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Afghans Lack $10 Billion in Aid, Report Says
By Carlotta Gall
The New York Times
Wednesday 26 March 2008
Kabul, Afghanistan - Western countries have failed to deliver $10 billion
of nonmilitary assistance pledged to Afghanistan over the last six years and
the United States, by far the biggest donor, is responsible for half of the
shortfall, a new report published here on Tuesday said.
The report was written by a policy adviser from the British charity Oxfam and
published by the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, or Acbar, a coalition
of Afghan and international nongovernment aid organizations. It warned that
development assistance to Afghanistan had been inadequate and in many cases
wasteful or ineffective, jeopardizing economic progress and security in the
country.
Donor countries pledged $25 billion in aid from 2002 to 2008, but only $15
billion has been disbursed to date, the report states, citing Afghan government
figures. The United States, which provides one third of all development assistance
to Afghanistan, has spent only $5 billion of the $10.4 billion it has pledged
for that period.
Jim Kunder, the acting deputy administrator of the United States Agency for
International Development, told The Associated Press that there were always
concerns about the speed with which aid was delivered but that the work was
being done.
"The U.S. government is on track to provide the aid to Afghanistan that
it pledged," he said.
American officials have also blamed security conditions for slowing assistance
programs, including the largest one in the country, the development of the Kajaki
dam in the insurgent stronghold of Helmand Province.
The new report is one of several recent studies that have called for more and
better organized assistance to Afghanistan. In an attempt to address some of
the concerns, the Security Council recently gave the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Afghanistan greater powers to coordinate international development
assistance.
The World Bank has spent only a little more than half of its commitments to
Afghanistan, and the European Commission and Germany have disbursed less than
two-thirds of theirs, the Acbar report said. The Asia Development Bank and India
have disbursed only a third of their commitments, while Japan and Canada were
singled out for best meeting their pledges.
The shortfalls in assistance can be partly attributed to poor security, high
levels of government corruption and the inability of Afghan institutions to
absorb the aid any faster, the report said. "However, the magnitude of
the shortfalls underscores the importance of donors increasing efforts to mitigate
or adapt to such problems," it said.
International development aid to Afghanistan remained "woefully inadequate,"
the report's author, Matt Waldman, wrote. At $7 million a day, it is far
below the $100 million spent daily on military needs.
It has also fallen far short of development assistance to other postconflict
countries, like Bosnia and East Timor. In the two years after 2001 Afghanistan
received only $57 per capita in aid, whereas Bosnia received $679 and East Timor
$233.
The report also called for a comprehensive review of international assistance,
two-thirds of which bypasses the Afghan government and fails to do enough to
relieve the poverty of the Afghan people.
The Afghan government says it has no knowledge of where $5 billion of the $15
billion spent since 2001 went, according to the Acbar report, and only half
of the money being spent now is being disbursed in concert with the government,
it said.
A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said that the government largely agreed
with the findings in the report but that it rejected the report's criticism
of the government for failing to tackle corruption.
The Acbar report estimated that of the $15 billion spent to date, a "staggering"
40 percent had not stayed in Afghanistan but had been repatriated in consultants'
salaries and company profits. More than half the international aid is "tied,"
meaning it is bound by procurement rules that resources and services have to
be purchased from the donor's country.
The report singled out A.I.D. for wasteful practices. A road from the Kabul
airport to a major intersection near the United States Embassy cost more than
$3 million a mile, "at least four times the average cost of building a
road in Afghanistan," Acbar said in a news release issued in Kabul alongside
the report. A.I.D. does not finance development through the government but works
through profit-making contractors who often subcontract the work to other companies.
"Vast sums of aid are lost in the corporate profits of contractors and
subcontractors, which can be as high as 50 percent on a single contract,"
the report said.
The use of foreign consultants is also costly, at $250,000 to $500,000 a year
for each, because of high salaries, generous living allowances and security
expenses.
The report also criticized an imbalance in assistance. Too much of the aid
goes to the capital, Kabul, and other urban centers, it said, when three-quarters
of the population lives in rural areas. Agriculture, the main livelihood of
the population, has not been a priority, it added.
A disproportionate amount of the aid is also being spent in the southern part
of the country, where the insurgency is strongest, which has created resentment
in northern areas, the report said.
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