Winning Peace With Tactical Economics: Violence, Governance, And Military Development Aid in Afghanistan

Abstract

Building on previous empirical studies of violence and military aid spending, this paper adds to the growing body of literature by analyzing the recent reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. New and more expansive violence data from Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) are combined with data from military-led development aid projects under the United States Army’s Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), and survey data from the Afghan National Quarterly Assessment Research (ANQAR) to investigate the relationships between military aid and violence. This paper replicates the most recent research in the field with a larger data set covering 2008-2013, testing three hypotheses. H1: Conditional on district characteristics, CERP spending is inversely correlated with violence. H2: Lagged 3 months, Small CERP spending is negatively related to violence, and Large CERP spending is positively related to violence. H3: Increases in perceptions of government effectiveness are associated with a reduction in violence. The data indicate a negative relationship between CERP