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Military and Aid Responses: the Afghan Dilemma - Response to Astri Suhrke and Juan Garrigues
21/03/2007 By Robert Matthews
In her extensive report, ‘When More is Less: Aiding Statebuilding in Afghanistan’, Astri Suhrke writes a scholarly and provocative treatise which presents a compelling critique of the Western illusion - even infatuation - with international aid to Afghanistan after September 2001.
She rejects the argument that there has not been enough (that the promised aid has not been forthcoming or that it has been stingy by comparison with other conflict areas like the Balkans).
The failure to develop a viable economy at the local level, the alternatives available in the poppy economy and the political fragmentation of the country, have acted in tandem to undermine the political authority of the central government.
More aid in sheer quantity - both economic and military - while maintaining the present local and international structures and actors, will not resolve the problem of Afghanistan’s failing and fragmented state. In fact it is having theopposite effect and encouraging the increasingly violent insurgency in that country.
Juan Garrigues in ‘Why Sometimes More is More: Military assistance to Afghanistan’ offers a response to Astri Suhrke. He grants Suhrke’s cogent point regarding the self defeating quality of economic aid, which needs to be adjusted to the competence of local Afghan structures in order to be absorbed and utilised efficiently. Less, butmore intelligently administered economic aid may now be the practical approach.
Garrigues’ emphasis on more military aid and force application by the ISAF, however, avoids the more critical question of exactly how that extra force wouldhave been employed.
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Keywords
Aid effectiveness External intervention NATORelated publications
- When More is Less: aiding statebuilding in Afghanistan
- Why Sometimes More is More: military assistance to Afghanistan
Bio author: Robert Matthews
Robert Matthews, Associate Fellow of FRIDE, holds a Ph.D in Latin American history from New York University, where he was a teacher at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. For twenty years was a collaborator with the Peace Research Center - Centro de Investigación para la Paz (CIP) - in Madrid, specializing in United States foreign policy.
