The Development Surge in Afghanistan

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published September 28, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT

There's a fascinating OpEd by Frank Rich in yesterday's New York Times -- Obama at the Precipice -- comparing Obama's struggles with Afghanistan and Kennedy's struggles with Vietnam. The US commander in Afghanistan is calling for more troops.

Yet what about the development surge? Winning hearts and minds is theoretically an essential part of any broader counterinsurgency strategy. And there, well, the picture gets just a wee bit murky.

Nathan Hodge, writing on the Stimson Center blog, has a great piece entitled Wicked problems for Afghanistan's development surge.  Hodge is out in rural Afghanistan, traveling with New Zealand's Provincial Reconstruction Team through Bamiyan Province, watching as they try to win the support of the local population through small-scale aid projects.

As Hodge explains: "[U]nderlying the whole enterprise is an assumption –- questionable at best –- that a firehose of aid money will automatically bring down violence and promote stability in Afghanistan."

Andrew Wilder at Tufts University has similar concerns. Wilder is undertaking a study looking at the effectiveness of such hearts and minds operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

According to Wilder: "While many projects have clearly had important humanitarian and development benefits, we have found little evidence that aid projects are 'winning hearts and minds,’' reducing conflict and violence, or having other significant counterinsurgency benefits. In fact, our research shows just the opposite. Instead of winning hearts and minds, Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative. And instead of contributing to stability, in many cases aid is contributing to conflict and instability."

Wilder describes contractors paying the Taliban to provide security, and how aid money can fuel not only corruption, but also tribal jealousies and rivalries.

It also doesn't help that the US military insists on seeing all western NGOs as part of the same broad effort -- a view echoed by the Taliban, which justifies attacks on NGOs by arguing that they are neither independent nor impartial. Many aid agencies, in turn, keep their distance from the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, believing that the PRTs only blur the line between military and humanitarian actors.

So far this year, eighteen aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan, making it the most dangerous country in the world for humanitarian staff.

For an overview of the problems and challenges facing aid agencies in Afghanistan, please see this article on Reuters AlertNet.

N.B. - in the interests of full disclosure, I've worked with Andrew Wilder on part of his research mentioned above.

[Photo of Afghanistan by Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini, U.S. Army/Released - Creative Commons, Attribution]