Development at War

Nathan Hodge makes a compelling argument in this intriguing and well-written book. Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, United States military doctrine, development work, and humanitarian relief have become increasingly interwoven, often with disastrous results. As defense planners and military strategists have given increased attention to “stability operations” and counterinsurgency campaigns across the Global South, development and “nation-building” have become central elements of a broader campaign to redirect the futures of “failed states” and defeated regimes. Reasoning that the most dangerous strains of political radicalism will emerge and prevail in societies afflicted by poverty, ethnic conflict, and a lack of opportunity, senior figures in the Pentagon and the State Department have come to view development as a crucial weapon in a struggle of indefinite duration. “What began in late 2001 as a global war on terror,” Hodge writes, “was quietly recast as a campaign of armed social work. And in the process, American foreign policy underwent a tectonic shift” (9).

As Hodge explains, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, U.S. policymakers came to view the challenges of national security through the lens of broad social transformation. Pentagon advisers like Thomas Barnett, for example, advocated that U.S. strategy should be reimagined. In place of the old Cold War divide, Barnett and his colleagues envisioned a world split between a “functioning core” of states integrated into the global economy and a “non-integrating gap” of states that were outside the channels of international trade, commerce, finance, and growth. In Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Latin America, they argued, the United States would have to prepare to confront terrorist threats, respond to humanitarian crises, intervene in failed states, and engage in prolonged tasks of nation-building. As this view took hold at the highest levels of the Pentagon, it resonated strongly with the conviction of a rising generation of military officers that the United States was unprepared for that challenge. The United States might have an unparalleled ability to fight conventional wars against potential adversaries, but some of the most influential leaders of military policy, including General David Petraeus, believed that the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq pointed toward the need for a greater counterinsurgency capacity. Because the solutions to such conflicts required a deep engagement in the political, economic, and social terrain, advocates called for a new military mission and a greatly expanded, more versatile force to accomplish it. Development, they insisted, would have to become a central part of U.S. defense strategy.¹

Hodge illustrates the consequences of this approach in convincing detail, and reading his colorful ground-level narratives is a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Following military officers and USAID workers in the field, Hodge’s vivid anecdotes reveal the extent to which a combination of practical failures and theoretical fallacies undermined broad, sweeping ambitions. At the operational level, the immediate task of defeating enemies and winning wars sits uneasily alongside the longer-term goals of sustainable development. “Building an effective state and a functioning civil society,” Hodge argues, “is a process that takes decades, often generations” (13), yet U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan and Iraq were charged with obtaining rapid results to undermine an insurgency. As a result, questions of democratic accountability were quickly cast aside, a problem that only grew as the military dealt with personnel shortages by contracting projects out to for-profit firms. If the aspirations of local populations for schools, hospitals, roads, and business opportunities frequently ran counter to the immediate desire of U.S. military officers to secure intelligence and provide work for would-be insurgents, massive infrastructure contracts to U.S. firms like Brown and Root often did nothing at all for the local population. Replicating the racial division of labor in wealthy Persian Gulf States, Brown and Root imported Filipinos, Sri Lankans, Indians, and Nepalis to lay brick and serve meals at the massive Bagram air base, leaving Afghans out of the picture altogether. Military...