Get the Military Out of Development

by Brooks Keene

Published December 04, 2008 @ 05:00AM PT

Brooks Keene is guest blogging for Michael today while he's off "doing field research," which I'm pretty sure means reading up on Settlers of Catan strategy to boost his skills.

Photo and caption from the State Department website.

The percentage of U.S. foreign aid being channeled through the military has skyrocketed, going from 6 to 20 percent between 2002 and 2007.  This "humanitarian" work done by the military can be divided into three categories:

1. Helping out in huge disasters like the Southeast Asian tsunami where the military has a clear advantage in rapidly transporting food and other items where it's needed.
2. State stabilization or building as in Iraq or Afghanistan, often in areas where aid workers are loathe to go.  This work is often done as part of a "quick impact team," which might have civilian aid workers included as well.
3. Work that many aid organizations would consider longer term development work--as opposed to emergency relief--done in fairly stable areas. This can run the gamut from digging wells to building schools.

The first of these, no one argues with.  There are limited times when really only the military can get people food or tents fast enough.  The second, I'll leave to someone like Michael who has ample experience.  The third is, in my opinion, a singularly awful idea.

Let me be clear.  The military doesn't do a lot of longer term development work, but it's part of a larger trend often called the "3-D's approach" where development, diplomacy and defense are increasingly merged.  David Brooks wrote a congratulatory op-ed on the trend earlier this week, seeing it as a common belief embraced by President Bush the lame duck, the soon-to-be former once and future Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the President-Elect.

Secretary Gates is dead-on when he says that we need to strengthen diplomacy and development as arms of U.S. foreign policy.  Gates himself uses some fun statistics to illustrate this: there are more musicians in the military than there are foreign service officers in the State Department and more lawyers in the Pentagon than the US Agency for International Development has permanent staff.

And yet, we need to strengthen not only the development budget. We also need to strengthen the force of its objectives.  Everything I've seen points to problems if we seek to unify these 3 D's under the objective of protecting Americans.  Good development is about working with people on the basis of their own hopes and wishes, not on your own needs. Put more simply, good development is not selfish.

Still, how can building a school be bad, you ask?  To illustrate how clashing objectives can lead to distrust on the ground that ultimately undermines even our security (much less good development), I'll point to something an ethnically Somali aid worker living in eastern Kenya said that stopped me cold in my tracks.  Her own impressions of the US government  were decidedly mixed.  She pointed to the good work she sees the US government doing through USAID projects or in resettlement of Somali refugees into the United States.  On the other hand, the periodic bombings just over the Somali border and intelligence gathering in the area created a decidedly more negative impression.  She said that perhaps this is a case where “the hand that feeds you is the one that kills you."  How much trust do you think she had in the U.S. troops digging wells nearby?

What's ultimately needed is to both strengthen and shield U.S. foreign aid.  The way this can best be done is by unifying the various US assistance agencies into one Cabinet-level Department of International Development.  This would give foreign aid the clout it needs to get results but also the power to form its own objectives and strategy.  There is no overall strategy for international development right now.  Yep, zilch.

If you think that doesn't sound quite right, check out Oxfam's campaign on aid reform or The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network to learn more or get involved.  There are many, many reasons for foreign aid reform beyond the small piece of it I've described.