Aid and Development Archive

One thing I’ve discovered from writing columns over the years is that they’re a great way to elicit invitations to sit down and talk with various players in the national security establishment. All you have to do is mention somebody’s office and you’re likely to get an e-mail from their public affairs officer eager to set your thinking straight. And so it was last week that I had the chance to converse with Ambassador John Herbst, three years in the job now as the State Department’s Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. I earned the invitation by describing the CRS job […]

Among the more than 20 top posts at the State Department that have yet to be filled is the director of foreign assistance. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice created the post in 2006 to consolidate responsibility for the country’s nearly $30 billion foreign aid budget. What follows is a letter to the still-to-be-named nominee. To the incoming director of foreign assistance, As you well know, for more than six decades, foreign aid has played an indispensable role in the conduct of the United States’ foreign affairs. Today, 154 countries benefit from some kind of financial assistance. Along with defense […]

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian authorities have stepped up border surveillance as more and more potential immigrants and refugees flee war-torn Central Asia and the Middle East, arriving here in search of passage onward to third countries like Australia. Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Tamils from Sri Lanka, Bangladeshis and even some Africans are finding Malaysia an attractive destination. On arrival, most are automatically granted a three-month tourist visa. The influx puts Malaysian authorities in a difficult spot. According to Malaysian law, an Afghan arriving by airplane has committed no offense. But when a cluster of Afghans touch down at KL International, […]

Recently, U.S. policy in Somalia hit a new low, with the shipment of 40 tons of arms to a government on the verge of overthrow, if not nervous collapse. Worse still, last Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the president of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, and promised to expand U.S. support. This perpetuates a long history of unsuccessful meddling in the affairs of Somalia, from Black Hawk Down to air strikes against al-Qaida suspects to support for the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. Somalia would be better off without our spasmodic interference. That’s […]

Speaking in Accra, Ghana, last month, President Barack Obama declared, “The 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in Rome or Moscow or Washington, but by what happens in Accra, as well.” His speech was designed to highlight America’s commitment to Africa and the opportunity for closer relations. On the heels of Obama’s trip to Ghana, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Africa this week. Her seven-nation tour — with stops in Kenya, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Liberia, and Cape Verde — will take her to hot spots and powerful […]

KAMPALA, Uganda — The bus destined for Gulu in northern Uganda hums and vibrates, its black exhaust pouring into Kampala’s deserted downtown streets, as a woman draped in a green dress stands up in front and calls for a prayer. Years ago, when Joseph Kony and his band of abducted child soldiers were still looting, maiming and terrorizing the north, prayer for this journey was essential. Yet three years after Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) were routed from northern Uganda — chased into isolated stretches of jungle in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African […]

Driven by food security concerns, governments around the world have begun purchasing land in developing nations for agricultural purposes. Foreign land acquisition — known by critics as “land grab” — responds to worries over global problems that include growing water scarcity, teeming populations, increasing demand for food and bio-fuels, and climate change impacting arable land and its productivity. This trend necessitates an international framework or code of conduct that can protect small local farmers as well as the economy and the ecology of the host country from potentially negative impacts. Such a code would seek to resolve the question of […]

To get a sense of what “complex operations” are, one need look no further than the kind of wars the U.S. fights when it intervenes overseas today. Unlike the total wars of the past, in which the U.S. military battled the national army of an enemy state, today’s struggles for security, stabilization, peace-building, reconstruction, and development in the most fragile states around the world are engaged by several different departments of the U.S. government. That’s it in a nutshell. But clearly, describing it is far easier than doing it. When you listen to how the best minds that are thinking […]

These are nerve-racking times at the Pentagon. For “Big War” adherents, Iraq is not looking like the “one off” that many hoped it would be, as Afghanistan-Pakistan appears to be, if anything, an even harder slog. None of the dominant Big War scenarios are looking good, now that Iran is ever closer to nuclear deterrence, North Korea ever closer to collapse, and Taiwan ever closer to a peace deal with Beijing. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, meanwhile, is locking in a more balanced take on small wars versus large, and the serious Leviathan budget-cutting has begun. Clearly, a tipping point […]