Emad Mekay

Funding for the US war on terror has not diverted money from other bilateral foreign aid programmes or anti-poverty plans in Africa or Latin America, but the funds most likely came from cuts in aid to politically important countries like Israel and Egypt, a US think tank says in a new report. The report by the Washington-based Centre for Global Development (CGD) appears to dispel a widely-held belief that the launch of the so-called US “global war on terror” (GWOT) after Sep. 11, 2001 has fundamentally altered US foreign aid programmes.

“We didn’t find there has been a shift in aid allocation from non-GWOT countries to GWOT countries,” Todd Moss, one of the authors of the report, told IPS. The report’s findings contradict statements by several humanitarian and advocacy groups that say Washington increasingly views foreign assistance as a tool for national security. The civil society organisations argued that the cost, complexity and controversy surrounding the high visibility programmes in Iraq and Afghanistan were eroding support for the myriad challenges to development and growth in Africa, Latin America and other regions.

After the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre, the Bush administration forged a national security strategy that united diplomacy, defence and development, in which aid was officially tied to the self-styled war on terror. But the CGD report released Wednesday now says that any major changes in aid allocation related to the war appear to have affected only a handful of critical countries — namely, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories. The extra resources to these countries came from overall increases in the bilateral aid envelope, combined with declines in aid to Israel, Egypt, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The report asserts that there has been no change in allocations of aid flows to the rest of the world, including to sub-Saharan Africa.

This contradicts what international advocacy gro-ups like InterAction and Oxfam have said about the war on terror. An Oxfam report titled “Paying the Price”, back in December 2004, said the new US posture “will divert aid away from the poorest countries and communities, and weaken donors’ commitment to poverty reduction.” But the CGD paper finds that the new US policy resulted in post-9/11 total USAID assistance of $27.5 billion for the four years between 2002 and 2005, or a 39 per cent increase over the $19.8 billion cumulatively spent between 1998 and 2001. The study finds that Iraq and Afghanistan appear to account for almost all of this increase, and that total aid excluding these countries remains nearly unchanged at 20 billion dollars.

According to the report, the main beneficiaries are Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey and Pakistan, followed by Jordan and the Palestinian territories, all Muslim countries and with links to the war on terror. But Oxfam told IPS in an email message that the new CGD report actually proves that increases in aid money are not going to the neediest countries, like those in Africa. “US aid money is increasing, and while this is welcome, we need increases in aid to also go to the very poorest countries,” said the Oxfam statement. “As the research shows, increases are largely going to Iraq and Afghanistan, not the world’s poorest nations.” — IPS