| Home > Central Asia >> Afghanistan | |
Massive waste of aid harms Afghan campaign, says specialist
Sydney Morning Herald - October 14, 2009
Brendan Nicholson – An extraordinary 40 per cent of the billions of dollars in aid destined for Afghanistan never even reaches the country, a top international specialist on the region has warned.
Anthony Cordesman, from the United States Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said in Canberra yesterday the massive waste of international aid was one of the great failures of the campaign to win the war in Afghanistan.
The United Nations was presiding over an uncoordinated and unmanaged mess, said Dr Cordesman, who has advised the Obama Administration and the US military extensively on Afghanistan and Pakistan as they plan a new strategy to defeat the insurgency. "This is a major problem," he said.
In a speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Dr Cordesman said international aid efforts needed to be refocused on the needs of Afghan people and made specific to individual communities.
Dr Cordesman confirmed the worst reports about corruption in the recent elections, saying the President, Hamid Karzai, had "stuffed the ballot boxes in a remarkably clumsy way".
He said the time served in Afghanistan by military personnel and civilian workers should be extended to at least 12 months to maintain continuity and to ensure projects and local people were not abandoned at key moments. "It takes time to get to know an area and to develop contacts."
The service of Australian troops in Afghanistan has been extended from six to eight months.
Dr Cordesman said some of the foreign aid that made it to Afghanistan was wasted on showpiece projects that were built in the wrong place and caused friction among locals.
He said a classic example of waste was the effort put into training the Afghan police. They were put under the control of local powerbrokers and were not paid, he said. Inevitably they became corrupt.
Dr Cordesman said Afghanistan was a bigger country than Iraq with a much bigger population but the coalition countries invested only about a fifth of the resources in Afghanistan as they did in Iraq.
He said a long delay in getting economic support into Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion left the new government with few resources so what was left of the public service fell apart.
With no one to pay them, trained bureaucrats drifted away to work with international groups with money including the media and a range of non-government organisations as drivers, translators or fixers.
Dr Cordesman said for NATO and its allies to win in Afghanistan, they had to give the Afghan people good reason to be loyal to a government that they could see was there to serve them.
Meanwhile, the disarray surrounding Afghanistan's presidential election deepened when an Afghan member of the vote-reviewing commission quit, citing "foreign interference".
The resignation of Maulavi Mustafa Barakzai from the Electoral Complaints Commission was not expected to affect the panel's work of examining allegations of massive vote-rigging in the August 20 balloting, officials said.
Yet it added an acrimonious new element to a vote that has already become an exercise in recrimination – and has left Afghanistan in political limbo at a time when crucial decisions about the course of the conflict are being made in Washington. (With the Los Angeles Times)
See also:
 |