Adams has a healthy skepticism about Afghan government officials, but it’s not the throw-up-your-hands and give up attitude one often hears from Westerners in Afghanistan. “Most of them will be corrupt if you let them,” he says.” The key is to design your spending systems so they cannot be. Our counterinsurgency efforts will falter if we fail to hold officials strictly accountable.”

“We drove the price of our roads and schools down to where officials couldn’t skim. By the time we left, the contractors were getting a 20% profit margin.” Adams made the bidding process for CERP-funded contracts transparent and insisted that the governor of Khost announce the winning bidders of all contracts on local radio and TV “You can make a good Afghan official competent,” he says. “In our system, they can’t take money, but they get the credit with the people. Their reward is political, which they understand.”

He is even sanguine about defeating IEDs. “Pave the roads so they can’t plant them, find the cell that are making them, and most important, get the tribes on your side. When the tribe says no to IEDs, that means no. I was never concerned about IEDs in the 11 of 12 districts where the tribes were supportive.”

Adams has strong convictions about what should be changed and what should be done next. Spending, he says, should be formalized. The CERP system is ad hoc. “If you spend it, competently, you get more. There should be an actual budget so you can plan one year, two years, five years out.”