Nancy Birdsall's piece on security-focused aid was featured in Newsweek.
From the Article
In December, the U.S. Agency for International Development banned one of its biggest and oldest contractors, the Academy for Educational Development (AED), from receiving future contracts because of “substantiated evidence of misconduct” in the $150-million program for Pakistan’s federally-administered tribal areas. This scandal dealt a blow to both institutions .
U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have pledged to reinvigorate what had become a beleaguered and weakened USAID long before its troubles in Pakistan. But the AED scandal does strike at the Obama administration’s ambition to keep aid flowing into Pakistan, making good on its 2009 promise of $7.5 billion in nonmilitary assistance over five years. That hope already looks naïve as deficit-hawk Republicans have taken over the spending arm of the U.S. Congress. Some might see the ban as an appropriate resolution to the situation, but embedded in this story are two larger lessons for policymakers.
First, this is a wake-up call for the U.S. military. Aid programs do not easily complement counterinsurgency programs. The history of aid in militarized settings—from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan—is replete with stories of projects that benefit only local elites, of money vanishing without trace. Ongoing research at Tufts University is finding that, in Afghanistan, while aid can sometimes sweeten dialogue between military units and local communities, aid projects do little to improve security over the longer term or to win support for the American military mission.
Second, for those in charge of U.S. development aid programs, the AED experience should prompt major reconsideration of how aid dollars are spent in Pakistan. Aid in dangerous areas like FATA (and much of Afghanistan) is obviously a risky, messy business. Yet the U.S. has committed to spend 10 percent or more of its $1.5 billion annual aid package in Pakistan’s tribal belt, home to 2 percent of Pakistanis. Trying to force that much money through a narrow pipeline creates pressures that lead to big failures like the AED contract and smaller failures like the purchase of hundreds of computers that auditors later found still in their boxes, collecting dust in a warehouse. Even from a security perspective, the U.S. should probably spend less of its limited development aid for Pakistan in FATA, and more elsewhere in Pakistan where there is greater hope it can be more effective in helping people and strengthening local institutions.