Why Aid Fails /
Several years ago in Afghanistan, I chatted over a drink with a U.S. Agency for International Development coordinator. We were at Gandamak Lodge, one of dozens of guesthouses that popped up since 2001 as 3,000 expatriates converged on Kabul to take advantage of a recovery effort costing well over $20 billion. He was one of those no-nonsense engineers who had come to do a job, and who, by God, was going to do it.
The man told me he had only recently arrived from Baghdad, but Afghanistan was just like Iraq. Rehabilitating roads would help lift the world’s fourth poorest country out of its poverty.
He was right about roads. They were what old hands, working here since the Soviet war in the 1980s, had recommended to the United Nations, the World Bank, donor governments, and think tanks.
But he missed two crucial caveats: you must focus on the countryside where nearly 80 percent of Afghans live. And you cannot rush, even if it takes 20 or 30 years.
You need a coordinated strategy. When Anders Fange, head of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, encouraged the Americans to build roads, he stressed the need to hire local villagers to fill potholes and clear winter ice. With cash they earned, they would pump life into markets, teahouses, and barbershops. Moreover, it would be their roads to keep safe.
But the USAID coordinator charged with building the logistical supply route between Kabul and Kandahar was a man in a hurry. He said a Turkish construction company had already cost hundreds of millions of dollars for bulldozers, graders, and asphalt spreaders. The trouble, he added as an angry aside, was that “private military contractors” – mercenaries – had to protect work crews. Locals were unappreciative. Some even harbored rebels.
“They just don’t like foreigners coming in to help them,” he told me.
When I asked if he had spent time drinking tea and discussing the road with villagers, mostly Pushtun tribesmen who are the Taliban’s main support, he stared in amazement. “We haven’t got time for that sort of thing,” he said.
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