The Center, for its part, denies that there is any direction or consistency of effect in the research of its individual members. That argument, considered by itself, is probably true; the CFIA has no stated policy line restricting its members, and there are now fairly broad disagreements within the Center on certain popular issues, particularly on Vietnam. But the bulk of the work there, if not monolithic or precisely identical in viewpoint, retains the pivotal assumptions and patterns of thought that have fueled American policy during the past twenty-five years.

Few of the CFIA's critics have analyzed correctly the reasons for the Center's inevitable political bias. Contrary to the argument of the "evil money" theorists, few scholars in the Center would allow themselves to be manipulated like marionettes for the sake of a research dollar-whether it comes, as in most instances, from a private foundation, or, as in other instances, from a government agency.

Nor does there now seem to be a conscious policy of discrimination on the Center's part against leftist thinkers; the radical approach to foreign policy is a new and highly rare development within social science, and it is the paucity of this approach, rather than overt antagonism to it, that probably accounts for the virtual nonexistence of radicals within the Center's confines.

What does discriminate against the new approach, however, is a long-entrenched system of thought that has just begun to undergo forceful challenge in political journals and on university campuses as well as in the jungles of Vietnam. And until that intellectual system is defeated, such research agencies as the Center, with their far-reaching connections in government and their extensive intellectual commitment to an outworn ideology, will continue to serve the needs of American policymaking.

BUT WHAT of the less theoretical, more concrete work which the Center performs? This work is undertaken exclusively by the Development Advisory Service (DAS), the largest wing of the CFIA, which places economic advisors in the employ of underdeveloped governments to counsel them on the implementation of basic policy.

The DAS traces its origins to 1954, when the Ford Foundation, acting on behalf of the Pakistani government, approached the Harvard School of Public Administration and its dean, Edward Mason. The Foundation, it was agreed, would fund a three-year field project in Pakistan to be carried out by Harvard personnel. David E. Bell, a former Truman advisor on a Rockefeller fellowship here who later headed the Agency for International Development, was chosen to supervise the field operation. In 1962, with a Harvard team still in Pakistan, a $750,000 Ford Foundation grant established the DAS on a permanent basis and placed it under the administrative aegis of the CFIA.

The DAS decided at the outset that it would make the following considerations in deciding whether to accept a particular country's bid to become a client government: 1) the academic interest posed by that country's development problems; 2) the likelihood of gaining access to vital economic information and 3) the possibility of doing concrete good while confining itself to working within the policy strictures of the host government. On these bases the DAS accepted some project proposals and rejected others in turn.

Yet-in spite of the fact that a wide variety of governments turned up on the DAS roster-there were two unfailing characteristics which defined the work of its teams: 1) each client nation was headed by a non-Communist government which remained open and often friendly to American capital investment and 2) in each field project, the overwhelming priority was to raise that nation's Gross National Product without as much thought or attention to the social effects of growth or the basic fairness of that country's political-economic structure.

And despite its claim that it was essentially apolitical, that it did notconsistently support American goals, the DAS operated within the ever-expanding framework of American capital and aid. While seeking to act in the best interest of their host governments-often advising many of them to beware lopsided agreements with American traders and agencies-the DAS teams continued to tolerate the principle of exploitative American investment and the permissibility of American intervention. To take one striking example, as rendered by Lester E. Gordon,. the present director of the DAS, "We concluded early in the game that Liberia's decision to have foreign investors [Firestone Rubber and Bethlehem Steel] exploit their resources was their own business."

TO BE FAIR, the DAS team in Liberia-as in most other client countries-would have been impotent to change the government's stand on foreign investment; as Gordon said, "The fact is in Liberia they wouldn't have accepted [a proposed change]. We've been bounced out on our ear." Instead the team there concerned itself with advising the planning office on how to get the most money out of its U. S. contracts. But then, its objective function was to rationalize and stabilize the existing arrangements without challenging their economic and political consequence; strengthened ties to, and dependence on, American capital investment.

How typical of the DAS' work is the Liberian episode? If any answer can be extracted from two of its longest-standing projects-Pakistan and Indonesia-it is that despite what may have once been worthwhile motives and intentions, the DAS teams in those countries wound up as apologists for governments in which they had little significant influence for the good.

The government in Pakistan at the time of the Harvard team's arrival there was in many ways the same as that of the recently departed British colonizers: undemocratic, elitist, institutionally repressive. In order to revive their stagnating economy, the Pakistani leaders had commissioned the Harvard group to shape up a five-year development plan and recruit an entire native planning staff; but the main impact of the team during this period was to facilitate the entrance of American aid into the country. This aid, part of a pact with the Pakistanis which John Foster Dulles had conceived in 1953 as an anti-Russian coalition, had the effect of strengthening the military and hastening the 1958 coup d'etat by Ayub Khan.

The Ayub regime had based its legitimacy on the promise that it would eradicate the corruption and the oligarchy of the post-colonial regime; but soon enough, Ayub showed himself to be the despot that he was, instituting a system of indirect elections which allowed the regime to manipulate friendly candidates into popular office. This system, in turn, had the effect of disenfranchising Pakistan's overpopulated and impoverished East wing, which had often been victimized by the financial and industrial centers of Pakistan's west.

THE PRINCIPAL task which policy planners and the Harvard team faced in Pakistan during the first years of the Ayub regime was to rectify Pakistan's regional inequalities; their response to the problem, however, was to work for a solution by the circuitous route of raising the GNP and letting the free market mechanism do the job on its own. What that meant in terms of social policy was to encourage the growth of private industry and capital through tax exemptions and other incentives for the rich. Nevertheless, in spite of a slight rise in growth that benefited the wealthier class, this scheme was patently unsuccessful in eradicating the regional inequalities.

A short time later, DAS field director Dr. Richard V. Gilbert proposed that the government set up a public works program in East Pakistan to lower the 30 per cent employment rate and improve agricultural yield. The program, which Gilbert later termed "the first significant works program outside a Communist country," was highly successful in denting the unemployment statistic and bringing improvements to farming and transportation, but the Ayub government never let it grow to full size. In fact, an extended program might ultimately have brought about a genuine redistribution of income and a radical decentralization of government authority, but these were the very predicaments that Ayub and his Western financiers were seeking to avoid.

The 1965 war with India precipitated a vast economic setback in Pakistan, wrecking much of the growth that had occurred in the years before. More than that, it precipitated a political crisis that led ultimately to the bloody rioting and the fall of Ayub in 1968. But the new government was merely a political, not an economic, substitute for Ayub, the only real difference in its economic outlook being that it chose to reduce the DAS' influence in planning policy. It was for this reason that the DAS left Pakistan last June.

How did the DAS do wrong in Pakistan? Largely, of course, by linking itself to a government which wanted neither social reform nor the prolonged influence of would-be reformers within its own counsels. That is not to say that there were irreconcilable breaches of opinion between the field team and the government; in fact, both had agreed on the desirability of working within the bounds of a free-market economy during the earlier period. The important point, however is that when Avub curtailed the works program, the DAS was obliged to go along and continue advising him on the feasible alternatives simply because he was the man for whom they were working. He and the institutions surrounding him were the givens in the relationship; within that context, the DAS could advise and consult, but it could not reform.

AND YET the DAS continued to work with him. It did not take issue with him because its subservient relationship with the Pakistani government imposed unbreakable obligations of loyalty and confidentiality. Why, then, did they not break off the project there and then? If they were any more meaningful than cabinet-level clerks, would they not have done so? And if the DAS amounts to no more than a collection of highly skilled technicians, are its activities in six foreign countries the proper place for men who should be concerned with the very broadest possible issues of development?

The Indonesian episode poses largely the same questions. According to Gustav F. Papanek, who served for six years as DAS director, the Indonesian government is "one of the most self-assured and independent governments-in the economic sphere-that I know of. They'll use foreigners for advice on technical problems, but there's no question who runs the show."

The analogy with Ayub is staggering. In the words of Richard Gilbert, who also served as field director in Indonesia, "an army which was originally a guerilla army, an army of independence, has been converted and now behaves like an army of occupation." The hope of the Indonesian people for a better life after the overthrow of Sukaron's abusive political and economic policies has met with mass murders, political concentration camps, and massive American "aid" and investment. And where does the DAS stand among all this?