Al-Qai'da aid project shows the way in Afghanistan

[Jefferson23]

World View: Corruption has blighted the torrent of dollars poured into the country by America since 2001

March 23, 2014


An Afghan acquaintance who had worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) told me several years ago how an Afghan subcontractor had made a large profit from a contract to build and get running a tractor repair shop in Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan. Uruzgan, the home province of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was then a particularly dangerous place, but the subcontractor cunningly turned this to his advantage. The strong Taliban presence in the area meant that nobody from the main contractor or USAID, which was funding the project, could visit the site of the new repair shop. Instead, they relied on photographs emailed to them which showed that the work was making impressive progress.

The head of the subcontractor did not go near Uruzgan, but instead rented an existing tractor repair shop in one of the safer parts of Kandahar. Along with the shop, he hired young men for a few days who were told to look as if they were busily fixing tractor engines. A photographer took pictures of all this which, when emailed to Kabul, convinced the donors and main contractor that the contract was being fulfilled.

My acquaintance had other stories of his time with USAID. "I went to see a food-processing plant in the east of the country which was meant to employ 250 women," he said. "We had started the project and were paying for the equipment and the salaries. But all I found was a few people working on a vegetable plot the size of a small room." He asked local officials about the non-existent processing plant and was warned to keep his mouth shut. They said, "if I did not keep quiet, there would be trouble on the road back to Jalalabad – in other words they would kill me".

I found these stories amusing at the time but, driving through Kabul one evening a few days later, I saw a man standing in the half-frozen mud – it was in December – selling second-hand clothes. When I stopped to talk him, he told me his name was Abdul Qudus and he used to clean carpets but had lost his job two years earlier. "I buy and sell clothes for between 10 and 30 Afghanis [11p-32p] and even then there are people who are too poor to buy them," he said. "I myself am very poor and sometimes I don't eat so I can feed my children."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/alqaida-aid-project-shows-the-way-in-afghanistan-9210168.html

[delrem]

1. USAID and generosity ought not be closely tied to US military.

These ought to be two different things.

For this reason I've never liked a "carrot and stick" vocabulary of foreign relations from any country. I'm especially disgusted when a country issues contracts for "rebuilding" after a war before the war even happens, as seems increasingly to be becoming the classical pattern. I'm especially disgusted when this utterly evil synthesis of war+generosity is said to support freedom and democracy.

eta: war+generosity = nation_building.