Here we come to the danger of the development-as-national security argument. The billions the U.S. spends trying to produce good government and promote economic growth in Afghanistan and Pakistan constitute the civilian side of the war on terror. That's national security. The same cannot obviously be said for reducing AIDS, stabilizing food prices, or building infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. That sounds like a moral rather a strategic good. So why preserve them from cuts in the face of massive deficits?
The short answer is that they achieve real results at a price that is practically a rounding error in the federal budget. The AfPak funds have done very little noticeable good on such crucial tasks as extending the reach of the government into the violent frontier region between the two countries. Meanwhile, programs like the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which go only to relatively well-governed states, are almost certainly more effective. In fact, it's the money the United States spends in the name of "national security," and which the GOP is eager to protect, that serves as a stimulus bill for foreign countries: Massive U.S. spending in Afghanistan not only props up the dysfunctional government there but fills the pockets of warlords and political leaders. The MCA, which is slated to lose 29 percent of its funding, really does help needy countries, whether or not they pose a terrorist threat to the United States.
The simple fact that these programs do real good in the world, and that the entire international affairs budget -- of which foreign aid is only a part -- represents 0.38 percent of national GDP should be reason enough to restore the funding. But it won't be. If the Obama administration is not going to accept this unholy compromise, it will have to forcefully make, or remake, the case that helping fragile states is a national security imperative.
I would nominate Defense Secretary Robert Gates to lead the charge. Gates has consistently argued for increased State Department funding. In a 2008 speech, he observed that failing states pose a greater danger to U.S. security than do "ambitious" ones, and said that "America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long" relative to the U.S. military. If this is so, then it's obviously a dreadful mistake to cut 15 percent from the budget of USAID, as the current House plan would do, let alone virtually eliminate the agency as the Republican Study Committee proposed.
The problem is that Gates is much more preoccupied with defending the Pentagon's gigantic $671 billion budget request. Gates has claimed that anything more than Obama's proposed $78 billion in cuts -- much of them from dubious accounting -- will damage national security. This insistence on preserving defense spending -- to say nothing of entitlements -- has required deeper cuts elsewhere in order to make inroads on the deficit. But if diplomacy and development really are underfunded relative to the military, then it's perverse to slash the budget for international affairs while protecting the Pentagon; we should take money from the bloated defense budget to increase funding for the MCA, or to help build the action-oriented USAID that both Gates and Clinton have forcefully advocated. And given that we spend more than 20 times as much on defense as we do on development assistance, we could make the changes proportional by cutting $20 from the Pentagon for every $1 we add to development, and use the rest to draw down the deficit. Do we really think that would make us, on balance, less safe?
Gates is stepping down later this year. Here is his chance to leave the nation an enduring legacy.
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