Hodge takes a skeptical look at the armed humanitarian work of the last decade. I've picked up a copy of his book, but for this write-up I'm just going off the event. He found that much of what we were doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan was similar to the nation building we did in the 1990s. However the money spigot got turned on in a big way which went well beyond the absorption rate of local communities. As an example, we're spending many times building up the Afghan military and police than the Afghan government is taking in as revenue. The military is a can do organization and it stepped in but with the exception of civil affairs and special forces it's not really that skilled at it. The sheer funding is also a problem in its own right, if 5% of convoy spending is misdirected that's enough to fund an insurgency.
On the whole, he thought that we should get leaner and go with a more 1990s approach and lower budgets. He did think we'd have to put in diplomatic and development people in hostile situations, but only at a small scale. A key success story was getting 2-3 people to setup operations in Darfur with the help of satellite technology. Ultimately, he argued that Armed Humanitarianism is an oxymoron which implies to me that we're going to need to substantially curtail our ambitions.
The question I didn't get a chance to ask was, if we need to work at a small scale, what missions are we going to have to give up? From what he said, I'd say Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as hostile occupations in general, obviously aren't on the table. The question I didn't get to ask is where should the line get drawn now? We'll see if the book can answer that one.
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