We will … defeat insurgency, assist fragile states and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering ... to promote participation in government, spur economic development and address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world ... [with] a comprehensive approach to stability operations that integrates the tools of statecraft with our military forces, international partners, humanitarian organisations and the private sector.

One of the most striking things about the passage – which comes courtesy of Bill Easterly's excellent blog – is that so many of the buzzwords would not be out of place coming from the director of a western non-governmental organisation (NGO). As former US secretary of state Colin Powell put it back in 2001, western NGOs are considered "a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team". Under-secretary of defence for policy Michèle Flournoy says a successful counter-insurgency strategy involves:

Leveraging the coercive ... force to establish a safe and secure environment … establish political, legal, social and … economic institutions; and help transition responsibility to a legitimate civil authority operating under the rule of law ... toward long-term developmental activities.

The field manual goes on to define a "legitimate civil authority" as one that: "Respects freedom of religion, conscience, speech, assembly, association and press ... Protects the institutions of civil society, including the family, religious communities, voluntary associations, private property, independent businesses and a market economy." In practice US – or multinational – military forces secure an area and then fund NGOs and private contractors to do the stabilisation work – sometimes referred to as "civil society building". I have spent much of the last 10 years designing, implementing and evaluating rights and justice projects, which are often seen as particularly strategic. The use of provincial reconstruction teams to deliver aid for explicitly counter-insurgency purposes in Afghanistan and Iraq will probably be a model for the future.

This poses a huge set of challenges for those involved in both human rights and humanitarian aid work. Earlier this month members of the African Union (AU) reaffirmed their opposition to the indictment of the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes committed in Darfur by the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC) and again asked the UN security council to suspend the prosecution. As Simon Tisdall notes, there is a general agreement that the moves to secure the arrest of Bashir have stalled and are unlikely to move forward in the foreseeable future.

In his new book on the Darfur crisis, Mahmood Mamdani lambasts those "human rights fundamentalists" who, he claims, "argue for an international legal standard regardless of the political content of the country in question". Although I agree with most of his criticisms of the way in which the ICC has handled two of its first cases in Darfur and northern Uganda, I would argue that the problem is the opposite. Human rights organisations are in danger of allowing themselves to be co-opted into strategies that compromise their independence and impartiality.

The concept of "rights-based development", for example, holds that there is a universal set of standards, located in international human rights law, that are applicable in all countries throughout the world. Western donors and international aid organisations are spending increasing amounts of time drawing up guidelines and developing monitoring mechanisms to impose these on poor countries. "Poverty is a human rights violation" has become the latest rallying cry for a growing number of western NGOs.

Yet it does not require that much thought to realise that people in different countries may have different views about what policies would be most appropriate for achieving economic growth or that attitudes towards certain human rights are quite socially and culturally specific. No one should ever be tortured, arbitrarily executed or held in slavery, but notions such as freedom of expression, religion and sexual relations do vary in different parts of the world. The right to private property is basically a western concept, which may be politically sensitive in societies where it is associated with capitalism and colonialism.

While it is good to debate such issues, western NGOs need to understand why they are facing accusations of cultural imperialism and how to respond to the different voices in this debate. The conjunction between human rights, humanitarian aid and military interventions has created a particularly dangerous dynamic, but the rights discourse itself raises a whole set of issues that need to be considered more carefully.