Military aid for development crept into recent U.S. wars as the component of counterinsurgency (or COIN) which would win the hearts and minds of the civilian population under siege. Ten percent of the war budget in Afghanistan is allocated for "humanitarian" aid such as school and health clinic building, bridge repair, road building, and so on; and it is administered through USAID. A new investigative report on USAID Afghanistan development projects finds that the agency is understaffed in the field and fails to manage, visit or audit their programs -- a recipe for waste, corruption, fraud and extortion. Further, USAID projects have recklessly bloated budgets which are mismatched with the local development needs of villages and result in ineffective projects. Finally, it is alleged that project contractors pay up to 20% of project costs to the Taliban for security "a protection racket" which funds those against whom we are waging war.
The strategic goal of U.S. military aid for development is to support war objectives and, only secondarily, the lives of Afghan people. For this reason, even this pitiful percent of the war budget is problematic for humanitarian agencies. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now targeted by militants because they are associated with the U.S. military, given that military development projects resemble NGO projects. CARE International has testified to the endangerment that military development aid embedded within war has caused their agency. CARE's neutral status, which has allowed them safe passage to reach and rescue civilians, is gone the collateral damage of counterinsurgency strategy as codified in the 2006 Army Counterinsurgency Manual. A dozen prominent humanitarian agencies including Save the Children, CARE, and the Catholic Relief Services -- issued a report in spring of 2009 critiquing the "militarization of aid" as a contamination of and endangerment to the genuine humanitarian work in war. (5)
Historic Role of the United States
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