Can humanitarian aid be used as a tool for stabilization and security in Afghanistan?
Security is the number-one desire of Afghans and the international community. If aid programs indeed have a significant security benefit, then I think there would be some justification for programming some of our development aid to try to achieve those benefits. But as far as I can see, there’s very little evidence that poverty, or the lack of infrastructure and health care in Afghanistan, are major causes of the conflict. All those things are important, but that’s not what’s driving the conflict. We operate under the assumption that spending more aid money in the insecure areas improves security. But we don’t have evidence that it’s actually achieving these security objectives. That’s why I’m urging some caution, since our research is showing not only is aid not stabilizing, it can also be destabilizing. How would aid be destabilizing? The more money we try to spend in this environment, which has very limited human resources and institutional capacity, inevitably money overflows into
