Does development assistance reduce violence? Evidence from Afghanistan

Abstract

C urrent counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine emphasizes the role of benign development assistance as a key component in any campaign to enhance security in conflicted and postconflict regions.1 As a consequence, significant resources have been spent on rebuilding Afghanistan's institutions and livelihoods with the intention that such projects achieve both conventional development goals and donors' security objectives. Since 9/11, the U.S. government has appropriated nearly US$20.3 billion for governance and development in Afghanistan, on top of the security-related and human costs of the war. 2 The questions of when, where, and how development assistance builds stability are especially relevant to policymakers as the military intervention in Afghanistan enters its tenth year and international donors begin to shift their attention to other conflicted areas such as the Middle East and Africa.While counterinsurgency researchers and practitioners appear to agree on the importance of popular support in determining the outcome of insurgent conflicts, the question of how to gain it is still debated. "Hearts and minds" proponents argue that the government can win civilian support by addressing grievances, thus reducing the "demand" for rebellion. Others argue that rebels, like secular criminals, might be more sensitive to the opportunity costs and potential payoffs of rebellion. This would be especially true in weakly governed places where the state cannot successfully "buy off" potential rebels, either through legitimate work opportunities or other income transfers, nor can they effectively utilize a cooperative populace's information. So far, the empirical evidence on the relative importance of grievances ("demand") compared to employment/income-generation ("supply") as motivations for insurgent violence has been somewhat mixed. Rather than analyzing the underlying reasons for insurgency, this article explores a more fundamental question: Does spending lower violence? 3 While counterinsurgency is almost as old as war itself, there has been relatively little empirical research into whether these reconstruction efforts have generated security improvements as intended. Recent empirical evidence suggests that this strategy of combining military operations with civilian development has been somewhat successful in Iraq. 4 This article, however, looks at reconstruction and violence in Afghanistan and finds that those efforts have ambiguous effects on conflict. For each of three reconstruction programs (the Afghan National Solidarity Program, USAID's Local Governance and Community Development Program, and the U.S. military's Commander's Emergency Response Program), project spending does not statistically reduce, nor increase, the level of rebel violence.However, the difference in results between the U.S. military's CERP and the two other programs suggests that aid conditionality is an essential, but currently underemphasized, prerequisite for stability-enhancing development. The theoretical model predicts stark differences in...

Lessons Learned from Stabilization Initiatives in Afghanistan: A Systematic Review of Existing Research

“…A number of studies (Altai, 2012 (7); Chou, 2012;Child, 2014;Goodhand, 2002;Gordon, 2011;Kapstein and Kathuria, 2012;Nagl, Exum and Humayun, 2009) highlight the intuition that smaller projects can be targeted at important, specific gaps and seem less likely to fuel instability. We note that these small projects are small in the scale of any individual project; the programs which fund such projects may be quite large including in many instances nationwide in scope.…”

“…For each of three reconstruction programs included in our analysis (NSP, LGCD, CERP), project spending was not associated with statistically significant reductions in violence. The one exception was small-scale development aid that was conditional on information sharing by the community; this incentivized approach did appear to be somewhat effective in reducing violence (Chou, 2012). The literature does not provide evidence of increasing returns from a cost-effectiveness perspective; small projects do not have a different impact on outcomes, such as violence or support for the government, relative to larger-scale projects (see Child, 2014).…”

“…This appears to be true of both US and international civilian-led programs, such as the ASI programs (Altai, 2012 (1)) or NSP (Beath, Fontini and Enikolopov, 2013 (1b)), and military-led programs, such as CERP (Chou, 2012). It also applies to the stabilization efforts of non-USG foreign donors, such as Norway (Norad, 2012), Germany (BMZ, 2010), and the UK (DFID, 2009).…”

“…From well-designed experimental and quasiexperimental approaches (e.g., Beath, Fontini and Enikolopov, 2013;MSI, 2014) to governmentinitiated qualitative reviews (Bohnke, Koehler and Zurcher, 2014;Bohnke and Zurcher, 2013 (1b); Norad, 2012) to historical accounts (Goodhand, 2002) the evidence consistently indicates stabilization programming has small, generally transitory, impacts (both positive or negative). Programs such as the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) (Chou, 2012;Sexton, 2015) or some of the Afghanistan Stabilization Initiative (ASI) programs (Altai, 2012 (1)) that have been "successful" may have short-term positive impacts, but they do not appear to generate large shifts in security, attitudes, or capacity. This is relevant for both managing expectations for what stabilization programs may accomplish and for considering how to design measurement and evaluation efforts to detect relatively small effects.…”

“…A number of studies (Altai, 2012 (7); Chou, 2012;Child, 2014;Goodhand, 2002;Gordon, 2011;Kapstein and Kathuria, 2012;Nagl, Exum and Humayun, 2009) highlight the intuition that smaller projects can be targeted at important, specific gaps and seem less likely to fuel instability. Small projects have a variety of beneficial features: they are often easier to manage by staff on the ground; they are less likely than large infrastructure projects to attract attention from corrupt officials or to become targets for enemy sabotage; and outputs are small and less likely to become a source of conflict.…”