsey, a former adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Justice who now works for the United States Institute of Peace in Kabul. “He has a point to some degree. There has certainly been a lot of waste.’’

A typical US adviser earns about $500 per day - several times what the average Afghan earns in a month. Add on the costs of security, accommodations, and support, and the cost reaches about $2,000 per day, or $500,000 a year, usually paid to a US firm, according to Paul O’Brien, a vice president at Oxfam America, a Boston-based international relief organization that monitors aid effectiveness.

Last month the Afghan government announced a new program called the Civilian Technical Assistance Plan, which allows Afghan officials to hire advisers of their own choosing, at cheaper rates, from fellow Muslim countries such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The Obama administration has joined other donor countries in supporting the plan, donating $30 million to help finance it.

William Frej, the Afghanistan mission director for the US Agency for International Development, called the program “a major step forward for the Afghanistan government in determining its own development needs and priorities.’’

But that contribution represents just a fraction of the $2.7 billion that the Obama administration expects to spend on economic assistance to Afghanistan next year, the vast majority of which will be used to hire US contractors. US officials say that is, in part, due to concerns about corruption in the Afghan government.

But to Afghan officials, “it makes the corruption arguments sound a little bit funny,’’ said O’Brien, who, while working for a Virginia-based consulting firm BearingPoint in 2007, served as an adviser to Afghanistan’s then-finance minister Ashraf Ghani.

“They would say, ‘At the same time we are paying out $2,000 a day to get a $450 adviser, we know we can get an Indian adviser for a fraction of that cost, who speaks the language, who has held a higher position in their government, who is much more able to move around,’ ’’ O’Brien said.

BearingPoint hired O’Brien to assist Ghani with unwieldy financial problems plaguing Afghanistan. O’Brien, who had years of experience in the country, said good foreign advisers serve an important function in a country with only a tiny professional class that has been ravaged by decades of civil war.

But too many foreign advisers - and the companies that hire them - have short-term profits in mind, O’Brien said. Rather than teaching Afghans to perform government tasks, they often end up doing the jobs themselves, ensuring a need for a future contract.

Ghani worked well with O’Brien but believed that BearingPoint was so bad for the country that he asked O’Brien to draft a memo kicking the company out, according to O’Brien and a 2007 Globe interview with Ghani. The effort did not succeed.

Over the years, BearingPoint has won nearly $400 million worth of contracts to improve governance in Afghanistan. In 2003, some of the advisers were sent from the United States to help privatize state-run industries, but they ended up doing little because Afghan officials had not yet figured out what state-owned enterprises existed, according to Clare Lockhart, a former adviser who later cofounded with Ghani the Institute for State Effectiveness.

“Often, plans to send technical advisers are conceived of in capital cities thousands of miles away and don’t correspond to what the Afghan government wants or needs,’’ Lockhart said.

The most recent BearingPoint contract, in 2007, was for $218 million and was meant to be spent on training Afghans to do crucial government work. But the company shifted the bulk of the funding to paying the salaries of international advisers and administrative overhead, according to the USAID audit.

Calls to BearingPoint, which is reorganizing after filing for bankruptcy, were not returned.

A spokeswoman for Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, said his government is grateful for the US advisers and is not planning to significantly curtail their use.

“The expertise Afghanistan seeks is not readily available within the region, and Americans are the only country with such resources readily available,’’ Adrienne Ross said.

But there is no guarantee that US advisers’ goals and vision will fit in with those of the Afghan government, as evidenced in the case of Yeager, a Colorado geologist hired in 2006 to educate the Ministry of Mines staff about the process of soliciting bids for mineral exploration. Yeager, who was paid by a World Bank fund to which the United States is a major contributor, advocated the creation of investment conditions that would be attractive to Western mining companies.

But Afghan officials ignored his advice and chose a Chinese company in a process Yeager said was too secretive. The Chinese promised to build a railroad along with the mine, something that Afghans badly wanted. But Yeager said he believed that American companies should have been given more consideration.

“The United States has gone in there with our blood and treasure, but the US companies get no credit,’’ he said.

His contact was not renewed, and he left the ministry. He recently released a paper detailing what he sees as the troubling aspects of the Chinese deal.

“I was pretty blunt, and I told him things he didn’t want to hear,’’ Yeager said. “It is really hard to advise somebody who didn’t want advice.’’

Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com