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Afghan Disenchantment
Le Monde | Editorial
Wednesday 26 March 2008
Afghanistan should be a textbook case, a model, the very paradigm of the "reconstruction"
of a failing state under the auspices of a mobilized international community.
There were so many hopes and promises right after the 2001 fall of the Taliban
regime which al-Qaeda had made its rear base!
Six years later, the official report is brutal: the Taliban are back in the
southern and eastern Pashtun regions; NATO is exhausting its troops in endless
battle; opium cultivation flourishes as never before; corruption rots right
through the heart of the Afghan government.
But there is another failure, or, in any event, a serious dysfunction, that
illustrates the impasse of reconstruction in Afghanistan: the broken promises
of international aid. The report just published by ACBAR, which combines close
to one hundred non-governmental organizations working on the ground in Afghanistan,
is damning. A big share of aid to Afghanistan is "wasted, ineffective and
uncoordinated," this study concludes. It is imperative that the international
community clean house and get back on track. Otherwise, its - already profoundly
damaged - credibility with the Afghan population will not easily recover.
First question: why have these commitments not been honored? Twenty-five billion
dollars of aid to Afghanistan was promised; in fact, only $15 billion has been
paid out. The second incoherence: why is there such a massive disparity between
military spending and aid to civilian reconstruction? Security operations against
the resurgence of Islamist fighters are certainly amply necessary to stabilize
the country, but nothing justifies the disproportion denounced in the ACBAR
report: the Americans alone spend $100 million a day for the war, while total
international aid for reconstruction comes to $7 million a day only. Finally,
the last serious deficiency: total chaos. A third of the funds follow obscure
channels, sucked up in the "black holes" of corruption. Furthermore,
is it normal that part of this aid should be absorbed by gigantic operating
costs? In fact, fully 40 percent of the money paid out returns to the donors
by way of salaries paid to consultants, sub-contractors and expatriates.
It is urgent to rationalize this international aid to Afghanistan, for when
the money arrives and is channeled into well-conceived projects, the progress
on the ground is real. Not everything about the reconstruction is negative.
There is nothing inescapable about the failure of Afghanistan - provided that
the international community no longer leaves itself wide open to its adversaries,
who employ scare tactics and gamble on that community's impotence.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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