Afghanistan at Wilton Park

I spent the last three days of last week in the UK, attending a conference on ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’ with the subtitle ‘Assessing the Effectiveness of Development Aid in COIN Operations’. The conference was attended by close to 90 people, from the military, foreign services and academia of major NATO countries. The Norwegian MFA, who contributed money to both Wilton Park and to this particular conference, was particularly well represented.

The debate is particularly important now that the US is about to ‘surge’, not only militarily, but also through dramatically increasing its aid expenditures, with an exclusive focus on the most unstable areas. Andrew Wilder from the Feinstein Centre at Tufts University, who also gave a presentation on this topic at PRIO recently, argues that there is no evidence that aid channelled in insecure areas contributes to ‘stabilization’, and that development aid is better prioritized on the basis of development impact. Not only that, aid in insecure areas easily exacerbates local conflict and feeds into the local war economy (as when the Taliban received protection money). Wilder’s study is qualitative, based on interviews with locals and internationals alike, and focuses on perceptions. Wilder’s view was challenged by Eli Berman from UCSD, who had conducted econometric analysis on the basis of georeferenced data in Iraq. Berman argued that over time, aid did have significant effect on stabilization. While the jury is still out, there is little doubt that more money will go to Afghanistan’s most insecure areas over the next year or two.

While the surge and its impact was not the main agenda at Wilton Park, the situation – and the US-led surge – did attract considerable attention. At the moment, a significant share of international and Afghan capacity is focused on Marja, a relatively insignificant little town in Helmand province, which it will still take many months to secure. President Obama has made it clear that the new strategy’s effectiveness will be assessed next summer, and that unless it has worked, there will be a change of gears. Meanwhile, there is much talk of negotiations, but the most concrete thing that has happened is that Pakistan arrested top Talib Mullah Baradar, who had been engaging in talks with the government (and handed him over to the US); a strong signal that there will be no talks without Pakistan at the table. By far the most likely scenario is that a major reduction in international presence starts next fall, following a costly compromise with a Taliban that the international community has spent nine years to harden and radicalize. I hope I will be proven wrong.