This post originally appeared as a comment on a post by Bill Easterly on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters Blog.
Bill Easterly wants to end aid to conflict zones - and to “bad” countries, including Ethiopia and Pakistan - where outside aid is likely to be diverted. He argues that the United States should forget about aid for nation-building and concentrate on aid for compassionate and humanitarian reasons.
Meanwhile Raj Shah, the head of USAID wants (see this speech at West Point earlier this month) to have “tight operational partnerships with the military” in the delivery of U.S. aid in places like Afghanistan, even if “spending money in warzones robs other poor parts of the world of limited development resources”. Why? Because not doing so in insecure states would be “ignoring the plight of billions while putting our own security at risk”.
Neither one has got it quite right. Shah got it wrong in citing USAID's work in Afghanistan. There is no evidence that U.S. aid in Afghanistan has made Afghanistan more stable (even those pomegranate farmers might well revert to opium when the Americans disappear). And the education and health programs represent the compassionate aid that Easterly wants, but at more than three times the cost of financing the same outcomes in, say, Malawi and Honduras.
But Easterly got it wrong when he included Pakistan in his list of no-go countries. Pakistan is not a conflict zone. An American can travel throughout most of Pakistan at no greater risk than traveling in India or for that matter driving from New York to Washington D.C. on route 95 over Thanksgiving weekend. Easterly includes it in his list not because it is a conflict zone, but apparently (he says) because of the failure of U.S. aid to win hearts and minds there. But, as my colleagues and I have written previously, the point is not to win hearts and minds in the short run, but to increase the likelihood that the democratic and civilian government there will survive . . . which will help secure Americans against the risks of the bad guys taking control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. And beyond that there are other good reasons: a stronger private sector, better regional/international trade linkages, and a more robust civil society will all contribute to making Pakistan a more responsible regional player, and a better long-term ally.
But wait. On Pakistan, Shah is not right either. True that Pakistan is a security worry for Americans. But not true that implies USAID should be a big player there. One problem is that the U.S. system of delivering aid there is hapless and ineffectual (see our report on that) - and potentially counterproductive given how toxic American official presence has become. USAID programming is hapless not because it's militarized (though that would be a problem with more aid to the FATA region of Pakistan). In the case of Pakistan, it's hapless because it lacks any long-run poverty reduction or nation-building focus. It’s hapless because everyone and no one is in charge: there is the State Department that wants to win hearts and minds asap; the White House that wants big visible projects to give the civilian government credibility asap; the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; the State Department's Civilian Assistance Administrator; the Congress - all focused on short-term fixes of one sort or another, and all by turns telling USAID what to do.
Oh dear it's complicated. In Pakistan, the United States could do far more to promote development by changing our trade policy and supporting U.S. investment there than via any aid program. And by channeling most of whatever aid money there is - for infrastructure, agriculture, water, education, health and energy - all both compassionate poverty-reducing and nation-building for the long run - through the World Bank or the African Development Bank, or via cofinancing with the UK's poverty-driven aid program.
Yes it's a complicated bottom line. Won't grab any headlines…
