A congressional investigation has warned that the expensive US attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan may not survive and collapse after the US withdrawal, reports The Washington Post.
The report, prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff, says the despite huge funding, the whole exercise has had only limited success and calls on the administration to rethink urgently the assistance programmes. The report describes the use of aid money to stabilise areas the military has cleared of Taliban fighters as a short-term fix that provides politically pleasing results. But the enormous cash flows can overwhelm and distort local culture and economies, and there is little evidence the positive results are sustainable.
According to The WP, the report says the amount represents a “tidal wave of funding” that the local officials in some provinces are incapable of “spending wisely”. It also mentions scanty oversight as reason for encouraging corruption, adding that although the US plan is for the Afghan government to eventually take over the programmes, it has neither the management capacity nor the funds to do so.
The newspaper says the report also warns that the Afghan economy could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. The “single most important step” the Obama administration could take, the report says, is to stop paying Afghans “inflated salaries” – often 10 or more times as much as the going rate – to work for foreign governments and contractors. Such practices, it says, have “drawn otherwise qualified civil servants away from the Afghan government and created a culture of aid dependency”.
It also rues the fact that even when US development experts determine that a proposed project “lacks achievable goals and needs to be scaled back,” the military often takes it over and funds it anyway. Although the report provides some examples of successful projects, it is critical overall of what one senior committee aide called the focus on a rapid “burn rate” of available funding as a key metric for success. The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the report before its release. Last week, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said in a separate report that billions of dollars in the US-funded reconstruction projects in both countries could fall into disrepair over the next few years because of inadequate planning to pay for their ongoing operations and maintenance.
The WP says the State Department and the USAID spends about $320 million a month in Afghanistan, beside the overall $10 billion monthly price tag for the military operations. Afghanistan is the biggest recipient of the US aid, with nearly $19 billion spent from 2002 to 2010.
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