Billions of pounds 'wasted' trying to help Afghanistan

Published on Wednesday 14 July 2010 18:07

BILLIONS of pounds blown on trying to rid Afghanistan of opium and most of the military's cash-for-work projects have been a complete waste of time and money, Afghanistan's finance minister said yesterday.

• Dr Omar Zakhilwal said counter narcotics in Afghanistan was a waste of money and had failed to deliver on any of its objectives. Picture: AFP/Getty Images

In a stinging attack on the way aid is delivered in Afghanistan, Dr Omar Zakhilwal said huge volumes of money poured into Afghanistan had very often done "more harm than good".

For years, he said, donors have been forcing the Afghan government to accept projects which were expensive and unsustainable, while soldiers in the field spent billions of dollars on "quick impact" projects – creating a culture of dependency by paying people to do things they used to do themselves for free.

"The people of Afghanistan and the people of all these countries, who have very generously been helping us, deserve to know where the faults are," he said yesterday.

The Canada-trained economist will use a major international conference in Kabul next week to demand donors channel more spending through the Afghan government, to make sure their projects meet the country's priorities.

To that end, he said the government was looking for $1 billion-$2bn at the conference for an Infrastructure Trust Fund to be administered by the Asian Development Bank and controlled by the government.

He cited a $300 million diesel power plant on the outskirts of Kabul – built and paid for by the US – which the government cannot afford to operate because they can't afford the fuel bill. Afghanistan has vast untapped hydroelectric potential, but Dr Zakhilwal said donors were looking for a quick-fix solution when they approved the plant, so they chose generators over a dam.

Although critics claim the government is incapable of spending more money because of capacity issues and corruption, Dr Zakhilwal insists sidelining the administration is unsustainable in the long run.

"If you deliver outside the government, not only do you not contribute to capacity building the Afghan government, you do the reverse, you undermine it," he said. Counter narcotics, which for many years was Britain's main focus in Afghanistan, was a waste of money, he said, because it had failed to deliver on any of its objectives. "Find me one single farmer who said 'The projects delivered to me' and was willingly not interested in growing narcotics."

The minister blamed expensive contractors, paid for by US and British taxpayers, who "parachuted in" with little or no knowledge of Afghanistan.

At the moment, just 20 per cent of the aid in Afghanistan is spent through the government. The US has put less than 5 per cent of its $19bn through the budget. That figure is expected to rise to 50 per cent, across the international community, within two years if donors honour commitments made at the London conference on Afghanistan in January.

Dr Zakhilwal was particularly scathing of cash-for-work projects often implemented by the military in the aftermath of operations for taking away the independence of communities.

He used the example of kareezes, the underground irrigation tunnels which criss-cross the Afghan countryside.

"Kareezes were never dug by the government, they were dug by the communities," he said. "It's the traditional irrigation system in Afghanistan. Then these quick-impact projects started paying to clean the kareezes. Now when people clean the kareezes, they say 'Well, somebody should pay us money'.

"They used to do it for themselves. Now they expect compensation for it.".