The 800 Pound Gorilla in the Room Posted by The Editors

This post is by NSN intern Luis Vertiz

The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed by John Nagl and Daniel Rice, discussing their plans for an Iraqi Enterprise fund. Their concern revolves around counterinsurgency [COIN] doctrine exhorting stability operations to focus on winning the hearts and minds through security and economic partnerships. However, the majority of defense spending up to this point in Iraq has focused on military operations. This is a genuine concern that cannot be easily dismissed. However, their prescription for offering long-term development aid, an Iraq Enterprise Fund, is couched in language which leaves doubts as to how the aid is to be administered. Nagl and Rice write:

Yet current development programs in Iraq -- like the Commanders' Emergency Response Fund, which lets senior military officials spend money on "urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction" projects -- focus largely on short-term job creation, not on sustainable economic development that reduces unemployment in the long term. A more appropriate weapon would be an enterprise fund to help Iraqis invest in long-term growth.

This description is misleading for a few reasons. First, the current use of Commanders’ Emergency Response Funds, or CERP, was never intended to be used as a long term development tool. Projects tied to CERP funding were expected to help with local stability operations, and were not necessarily tied to a larger, national economic development program. Because projects were paid for on an emergency basis, overall economic growth appears random and CERP spending undisciplined, causing understandable concern amongst auditors and the development community. The use of CERP funds as an example of poor development tool is neither apt nor fair.

The bigger issue, however, is the implicit characterization of development aid as a weapon. That is sure to raise a red flag within civilian agencies like State and USAID, and within the NGO community, which strenuously opposes the militarization and politicization of aid. COIN is an inherently hybrid effort, not a purely military or civilian effort. Therefore, it wouldn’t be difficult, if not implausible, to conclusively characterize Nagl and Rice’s argument as an argument for the militarization of aid.  While they make an offhand remark about how the Iraq Enterprise Fund could be profitable to USAID [assuming it is administered by them], the authors did not state the obvious: because of the preponderance of uniformed military personnel and DoD personnel in Iraq [and Afghanistan], the military would be the natural conduit by which this Iraqi Enterprise Fund, or development aid in general, would be administered, not USAID.

In order to win over the support of civilian agencies and the NGO community, Nagl and Rice should have unequivocally stated that this Iraqi Enterprise Fund would be administered by USAID. Civilian agencies and NGOs would like to portray their work as non-combative in nature and more likely to draw in persuadable Iraqis. Firmly putting USAID in the lead would also be more likely to gain the support of the military, which would prefer to focus their training and resources on war-fighting rather than allowing their responsibilities in Iraq to suffer from mission creep.

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The bigger issue, however, is the implicit characterization of development aid as a weapon. That is sure to raise a red flag within civilian agencies like State and USAID, and within the NGO community, which strenuously opposes the militarization and politicization of aid. COIN is an inherently hybrid effort, not a purely military or civilian effort. Therefore, it wouldn’t be difficult, if not implausible, to conclusively characterize Nagl and Rice’s argument as an argument for the militarization of aid.
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