Conflict and counterinsurgency aid: Drawing sectoral distinctions

We examine the impact of counterinsurgency aid on conflict in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2009. To enable this analysis we combine unique aid project data from NATO, household data from the Afghan government, and conflict data from US government sources. Our panel data analysis accounts for district and time period fixed effects across 398 districts and 57 months. Projects in the health sector successfully promote stability, whereas those in the education sector actually provoke conflict. Our findings are robust to reverse causation, confounding aid programs, and other sources of endogeneity. The results shed new perspective on the ‘hearts and minds’ theory commonly discussed in this vein of inquiry

The likelihood of local allies free-riding: Testing economic theories of alliances in US counterinsurgency interventions

In counterinsurgency interventions, free-riding by small, local allies is persistent. Yet, the literature on free-riding by small allies is largely limited to conventional multilateral partnerships, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, neglecting other types of asymmetric alliances. Using new data containing 144 US requests to local allies in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, this article tests the logic of economic theories of alliances in counterinsurgency interventions. I find even when small allies are explicitly asked to contribute to alliance-wide security goods, they are likely to free-ride almost half the time (45%), and the likelihood of free-riding is dependent on whether local allies can be excluded by larger allies. This conclusion upholds the logic of economic models, since shared defense goods that exclude local allies fail to meet the criteria of public goods