The Financial Times published an op-ed by R4D Principal, Dennis de Tray, titled, "Only An Aid Rethink Can Save Afghanistan." To read the full article from the Financial Times, click here. To read an extract of the op-ed, see below.

A recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report  concluded that America’s aid efforts in Afghanistan have failed. Even so, the US is likely to spend $15bn on development assistance between 2010 and 2012 — $1bn more than in its entire engagement in that country prior that point. These figures risk doubling down on an already bad bet. Afghanistan may soon become situation described in the classic quote: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”, in which significant donor assistance and armies of contractors turn out to be part of the problem, not the solution. Indeed, if we look back on 10 years of war in Afghanistan, we face two inescapable truths: first, as is predicable in a counter-insurgency war, we cannot win simply by killing the enemy; second, as hard as we have tried, we cannot build our way to victory either. The international community’s development efforts have produced hundreds of schools, health clinics and power plants. But they have not come close to producing the stability needed to let our troops come home with reasonable assurance that they won’t be back in a few years.

So if neither guns nor major assistance works, what will? Here many speak of the failure of the US military’s counter-insurgency doctrine. But this is to misread Afghanistan’s recent history. The problem is that the US military and civilian actors have, in the name of counter-insurgency, produced precisely the opposite effect that this strategy intends.

The writer Dennis de Tray was an adviser to the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team deployed in Afghanistan’s Logar and Wardak provinces in 2010. He is a principal at the Results for Development Institute and a former World Bank senior manager.

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**This extract from the Financial Times was produced by Results for Development Institute. To read the full article, click here.