What Are the Pros and Cons of Foreign Involvement?

What Are the Pros and Cons of Foreign Involvement?

The first priority in stabilizing a post-conflict state is usually to meet a range of immediate
needs (like food supply, security, and health care). Providing these services is absolutely
critical and is an essential role that the international community can provide.
International peacekeepers too create the secure environment needed to get supplies to
suffering populations. As a flood of foreign money and aid comes into the country that is
in desperate economic condition, there can also be a rapid rise in corruption as citizens
scramble for scarce resources and those with power and connections look for ways to

turn a profit. Who does this money go to, and
is it wisely spent? Provincial leaders, notes
Debra Liang-Fenton at USIP, often work with
international NGOs to dictate priorities based
on how they personally benefit, but it’s not
always clear that this support is meeting the
real needs of the people in that society.
Some groups may also get lucrative contracts
when others don’t. This is what is happening
in Afghanistan, says Raymond Gilpin at USIP,
who adds that this practice is increasing
inequalities in that society. “When local
politicians influence aid delivery based on
politically or economically corrupt premises,
rather than on a competence and need basis, corruption will result in reluctant donors,
under-performing or inadequate infrastructure and services, higher costs and sometimes
delays, and the entrenchment of inequalities,” noted Philippe Le Billon at a forum on
corruption at Tufts University.30 For all of these reasons, monitoring how foreign aid is
spent is critical and is becoming a much higher priority of the international community—
such as through programs like the International Aid Transparency Initiative. This initiative
is supported by a number of governments and multilateral institutions, and its main aim
is to make aid more effective in fighting poverty through improving transparency over aid
flows.
Development assistance often tends to be high in emergency situations and then to
diminish substantially when donors move on to the next crisis. But, making a dent in
problems like corruption takes a long time and lot of sustained investment in institutions,
legal structures, and civil service reform. Outsiders can choose to ignore the corruption
that exists (facing certain negative consequences down the road), deal with it directly
(perhaps by putting punitive or preventive measures in place), or work with the host
society to change customs and expectations. Local populations, however, may have
very different ideas about combating corruption than do international peacekeepers.
One-size-fits-all approaches rarely work, and neither “good governance” nor anticorruption
campaigns are likely to be successful if they are not locally driven, or do not
take local realities and cultures into account.