MORE ADVICE FOR KAREN HUGHES

MORE ADVICE FOR KAREN HUGHES
By William Fisher
Karen Hughes is either the most courageous woman on the planet, or she is the world’s most incorrigible optimist.
As this close friend of and advisor to President Bush prepares to take over America’s public diplomacy efforts abroad, she has been drowning in torrents of public and private advice about how to achieve her mission – repairing the reputation of the United States in the world, and especially the Muslim world.
So I hope she will forgive me for chipping in my two cents.
I’m sure Ms. Hughes knows that the magnitude of her task is beyond enormous. Both the substance and style of our Middle East foreign policy is detested in most of the region. Abu Ghraib has robbed us of our claim to moral leadership. And our lapses are incessantly exploited by government-controlled media, including media in authoritarian countries that receive massive U.S. aid and that are supposed to be our closest allies in the ‘war on terror’.
Given that much of ‘the Arab Street’ would probably vote for Usama Bin Laden if he was running for something, Ms. Hughes will face the temptation to go for the fences: Do big, high-profile stuff that grabs headlines at home and feeds the Beltway’s yearning for the magic bullet that transforms the Middle East into Boosters for America. Voila!
I trust and believe that Karen Hughes is much too smart to be seduced into going down this road. It’s failed too many times.
No doubt Ms. Hughes will continue many of the programs and projects that are already in place. But when she starts thinking about new initiatives, I recommend one that will grab no headlines, generate no congratulatory resolutions from Congress, produce no instant success stories, and probably go largely unnoticed for a long time.
Every development professional knows that in authoritarian regimes, change has to be a bottom-up process. Ms. Hughes should start that process by aggressively supporting the many non-governmental organizations that have been laboring for years – at considerable risk to themselves – to advance better governance, transparency, equity and basic freedoms.
There are literally hundreds of such civil society organizations. Considering the incredibly difficult and dangerous conditions under which they work, they have achieved remarkable levels of maturity and effectiveness. They work in diverse fields — from human rights to women’s issues to better education and health care to judicial independence to press freedom to campaigning for free and fair elections.
In each of these fields and many more, there are counterparts in the United States who are eager to help their colleagues abroad. Ms. Hughes has the clout to mobilize this tremendous reservoir of energy and expertise.
Civil society advocates in dictatorships are routinely arrested, detained, tried and jailed. Yet they persist. They know – and so do their repressive governments – that their combined efforts are the essential catalysts of progress.
Yet these critical change-agents are largely ignored by our government’s official aid programs. Not because our aid agency wouldn’t like to do more to help, but because ‘host’ governments – the recipients of our largesse – see the civil society sector as a threat to their power. And it is!
The way official aid works requires that donor and recipient governments must agree on who gets help and for what. It’s literally a contract, written and signed by both parties. And most aid is government-to-government.
Karen Hughes has a unique opportunity to break this discredited mould – just a bit. Direct financial assistance to non-governmental organizations is not a substitute for all the other good ways we use our aid dollars. But it ought to be a condition for our continued generosity. Non-negotiable.
Because she is so close to the president, Ms. Hughes might just have the leverage to pull this off — if he and she are really serious about spreading freedom throughout the Middle East.