The Afghan Scam: Why the U.S. Is Certain to Fail in Yet Another War

By Ann Jones, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 12, 2009.

There are other peculiar features of American development aid. Nearly half of it (47%) goes to support "technical assistance." Translated, that means overpaid American "experts," often totally unqualified -- somebody's good old college buddies -- are paid handsomely to advise the locals on matters ranging from office procedures to pesticide use, even when the Afghans neither request nor welcome such advice. By contrast, the universally admired aid programs of Sweden and Ireland allocate only 4% and 2% respectively to such technical assistance, and when asked, they send real experts. American technical advisors, like American privateers, are paid by checks -- big ones -- that pass directly from the federal treasury to private accounts in American banks, thus helping to insure that about 86 cents of every dollar designated for U.S. "foreign" aid anywhere in the world never leaves the U.S.A.

American aid that actually makes it abroad arrives with strings attached. At least 70% of it is "tied" to the purchase of American products. A food aid program, for example, might require Afghanistan to purchase American agricultural products in preference to their own, thus putting Afghan farmers out of business or driving even more of them into the poppy trade. (The percentage of aid from Sweden, Ireland, and the United Kingdom that is similarly tied: zero.)

Testifying before a congressional subcommittee on May 8, 2001, Andrew Natsios, then head of USAID, described American aid as "a key foreign policy instrument [that] helps nations prepare for participation in the global trading system and become better markets for U.S. exports." Such so-called aid cuts American business in right from the start. USAID has even developed a system for "preselecting" certain private contractors, then inviting only those preselected companies to apply for contracts the agency wants to issue.

Often, in fact, only one of the preselected contractors puts in for the job and then -- if you need a hint as to what's really going on -- just happens to award subcontracts to some of the others. It's remarkable, too, how many former USAID officials have passed through the famed revolving door in Washington to become highly paid consultants to private contractors -- and vice versa. By January 2006, the Bush administration had co-opted USAID altogether. The once independent aid agency launched by President Kennedy in 1961 became a subsidiary of the State Department and a partner of the Pentagon.

Oh, and keep in mind one more thing: While the private contractors may be in it for the duration, most employees and technical experts in Afghanistan stay on the job only six months to a year because it's considered such a "hardship post." As a result, projects tend not to last long and to be remarkably unrelated to those that came before or will come after. Contractors collect the big bucks whether or not the aid they contracted to deliver benefits Afghans, or even reaches them.

These arrangements help explain why Afghanistan remains such a shambles.

The Afghan Scam

It's not that American aid has done nothing. Check out the USAID website and you'll find a summary of what is claimed for it (under the glorious heading of "Afghanistan Reborn"). It will inform you that USAID has completed literally thousands of projects in that country. The USAID loves numbers, but don't be deceived by them. A thousand short-term USAID projects can't hold a candle to one long, careful, patient program run, year after year, by a bunch of Afghans led by a single Swede.

If there has been any progress in Afghanistan, especially in and around Kabul, it's largely been because two-thirds of the reconstruction aid to Afghanistan comes from other (mostly European) countries that do a better job, and partly because the country's druglords spend big on palatial homes and services in the capital. But the one-third of international aid that is supposed to come from the U.S., and that might make a critical difference when added to the work of others, eternally falls into the wrong pockets.

What would Afghans have done differently, if they'd been in charge? They'd have built much smaller schools, and a lot more of them, in places more convenient to children than to foreign construction crews. Afghans would have hired Afghans to do the building. Louis Berger Group had the contract to build more than 1,000 schools at a cost of $274,000 per school. Already way behind schedule in 2005, they had finished only a small fraction of them when roofs began to collapse under the snows of winter.

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Ann Jones wrote at length about the failure of American aid in Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan Books), a book about American meddling in Afghanistan as well as her experience as a humanitarian aid worker there from 2002 to 2006. For more information, visit her website. For a concise report on many of the defects in international aid mentioned here, check out Real Aid (pdf file), a report issued in 2005 by the South African NGO Action Aid.

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