THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL STUDIES
VOL. 1
MARCH 2014
NO. 3
AFGHANISTAN... COULD HAVE, SHOULD HAVE?
A NORMATIVE DISCUSSION OF THE NEED TO BALANCE SECURITY
AND DEVELOPMENT IN COUNTER-INSURGENCY STRATEGY
Christopher Ajemian*
*Christopher Ajemian is currently a fourth year social and political science student in the University of Edinburgh. He is expected to receive a Masters in International Relations (Honours) at the end of this academic year and is writing his undergraduate dissertation on the effect of UNSC legislation on gender development programs within Afghanistan. More recently Chris worked in Kabul Afghanistan, in the summer of 2013, as a member of the Afghanistan Public Policy Research Organization (APPRO). While working within this Organization alongside his degree he works as a consultant, assisting with APPRO's work on a UNDP sponsored project to recruit policewomen within Afghanistan and to improve their community perceptions and livelihoods.
VVVVVThis article will discuss the need to balance security with development within counterinsurgency environments. It will accomplish this through the perspective of the NATO experience of counter-insurgency warfare within Afghanistan and parallel this with a normative form of how operations in Afghanistan should have been executed. Ultimately, this article will maintain and defend the notion that it is not possible to have security without development. Furthermore, in order to institute security and development in an insurgency situation, states must incorporate aspects of political reform and balance them with other factors of socio-economic development, and military securitization. To show this, this article will divide itself into four separate parts. First, this article will establish the vital and necessary conceptualisms for security, development, insurgency, and counter insurgency. The second segment will demonstrate how security is fundamentally tied to counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy, so any conversation of security must include COIN as a key aspect of it. The third portion of this article will discuss a normative view of how the relationship between security and development should progress. More concretely, how security should work and how it must be balanced with economic and political reforms, in order to take advantage of an intervening force’s strengths and their available time frame for operations. The final aspect of this article will validate the case with an analysis of how events in the Afghan war prove the necessity of having security and development together. Moreover, how a failed balance of human security and political-economic development created the struggling mission that we see today.
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