Steve,

I did a quick read of the RAND study, and I find it supports my arguments. I look forward to reading the Case Studies in Development later.

The RAND study was published in 2003, and it described the economic development in the Southern Philippines overall as a dismal failure because it was grossly under resourced ($6.00/per person), most of the aid went to the Christian population (not the target population), and that the government of the Philippines is corrupt through and through. It did site a couple of "minor" successes regarding banana plantations, where it gave "some" guerrillas an alternative life style via providing jobs.

However, the fact of the matter is that the insurgency is still alive and well today in the Southern Philippines, and most of the economic development projects have failed. Different perspectives will give you different views. On one hand if you listen to Philippine and USG representatives they'll tell point out individual successes, and then if you talk to the Muslim Filipinos who live there, especially the ones not touched by these relatively micro successes, they'll tell you another story.

Let's say you have 100,000 disenfranchised citizens who are active or passive supporters of the insurgency, and your economic development actually provides jobs for 5,000 of them. That makes for 5,000 folks who are more content (perhaps), and some kodak moments for your next brief, but you still 95,0000 disenfranchised folks who are active supporters of the insurgency.

Not necessarily bad, because now you can point to the 5,000 and say if you quit fighting we'll do the same for you, BUT YOU BETTER BE READY TO DELIVER. As the study pointed out, if you give them rising expectations, but fail to deliver you will actually have made the problem worse with your false promises. This is exactly the failed economic aid I saw in Iraq, a number of promises made that never could be realized until we first established security by suppressing the insurgency.

As the study stated, its focus was "inhibiting a resurgence" of violence, not defeating an insurgency. That is completely different than what we were discussing earlier. You were implying you could use economic development to defeat an insurgency, and I disagreed and still do unless the root cause of that insurgency is "simply" economics, and that is rarely the case.

The study also confirmed that poverty doesn't cause terrorism, but it may contribute to it. My previous point, if the issue that they're fighting over isn't economic disparity, then why waste time and our precious resources on economic development to begin with? Furthermore, if the economic development isn't synched with the plan (and used as a carrot and stick), then it is going to fail.

I'm letting this thread die from my side, so in summary, economic development isn't something you do independently of the counterinsurgency effort, and there are more risks associated with doing economic development poorly than not at all. COIN is political warfare, and if you employ economic development as a leverage tool versus a handout, then "maybe" you can make a difference with it, but only if you really know what you're doing.