LONG AND
WINDING ROADS
ceremony for washing hands.
“Development is not a business you
should get into to become popular,”
Wilder said, when we met in his sunfilled office this fall.
“I’m a very strong believer in the importance of development aid — by far
the biggest concern I have is that the
U.S. gives too little of its budget to foreign aid,” Wilder said. “My worry is that
foreign aid now only gets legitimized on
the basis of it promoting our national
interest. Good development as a good in
and of itself is no longer priority. Alleviating poverty is no longer a good — only
having COIN impact or national security
impact is what matters now.”
Obama’s surge was supposed to be the
turning point in the Afghanistan war. But
its development strategy remained locked
in many of the same, stale assumptions:
If you build it, goodwill will come.
“The best that can be said in their defense is that you had a lot of people who
didn’t know what they didn’t know,” said
Jeremy Pam, a former State and Treasury
Department official who spent several
years working on development issues in
Iraq and Afghanistan. “They had this narrative that one of the problems was that
the war was under-resourced, therefore,
if we provide proper resources, the sky’s
the limit. There was no reality constraint.
One rarely heard somebody say, ‘Is that
feasible? Is that overambitious? Should
HUFFINGTON
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we aim for something more moderate?’”
Since Wilder first started discussing
his findings, two years before his final
report was published, other studies
have reached the same conclusions. A
2011 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described the evidence
to support using development to promote stability as “limited.” That same
year, Mark Moyar, a former Pentagon
adviser and counterinsurgency theorist,
produced an independent report calling for the U.S. to vastly scale back its
development projects in Afghanistan,
because they were not helping to bring
stability. “A lot of times, just pouring
money into these projects has actually
made things worse,” Moyar told me.
In an interview, USAID’s Sampler suggested that the debate over the value of
development for stability had become
academic, and said that there is a tendency of these reports to focus on negative
stories to the exclusion of positive ones.
“It would be naive of us to believe
that stabilization programs are going to
instantaneously sprout stability,”
he said. “But neither would I suggest
that we should stop doing stabilization
programs just because there are examples where there is still instability
after the programs.”
Wilder and Gordon don’t discount the
possibility that development could theoretically help stabilize a country —