17,644
The number of U.S. service
members wounded in action
since the start of the Afghanistan war
[SOURCE: NATIONAL PRIORITIES PROJECT]
a longtime Afghanistan researcher.
But in Wilder’s eyes, it wouldn’t have
mattered whether the military had made
mistakes or not in terms of how effective the softer side of the war has been.
For him, development was destined to
fail from the start, at least as a campaign
to win over the loyalties and affections
of the Afghan public. In other words,
the problem wasn’t just the military, it
was the development strategy itself that
was ineffective—and few in Washington
seemed to have noticed. If money was,
indeed, supposed to be a weapons system, Wilder’s findings were like discovering, 10 years too late, that the West
had been firing blanks.
YOU NEVER KNOW
This past May, I traveled to Helmand
Province to see for myself how these
development projects had gone so awry.
A heavily Pashtun province (the Taliban is Pashtun), and with a long border
with Pakistan, Helmand and its immediate neighbor to the east, Kandahar,
have been some of the most combustible areas in Afghanistan since the
beginning of the war.
They have also drawn a disproportionate amount of America’s development
spending. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the main civilian
body that oversees government development programs, says that until recently it
spent about three quarters of its budget
in the southern provinces, including Helmand and Kandahar.
My destination was a small, isolated
base in the town of Lashkar Gah, in the
center of the province. The short helicopter ride from Camp Bastion, to the
north, lasted 30 minutes, but took almost
24 hours to arrange. A sandstorm had
snarled air traffic for the entire region.
“Welcome to every day of our lives,” a
British officer at the base later joked.
From regional bases like these, small
provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs)
coordinate and distribute funds for
projects that they consider most valuable to the citizens around them. The
PRTs are the most ambitious component of the development plan — and
also its greatest weakness.
Creating small teams that can engage
with local residents would seem like an
effective way to win hearts and minds.
But upon arriving on the base, it was
easy to see how that proximity could
feel like an illusion. Situated right in