St. Louis native seeks local help rebuilding Afghan legal system

ST. LOUIS -- A State Department official wants Missouri's law firms to help lead the way in a new program to rebuild the legal system in Afghanistan.

St. Louis native Tom Schweich, a high-ranking State Department official, is leading the new public-private partnership that gives American law firms a role in the Afghanistan's future.

Schweich is looking for firms to help finance and conduct the program, and he wants lawyers in his old hometown to lead the charge. Schweich said he would personally approach St. Louis law firms for help.

"Generally what we're looking for is for law firms to make a two-year commitment for $25,000 a year," he said.

One goal of the program is to help set up an independent bar association in Afghanistan to regulate entry into the profession and uphold professional standards and ethics.

Afghan legal officials currently work in rudimentary conditions in terms of physical facilities and training. Judges and lawyers often rely on their personal understanding of Islamic law and tribal codes without taking Afghan laws into account. Those laws differ in that they are unwritten and vary from region to region.

The program also seeks to train more defense attorneys so they will be available to ordinary Afghans, and to train more women as prosecutors and judges.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the plan is "essential to the country's success" in combating corruption, drug trafficking and other major problems in the nation.

Participating firms will serve on an advisory committee to the State Department. Committee members will help determine how resources are allocated, attend news conferences and get regular briefings from senior State Department officials.

Bigger contributors will have more involvement, including the opportunity to go on official trips to Afghanistan.

The State Department hopes to initially raise as much as $2 million over the next two years, adding to the $40 million the State Department already is spending on the country's justice system, Schweich said.

Schweich has been in charge of the State Department's largely unsuccessful effort to curb illicit narcotics production and trafficking in Afghanistan, whose poppies account for about 90 percent of the world's heroin.

He hopes an effective judicial system could help. He said U.S. and Afghan counternarcotics efforts had been hamstrung by the legal system's inability to arrest, try and incarcerate drug producers.

Although the plan to involve U.S. lawyers hasn't gotten off the ground, some experts wonder how many law firms will participate. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sharply criticized the idea.

"Once again this administration wants to outsource important policies to the private sector because resources and trained experts are tied up in a failed policy in Iraq," Dodd said.

Schweich said he was not aiming for privatization.

"All of the programs are publicly administered," he said. "This is simply a source of funding and some expertise."

Along with St. Louis, where Schweich was a partner at Bryan Cave before joining the Bush administration, he will focus on law firms in Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.