Bible and a Gun

As I read Jordan's last post, with the photo burned in my memory, I became increasingly smug as my attitudes towards the military complex were even more deeply confirmed. However, out of the blue, I started thinking about the line from "The Wanderer" by Johnny Cash and U2,
"I went out walking with a bible and a gun
The word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one"

I won't try to analyze the song in this space, I tried very much simply to put the lyrics on the right but to no avail - so I've simply posted a YouTube video to let you listen to the words.

It wasn't so long ago that missionary's made the very same leap of logic. Somewhere along the line people who were in the business of evangelism realized that meeting people's physical needs was an excellent stepping stone to meeting their spiritual needs. (To me, that logic is present right in the New Testament but things got confused along the way.) *

I will not be able to explain my train of thought but after a while I almost began to see myself in that picture. Obviously a gun, as a weapon, creates a very hierarchical relationship but just looking at that picture I get a feel for all the relational dynamics between that soldier and the others in the photo. One of the last activities I did before coming back to Canada was help protect a natural spring so that animals would not pollute the water and people have better access to clean water. Similar to that soldier, I was down in the muck and mire, working away, laying bricks and scooping mud while getting to know the nationals who lived in the area and would eventually (I presume) take advantage of this clean water.

I may not have had a gun but I had a nice watch, a massive car, absolutely no financial concerns and drove off every few days to "recuperate" at home. In other words, although I'm sure I got to know my co-workers much better than GI Joe pictured below, there were some not insignificant factors preventing real relationship building and, as an extension, effective development. I cannot hold my nose too high.

So that was my initial response to Jordan's post; am I able to end this post with a poignant lesson? I'll try. Maybe as the International Committee for the Red Cross, UN, et al protest about the incredible harm that comes from linking military activities and providing aid it will cause them to purposefully study and categorize what they do so as to distance themselves from the military. This naval gazing may result in a broader recognition of some of the side effects of their own actions and cause some re-thinking about development.

In other words, one of the core topics of this blog is the ineffectiveness of traditional aid. Maybe the military getting involved simply magnifies this and will drive all the real aid organizations to really do some soul searching for some ground breaking methods to help those in need.

Not sure how that ties in with my anecdote or even the song but there you have it.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

*Now, make no mistake, the path from trying to help someone spiritually to being concerned about their physical well being is significantly more straightforward than the winding path between a military presence trying to seek out terrorist individuals within the populace and that same military also helping individuals rebuild their homes. According to the military that path has to get through the towns of "It's for our National Security" and "For their freedom". Other towns along that road, not mentioned on the map include "Civilian casualties", "Toppled government" as well as "Abu Ghraib" and "My Lai". So I'm sorry military, in the short, medium and long term you are not doing one iota of good. Just had to get that rant out, better stop while I'm ahead.

Laying bricks with guns

image source: http://katakamidotcom2.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/children/

The linking of security of development manifests itself in two ways.  I explored one of these manifestations in my last post, that of linking development with the desire on the part of donor countries to increase their own security.  Put another way, this amounts to the assertion or belief that ‘we’ can “develop our way out of [insecurity]”(Beall et al. 2006:64). The second implication of the development-security linkage is a shrinking of humanitarian space and a blurring of the lines between military and civilian actors in countries where development is taking place (Jacoby and James 2010). I want to focus on this second point in this post.

In both Afghanistan (since the 2001 US invasion) and in Iraq (since the 2003 US invasion), reconstruction of both the state and infrastructure have been carried out in the context of ongoing military conflicts and considerable military presence. In Pakistan, along the Afghanistan border, development projects have been implemented in the context of considerable insecurity and instability and subsequently have required remote management by development managers bunkered in their offices in the capital, far from the locations where development activities, such as infrastructure development, are being carried out. In Afghanistan, where heavy military presence continues in most provinces, physical reconstruction and other development activities have been carried out by Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) made up largely of military personal of foreign security forces under NATO command. In these cases, the military are doing development and the distinction between military and civilian, between multinational and unilateral aid, are nearly lost altogether.

The humanitarian community, such as the International Committee for the Red Cross and other organizations, have long aspired to the principles of impartiality and neutrality, committed to operating in conflict or other politically charged contexts without taking sides and focusing on helping those most in need.  The UK’s Department for International Development, created in the 90s, explicitly embodied a legal requirement that UK foreign aid be divorced from its political (diplomatic) and military (defense department) spending and agendas.  As Jacoby and James (2010) point out, these ideals are being severely tested in the contexts of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, I would argue, in the broader context of the fragile states agenda, as discussed previously.

A military is expressly maintained and deployed in the national interest of its country.  It can, in no way, act neutrally or objectively.  And even acts such as building roads and schools are not, somehow divorced from the political and social complexities of all development activities and programmes.  The use of military in development not only obliterates any hope of maintaining neutrality, it belies a positivist, top-down, apolitical view of development.  Development cannot be deployed like an airborne division and somehow fix insecurity or instability as it is rolled out on the ground.  This point links with Kurtis’s insightful comments in last week’s post about the complexity of development contexts and the futility of trying to control or manipulate them from outside. Robert Chambers called these kinds of development contexts, complex, diverse and risk-prone (CDR) and they require a different approach.  I’ll have a closer look at possible alternative modes of development in my next post.