EXCLUSIVE: US adviser’s Iraq warning - Progress too slow!

Bob Fonow, who completed a 18-month stint as senior consultant, telecoms and IT at the US State Department in Baghdad earlier this year, also charges that the recent military surge has seen the US Department of Defense command excessive influence in telecom reconstruction, often in areas where it has insufficient expertise.

In a paper circulating among policy makers in Washington D.C., billed by Fonow as an “end of assignment” report, he says:

• The rapid success of commercial cellular services, while a positive, also comes with negatives, namely a neglect in developing a national fixed infrastructure. “The economic security of the country may have been served better by assuring that the national fiber infrastructure was completed, or at least fully funded, before actively soliciting bids for cell phone services. After five years the US military and other large Iraqi and foreign companies and agencies cannot get access to reliable business class broadband data services…” Fonow says that this is adding US$200 million of costs annually to the American taxpayer and retarding the development of banking clearances, inventory and manufacturing control systems and other online business activities.

• Reconstruction should “use equipment and systems that host nation engineers know and understand, not what US officials want them to have, or which rewards politically influential vendors. In Iraq, it was a folly not to use equipment readily and cheaply available from Chinese suppliers when almost all the telecommunications equipment supplied by Western companies in Iraq is manufactured in China.” He claims, for example, that the USAID-funded purchase and delayed deployment of Lucent switches housed in mobile trailers at exchange sites destroyed by the US military was a “contestable decision” when Chinese replacements for existing equipment were cheaply and readily available.

• Iraq faces a significant shortage of trained ICT employees and that the US is not the best place for much training nor the cheapest per person. He recommends the controversial course of action of using China to support training, which he admits might not sit well with the US Department of Defense. “A 15 year gap in technical knowledge and management capability is evident in Iraq, especially in middle managers who were not able to keep up to date in the most modern telecommunications technologies in the later years of the former regime … 200,000 to 300,000 telecommunications and information technology specialists will need training to support a modern information economy in Iraq.” In addition, Fonow notes that Chinese equipment vendors appear to have been more successful selling into Iraqi provinces than Americans have. “Chinese sales people and engineers seem to have freedom of passage.