Western projects are bleeding Afghanistan dry, says minister

Samihullah is just the kind of returned refugee his country needs. Aged 30, with a wife and two children, he was well educated in the camps across the border in Pakistan. After the Taliban were pushed out in 2001, he returned home and joined the Afghan Ministry of Education, where he helped to rebuild the higher-education sector. But not any
more. I found him working as a security guard at the UN's World Food Programme headquarters in Kabul. With allowances he earns a total of $270 a month there, compared with $50 at the Afghan higher education. The decision to move jobs was not a hard one. But it is the international system that is sucking Afghanistan dry.

Any returnee who speaks English can be guaranteed a job at a higher level in the UN, or the myriad big NGOs that have set up shop in Kabul. Ashraf Ghani, who was Finance Minister in the first year after the Taliban fell, and is now chancellor of Kabul University, says the international community has failed Afghanistan. Rather than build up the government, it has created a parallel system that has actively weakened the capacity of Afghanistan to run its own affairs.

Mr Ghani's greatest fear is that by failing to empower the Afghan government, the world could be helping the Taliban to regroup, as they feed on the resentment of people at the slow pace of change. He says "The cheapest way of bringing development and security is government." The frustration of the Afghan government system at the way the money is spent surfaced at the London conference on funding earlier this year. A World Bank report that came out just before the conference calculated that 90 per cent of international development spending continued to flow outside the government.

(snip)
The Americans and the Japanese, both large donors to Afghanistan, are the two countries who are most responsible for spending money outside the government budget, and despite the claim of high standards in the village in Kunar, much of what they have built is sub-standard. The American government's development arm USAID, boasts of the number of girls' schools it has built. I asked to see one in Kabul, and was shocked by the state of it. A plaque on the wall boasts of this as a gift from the American people, but the Lycée Mariam is nothing to be proud of. Teachers there say the Americans did little more than add a coat of paint on the one standing building, and replace the roof of makeshift huts. The new roofs are already leaking, and in the courtyard hundreds of girls are still being taught in tents. The school looked like an emergency had just hit.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article485894.ece

How will the world ever, ever look to us again when we cheat so often and so baldly...