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Washington, Mar. 16 (ANI): Some analysts have said that US development aid, aimed at winning the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, is not helping the coalition military forces win the war.

This will likely be a key question on Capitol Hill this week as General David Petraeus, commander of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, testifies at three separate hearings, the first of which begins Tuesday, on the US military’s progress in that country, reports the Christian Science Monitor (CSM).

In reaching these conclusions, the analysts are calling into question one of the key tenets of the military’s current war-fighting strategy.

This strategy, known as counterinsurgency, is widely interpreted as the effort to win a competition for the hearts and minds of the Afghan population.

Critical to this effort, defense officials have long argued, is aid money that the US military spends in small villages and towns.

Help citizens improve their quality of life, they say - by building wells and schools with US aid money, for example - and the more supportive they will be of the US war effort.

This is because much of current military doctrine also holds that insurgents are better able to garner support among Afghans if the local citizens have economic, governance, or security grievances.

The argument goes that if Afghan citizens don’t feel as though they are getting needed services such as water or electricity from the Afghan government - or if they feel the government is too corrupt - they will transfer their support to the insurgency.

But in many areas of insurgent-dominated Afghanistan, “development spending has done little to increase popular support for the government, casting doubt on the counterinsurgency and development theories that have inspired this spending,” says Mark Moyer, a former professor at Marine Corps University and a Pentagon adviser, in a widely circulated paper published by Small Wars Journal, a policy publication.

Dr. Moyer further contends that it’s not that development aid doesn’t have the potential to be productive - rather that US officials must rethink how they use it.

Moyer believes that carefully selected elites can do more than average citizens to help the US military improve security throughout the country, because they have the ability to influence others.

What’s more, he adds, the primary focus for the

“We’ve confused what ‘hearts and minds’ is really about,” says Andrew Exum, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security.

He adds: “It’s basically gratitude theory - we’ve built you schools and so you like us and work with us. It’s more about convincing the population that you’re going to win - establishing that control which then leads to collaboration.”

“The people of Afghanistan will make their decisions about which side they ultimately support “based on who they think is going to win, not on who’s building their roads,” he says. (ANI)