Research by CISAC's Joseph Felter shows that insurgents try to derail government-delivered aid programs in poor areas because they fear successful programs will boost the government's credibility. Preventive measures include providing greater security around aid projects and limiting advance knowledge about them.

A research paper, published in the American Economic Review, involved an analysis of a large community-driven development program in the Philippines. In 2012, the World Bank supported more than 400 of these projects in 94 countries with about $30 billion in aid.

Conventional wisdom assumes that development aid is a tool to help reduce civil conflict. But some aid projects may actually exacerbate the violence, the research showed.

In an interview, Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said, "A 'winning hearts-and-minds' strategy for disbursing development aid may lead to an increase in insurgent attacks in the world's poorest areas. The study's takeaway is not to stop aid delivery, but to appreciate and plan for the possibility of unintended consequences."

Felter co-wrote the article, "Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict," along with Benjamin Crost of the University of Colorado-Denver and Patrick Johnston of the RAND Corporation. Their research relied on conflict data from the Philippines military from between 2002 and 2006 that allowed them to precisely estimate how the implementation of aid affected violence levels in ongoing insurgencies against the government.

Spotlight on the Philippines

These issues are particularly important in poor and conflict-ridden countries like the Philippines, Felter said. The Philippines is home to some of the most protracted insurgencies in the world. Islamic separatist groups struggle for an independent Muslim state; a communist group continues to wage a classic Maoist revolutionary war; and the extremist Abu Sayyaf Group conducts kidnappings and terrorist attacks.

The aid program Felter and his colleagues studied was the Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan Comprehensive Integrated Delivery of Social Service – or KALAHI-CIDSS – the largest of its kind in the Philippines. Through it, poor communities receive projects to address their most pressing needs. According to Felter, this typically involved funding for projects like roads, schools, health clinics and other infrastructure.

"This is government funding for projects that citizens in these areas have expressly asked for," Felter said.

The researchers noted that community-driven development projects, also known as "CDD" projects, are popular because evidence suggests they enhance social cohesion among citizens. But sometimes they draw the wrong kind of attention from anti-government groups, as the research illustrated.

Felter and his colleagues found an increase of 110-185 percent in insurgent attacks in communities where aid projects commenced, the authors wrote. If this effect is extrapolated across all of the Philippines' municipalities, the authors estimate that the program resulted in between 550 and 930 additional casualties during three years.

"Taken together, this detailed evidence sheds new light on the mechanisms that link aid and conflict, which may eventually help design more effective aid interventions that alleviate poverty without exacerbating conflict," they wrote.

When the insurgent groups destroy such a project, it has the effect of weakening the perception that the government can actually deliver on community projects, the scholars wrote. For example, the communist rebels in the Philippines have issued public statements denouncing the KALAHI-CIDSS program as "counterrevolutionary and anti-development." If a successful aid program shifts the balance of power in favor of the government, it reduces insurgents' bargaining power and their political leverage.

As a result, insurgents tended to engage in conflict in the earlier stages of a project in order to keep it from succeeding, according to the research. In fact, conflict increased when municipalities were in the early or "social preparation" stages of publicizing an aid program, Felter and his colleagues wrote.

Sometimes rebel groups divert aid to fund their own operations – aid shipments are often stolen or "taxed" by these groups, according to the paper.

The Next Step

What can be done to prevent attacks?

"Greater security around the aid projects and limiting advance knowledge of the particular projects are good measures to start with," Felter said.

He noted that governments and aid organizations need to be discreet in how they identify aid projects and their locations, and how they disburse the aid itself. More research on this issue needs to be done, Felter said.

"One lesson is not to give insurgents too long a lead time to plan attacks," he said.

Unfortunately, as the researchers noted, poverty and violence are often linked: "The estimated one-and-a-half billion people living in conflict-affected countries are substantially more likely to be undernourished, less likely to have access to clean water and education, and face higher rates of childhood mortality."

Continued progress – in the form of international aid – is urged toward eradicating poverty. "To help achieve this, governments and multilateral donor organizations are increasingly directing development aid to conflict-affected countries worldwide," Felter and his co-authors pointed out.

Felter, also a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2012 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer. He has conducted foreign internal defense and security assistance missions across East and Southeast Asia and has participated in combat deployments to Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010-11, he commanded the International Security and Assistance Force Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan.

"I saw this dynamic (insurgent attacks on aid projects) firsthand in Afghanistan and Iraq. This research paper confirms it," Felter said.

He devoted much of his Stanford doctoral dissertation and his work at CISAC and Hoover to build what he hopes will be the largest and most detailed micro-conflict database – the Empirical Studies of Conflict – ever assembled.

Felter said there is only so much that the military can do to win over people in areas ravaged by war and conflict.

"The military can 'lease' hearts and minds by creating a safe environment for aid projects," he said, "but ultimately it's up to the government to win them over."

Karl Eikenberry  Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

President Barack Obama has announced he will send several hundred troops to help secure the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as militants aligned with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - known as ISIS - take neighborhoods in Baquba, only 44 miles from the Iraqi capital.

Former Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security, is interviewed by the Australian Broadcast Corporation. He says the advances by Islamic militants in Iraq in the last week "have been absolutely stunning." The retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen., however, thinks the ISIS advancement will end quickly. "The bigger worry that we have though is ISIS crossing over to the Iraqi and the Syrian frontier and the possibility of them establishing a sanctuary for international terrorists," Eikenberry says.

You can watch Eikenberry's interview here. and ready an interview in The Australian here.

Martha Crenshaw  Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at CISAC and its parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is one of the world's leading experts on terrorism. She joined a panel on the public radio program KQED Forum to discuss the political situation and what the militants envision for an Islamic state.

"The ISIS is a group that is even more radical than al-Qaida itself," Crenshaw says. 
"Syria provided a launching board for them, which allowed them to become sort of a caliphate linking Syria and Iraq."

Crenshaw estimates there are between 5,000 to 6,000 members of the ISIS fighting in Iraq and that new recruits are coming in all the time. "But the source of their strength is not merely in numbers," she says. They have gained strength through discipline and communicating what an Islamic state would look like.

Listen to KQED panel discussion here.

Arash Aramesh, a national security analyst at Stanford Law School, discusses the crisis through the prism of Iran on Al Jazeera English.

President Barack Obama announced this week that the United States would complete its pullout of troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, leaving 9,800 troops by the end of this year and cutting that in half by 2015. A small force will remain to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul and help with local security. The president said this would free up combat troops for emerging terrorism threats in the Middle East and North Africa and effectively put an end to the longest war in U.S. history.

Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011, answers a few questions about the way forward. Eikenberry is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC.

Critics say the drawdown is too dramatic and rapid and could seriously diminish the progress NATO and its allies have made in the country. What is your view?

I think the drawdown schedule is militarily sound and responsible. First, the commander on the ground has indicated his support for the timelines. Second, by the end of 2016 – the announced target date for completion of the military drawdown – our armed forces will have operated in Afghanistan for over 15 years. It will be time for the Afghan government, with continued U.S. and international material and security assistance support, to take full responsibility for the defense of its country. In fact, the president's announcement represents the culmination of combined U.S., NATO, and Afghanistan planning that began in 2010.

Third, militant extremists in distant lands often effectively exploit the presence of U.S. armed forces serving in their county to rally support for their cause. At some point, large scale U.S. military deployments can become counterproductive, undermining efforts to develop accountable responsible governance and security forces.     

Are the Afghans ready to take over the security operations in their country?

U.S. and NATO military forces have been complimentary about the performance of the Afghan National Army and Police since they began in 2012 to assume greater responsibility for securing their country. Certainly, the Afghan security forces did well protecting the recent April 5th presidential election. Their major challenges will be ensuring adequate international monetary support (perhaps $3 billion a year for some years to come) and adapting to a tactical environment in which they will not have access to U.S. and NATO firepower, logistics, communications, and intelligence. Combat against the Taliban will be more equal contests.

There are concerns that the Taliban is sitting in the wings, just waiting for the withdrawal of American troops. Are those concerns valid?  

I have heard this argument since I first served in Afghanistan in 2002. I don't buy it. By 2016 we'll be in the 15^th year of a military mission that began in 2001. Will another 15 years be adequate to prove we can "wait them out?" It is time for the Afghans to take charge of their own destiny. Furthermore, the Taliban are not a cohesive movement; there is not a centralized Taliban command "waiting in the wings." Last, the Taliban are not the primary threat to Afghan stability.The greater challenges are Pakistan's policies towards Afghanistan, Afghanistan national political reconciliation, and massive government corruption. 

What is the legacy that the United States leaves behind?

Most Afghans have told me over the years that the greatest U.S. legacy will be democracy and all that has brought. If Afghanistan is able to strengthen its political institutions and stabilize the country in the years after foreign forces return to their homes, I would agree that the introduction of democracy will be what we are remembered for. 

Military interventions have traditionally been a source of controversy in the United States. But America’s appetite for the dispatch of armed forces has been diminished greatly by factors that have primarily emerged in the 21st century. These include, most painfully, the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that have made US political and military leaders more cautious about waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands.

Debates on military intervention are complicated by the network of political, security and economic interests that must be balanced when contemplating this option. In this IISS commentary, Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, talks about how four factors have heavily influence the current calculus.

Military interventions have traditionally been a source of controversy in the United States. But America’s appetite for the dispatch of armed forces has been diminished greatly by factors that have primarily emerged in the 21st century. These include, most painfully, the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that have made US political and military leaders more cautious about waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands.

Debates on military intervention are complicated by the network of political, security and economic interests that must be balanced when contemplating this option. In this IISS commentary, Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, talks about how four factors have heavily influence the current calculus.