The difficulty with this plan is that it is focused on abstinence and faith-based solutions. Now I understand that there are those (including Congressman Rohrabacher (R-CA)) who believe that HIV and AIDS are caused by lifestyle choices and that if those damn heathens would just shape up and follow the morality set forth by any particular group that holds the moral authority to preach to others, everything would be fine. As you may be able to tell, that’s not me — peoplez out there gotz different idears and wayz o’ livin’! You go country to country and culture changes – expectations change – what is acceptable changes, and unless you live there or are native in a substantive way, you can’t go making demands about how things are going to be. Well, not if you want to be helpful at least.

But I digress – the point is that there is a debate about the legitimacy of certain aspects of PEPFAR. I’m sure there are tons of good discussions all over the internet dealing with it if you’re interested.

So it’s up for renewal, and even though there are contentious elements, it seems generally accepted that we, as a country, need to be doing something, and that PEPFAR has made a significant difference in the lives of <some large number> of people.

The beginning of the meeting felt a little like some sort of NGO hug-fest, frankly. You know what I mean – the kind where everyone quotes a bunch of numbers out of context about how many people and children are dying and all we have to do is get the whole world committed to solving this problem and it will magically vanish — all love and kindness and good intention without any form of pragmatic understanding underpinning the discussion?

Except that there was $50 billion on the line! And it passed! I’m not withholding for suspense here. It did pass on to the floor (By the way, the $50 billion is spread over five years, and includes money for TB and Malaria and adding more countries, including some in the Caribbean, but not Mexico).

Now the hug-fest comment is slightly unfair. Why? Because there is a lot of data behind this discussion and I’m sure PEPFAR’s doing great things (although I don’t personally know the details). It’s just that the meeting made me wonder about the goal of such a meeting. It was very confusing and I suppose I have much left to learn about Congress, but the final version of the bill was compromised into shape last night, added to the agenda immediately following that, and all but one of the Congresspeople present received the latest markup when they arrived for the meeting. And it’s big! Several of them were a little put off by this.

So the meeting started with this “hug-fest” all about how great bipartisanship is and all the hard work that went into pulling the bill together at the last minute and all that sort of thing – then there was the occasional bitch about how we’re not taking care of Americans — why should we take care of Africans, and then there were several people unhappy about this being sprung on them at the last minute (mostly Republicans, interestingly enough).

Congressman Payne (D-NJ) even used the fact that the White House was involved in the final negotiations to encourage the hold-out Republicans to vote for the bill. Funny, right?

Okay, so that all worked out as I said above — they passed it on to the floor of the House and everyone fully expects that it’ll run right through and President Bush’ll sign it. But here’s one of the most entertaining parts of the event:

I’m standing in the overflow room (because I misjudged the length of time it would take to get through security) watching one of the Congressman (I’m sorry, I forgot to note which one) talk about the joys of having an anti-prostitution clause in the bill, when this guy sitting in front of me a little way on a table, flips off the TV screen! Brilliant, I think! This cat is a little scruffy looking — although clean — in a T-Shirt that he had pasted letters onto, with green jeans, some form of hand-written tattoos on the inside of his left arm (probably done himself, could have been a sentence or a mathematical formula), converse high tops with a white diamond pattern on a black background, an assortment of obscure ear piercings, and get this: green, metallic fingernail polish! A fabulous get-up to be celebrated in its own right, but a strange place to find it, at least in my mind. He certainly felt right at home expressing his opinion (quietly) in the great halls of lawmaking in the most powerful country in the world. That is some of the point of why we’ve all been drawn to hang out in the nation’s capital.

Here are some official links:

• Statement of Acting Chairman Howard L. Berman on the committee markup of the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Reauthorization Act (H.R. 5501)
  Verbatim, as delivered
• Committee Approves Landmark Renewal of U.S. Global AIDS Prevention Effort
• United States House of Representatives House Committee on Foreign Affairs

In addition to reflecting many of the sentiments that I long to hear more discussion of, they were announcing the release of the new Index of State Weakness in the Developing World — a policy tool to help policymakers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the 141 developing countries.

I will not pretend to speak at further length about the intentions of the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development in devising this index, you can read that from the page itself. Instead, I will just talk about what interests me. After all, this is all about me, isn’t it.

First, a concern that I have about this tool:

• This is definitely a ranking and not a rating system. This means that there is no standard against which the countries are judged, but rather the scale that is used is determined solely by the data concerning the 141 countries in the survey. The bounds of the survey are thus set to equate with the best and worst of the group. Consequently, any sort of multi-year comparison becomes untenable due to the fact that the range itself will move each year (I have emailed Dr Rice about this to see if I have correctly understood this aspect of the index, and to determine if there is some rationale for it that I have missed).

That said, the index seems to be quite an accomplishment, and these are the important points that I took away from the event today:

Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash)

• Opened the event with a very well presented speech about the importance of poverty alleviation to the military (what? I know – but seriously!). He sits on both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, where he chairs the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee. He says that no one knows the importance of poverty alleviation better than the special ops guys that are digging wells and providing basic services in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s nice to hear these things from both the military side and from the lips of a Congressman.
• He also spoke about the difficulty of drawing the correlation between global poverty alleviation and national security in the minds of the American people. This is a critical component, since as people come to understand how global poverty affects them personally, they will demand change from their elected representatives.
• Finally, his interest in poverty began when he travelled to Honduras with an NGO and had a real life experience with real life people who are in dire straights. I apologize for this if I offend anyone, but I am continually bothered by the politician’s (writ large) need to reference the plight of some solitary individual or talk about some ‘real-life’ experience that they have had that proves whatever point they’re trying to make. This was the weakest part of Congressman Smith’s speech.
• Oh! One more thing! In the Q&A, someone mentioned the argument that the connection between poverty and terrorism is tenuous (9-11 hijackers were all wealthy, etc…). Well, our man was havin’ none of that! He was adamant about the fact that we are fighting an ideological battle, and that alternative ideologies only gain a toe hold if the populace has no opportunities in their life. He makes a good point, although I feel like there is a naivete or an ignorance of some sort in it that I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on.

Dr. Stewart Patrick

• Before considering content, I have to say that I feel for this man who has been marked by the reverse of the name Patrick Stewart. Several times, his ‘friends’ on stage referred to him as Patrick or Dr. Stewart. He handled it well, although he and Dr. Rice did share a knowing glance once or twice when it happened. ‘Very entertaining’ would be an exaggeration, but nonetheless worth mentioning.
• Dr. Patrick covered the motivation and methodology for creating the index. This was a little dry (of necessity), but yielded some interesting aspects.
  • He mentioned Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, which it certainly seems that I should pick up and peruse.
  • He also mentioned the fact that their goal was to give a valuable policy tool, and that the entire project was oriented in that way.
  • They attempted to develop a reproducible methodology (admirable) and the data that they decided to rely upon is freely available, open source data that is consistently available across the span of countries.

Dr. Susan E. Rice

• Dr. Rice presented the data itself and explained the charts and graphs and color coding and gave some examples of how it might be used. Frankly, I found it very difficult to follow – not the speech mind you, but the mechanism of color coding and charting. I hope that they work with a good graphic designer or put it into a more readable format.I say this because their stated goal was to create something that would be a quick reference for policy makers with a built in ability to drill down to finer detail – to provide some level of granularity or explanation of the individuality of each state’s situation. If a policymaker is looking for information on a specific state, this opportunity is built in, but if one is looking for an overview or for specifics on a type of problem, it’s very difficult to keep all the colors in your head, while checking out the names of specific countries or reading the details of the numbers in the final analysis. See what you think for yourself.
  • Personally, I would start with a stacked bar chart for each country, with each of the four baskets assigned a color, and each of the five indicators within each basket assigned a shade of that color. Then a long bar chart could be created with all of the relevant data included in one easy to read location, that would also provide a quick, graphical overview of the status of all of the countries. Maybe I’ll do that. It shouldn’t take long (Ha! famous last words).

Q & A

The question and answer period drew out some additional interesting points and questions:

• In explaining some of the rationalization behind the decisions that led to the current state of the index, Dr. Patrick acknowledged that this was originally viewed as is the first step in a larger mission: to develop a weak states vs. threats comparison chart. That is, they were (or perhaps are) headed towards a means of legitimately evaluating the dangers posed by weak states through use of empirical evidence. This could be very exciting.
• Several people complimented them on the fact that they were making a statement about the importance of weak states (and the associated ills – poverty, poor education, poor healthcare, etc…) in terms of national security. I concur.
• And finally, there were a couple of questions related to using this index as a tool to measure the effectiveness of our current policies. The response to which was much to my liking: well-intentioned and a little vague. The results of the index allude to a need for a new system of dealing with problems the world over. This index highlights the interconnectedness of issues that we assume to be unrelated. Just as the Congressman was saying at the beginning, there is a strong tie between health and opportunities for people the world over and our own national security. There is a need for a unified approach in constructing solutions to these problems. While we may be making progress on dealing with HIV/AIDS, are we blinding ourselves to even larger issues in the countries that we’re helping by narrowing our focus to that one issue? These are big questions, but ones that need to be seriously considered by policymakers.