Can You Spend Your Way to Victory? The Case of Statebuilding in Afghanistan

Abstract

Do statebuilding activities decrease insurgency? Since 2006 General Petraeus's mantra has been that you cannot kill or capture your way out of a complex insurgency. Instead of bullets money spent on development projects, like those funded by the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP), are seen to be key to victory. These projects are theorized to decrease insurgency in direct and indirect ways. Indirectly, improvements made to quality of life, and the use of domestic security forces, encourage the population to provide actionable intelligence. CERP projects may directly affect levels of insurgency in three ways: first, by building state institutions that offer insurgents peaceful ways to achieve their goals; second, by shifting the burden of military operations to local citizens who best understand the human terrain; and third, through increased employment which may give young men an alternative to joining the insurgency. This study contributes to the COIN literature by testing each of these theories separately on a unique sub-national panel dataset of over three-hundred an seventy Afghan districts over a fifty-two month period. In so doing, two of five hypotheses examining the effect of over three billion CERP dollars on over sixty-thousand insurgent attacks, find empirical validation. As well, two additional hypotheses focusing on the ability of CERP projects to improve the quality of life of Afghans and increase the legitimacy of the Afghan government do not find confirmation in the data. The major conclusion of this study is that statebuilding through the CERP has not been an effective COIN strategy. Only humanitarian assistance projects, because they are immune to corruption, insecurity, and mismanagement, were found to significantly contribute to success in the ongoing COIN campaign in Afghanistan.