Protect Mothers and Children, Without Weapons

This is the first in a multi-part series looking at the subject of foreign aid reform, offering some specific recommendations as the U.S. Congress prepares to debate the subject in the coming weeks and months.

Foreign Aid Reform recommendation #1: Counterinsurgency Forces Must Leave the Humanitarian Sphere

As the U.S. Congress and Executive near their spring deadline for signing foreign aid reform legislation, Change.org's War and Peace blog will have an open discussion on which priorities we would like to recommend. That includes some of my fellow Change.org War and Peace writers, as well as folks from the soon-to-be-launched Global Poverty blog. Today, I'll put the first recommendation up on the board and see if anyone would like to applaud, counter, or tweak it before we turn it into an action which you the reader can sign and send to policy-makers.

Why should NATO and its counter-insurgency operations run separately from the humanitarian sphere in an era when the Defense Department is celebrating the perceived successes of "Civil-Military" operations?

The short answer is, when insurgents see aid agencies and local leaders cozying up to foreign military as in Afghanistan or Iraq, they make stronger cases to their followers that the aid agencies and local leaders are traitors and spies and that they should be targeted like they were soldiers, despite being unarmed and unarmored. Since 2001, attacks on international and local aid workers have risen dramatically, largely because of NATO's move into the aid sphere. And attacks on those aid managers sometimes mean that programs helping thousands may be shut down in the region where the attack occurred.

However, there is an important qualification here. While military forces should keep out of the humanitarian sphere (sectors in which services should not be conditioned upon political loyalties like health, education, peacebuilding), militaries conducting counter-insurgency operations alongside local governments have the right by international law to carry out any kind of support aid-related to establishing the rule of law, security, democratization, or expanding the reach of the local government through mass-hire work projects. So the military has the legal right to include many vital aspects of aid in its operations, but these aspects are to be in support of the local government -- those areas in which service-provision is already biased loyal to the ruling party's policies.

To recap a nuanced but tremendously vital recommendation (long rallied by international aid and human rights agencies), military forces conducting counter-insurgency according to international law may try to woo insurgents into a unity government or to lay down their arms through aid run through the local government in the security, democratization, and infrastructure spheres; military forces should keep away from traditionally impartial life-saving and peacebuilding activities for the safety and success of those efforts.

Some may wonder whether any aid is impartial; isn't much of the aid coming from the NATO governments anyway? Yes, but look at Gaza for the best example of how sophisticated populations can distinguish between aid to Palestinians from the State Department, and aid to Israel from the Defense Department.

Local communities face a dilemma of trust. If their children are suffering preventable diseases or they have a new mother at risk of hypertension, they do not want to have to cross a gauntlet of armed soldiers to get help. There's much more to say on the topic. But let's debate it out. If you have some ideas here, or wish to challenge this recommendation, please do.

Photo credit: DVIDSHUB (Iraq mother and child wait for a U.S. military vaccination)