A new kind of reconstruction aid is needed. What passes for development assistance in many conflict countries emphasizes security to the detriment of everything else, fosters or tolerates corruption and dependency, and essentially distrusts local communities, small-scale social services, entrepreneurial and collective efforts alike - all the things that optimal reconstruction entails. The merging of security and development has been roundly criticized by on-the-ground specialists for more than a decade, yet this tendency persists, wasting billions and alienating the populace.
The budget squeeze in Washington - a crisis prompted in no small part by these very wars - will make large expenditures for Iraq and Afghanistan difficult, but small investments can go far if provided directly to the people undertaking small enterprises, community clinics, sustainable agriculture, and the like. This can be accomplished, among other social innovations, through a new banking system that relies on cellphone transactions, bypassing corrupt officials. Security spending can be made (and siphoned off) separately, but mixing the two - pretending that security spending is the same as reconstruction spending - disadvantages ordinary people.
Such community investments can go part way in healing the human destruction of the wars. While it is commonplace in political and media discourse to estimate war deaths in Iraq in the “tens of thousands,’’ the actual number is well into the hundreds of thousands, according to both household surveys and other methods. The displaced from Iraq still numbers in the millions - 4 million to 5 million, by the UN’s count - and those Iraqis are returning only in a trickle because they see the troubling security and economic situation in Iraq persisting. While the mayhem in Afghanistan has been at a smaller scale, its people have also suffered enormously.
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