My undergraduate honors thesis was on the ethics of US humanitarian assistance to Somalia in 1992. It tried to examine the political influences that determined who to assist and how much in a conflict zone. I just noticed a warning by Oxfam about this exact issue in terms of today’s American international security interests:
If you look at allocations in the course of this past decade to Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s much higher on a per capita basis than the aid given to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is one of the worst places to live on Earth, and has been for a couple of decades. I think aid per capita at one point in Iraq was 18 times higher than the aid per capita in Congo, even though Iraq – despite the violence at the time – was considerably less badly off than the Congo.
The Deutsche Welle uses some highly charged language as an introduction to the issues:
Billions of dollars are being used for “unsustainable, expensive and sometimes dangerous aid projects” supporting short-term foreign policy and security objectives, while countries in desperate need are being overlooked, according to Oxfam.
Oxfam argues two points against letting security policy be tied to aid.
- Military-related assistance can be perceived as tainted and a target of resistance
- The military does a poor job identifying and managing assistance areas
They give an area just to the south of Somalia as an example:
If you look at the assistance that the US has given in northern Kenya, which is an area of security interest for the Americans, the US Army has built schools there and then forgotten about them or not ensured that there are teachers and materials for that school to be sustainable. We’ve seen that happen in many parts of Afghanistan as well. The assistance is badly done.
I recently wrote about a little-known US military project in a small African country, very likely to be related to security but portrayed as entirely humanitarian.