Afghan aid efforts an 'uncoordinated mess'
Updated
An adviser to President Barack Obama on US policy in Afghanistan, says aid efforts in the country are 'an uncoordinated and unmanaged mess'.
Dr Anthony Cordesman from the United States Centre for Strategic and International Studies is also backing claims that Afghanistan's presidential election was hijacked, and he's directly implicated President Hamid Karzai.
Presenter:Linda Mottram
Speakers: Dr Anthony Cordesman, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington; Professor William Maley, Director, Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy, ANU, Canberra; Mark Ward, special advisor on development, UNAMA, Kabul.
- Listen:
- Windows Media
MOTTRAM: Citing figures from the aid agency Oxfam as typical, Doctor Cordesman told his Canberra audience that a massive 40 per cent of the billions of dollars promised in aid to Afghanistan hasn't reached there.
CORDESMAN: They've either poured through it through corruption misuse of money, contractor charges, planning charges and overhead charges, or simply been stolen. And the list of people involved in corruption includes as many western contractors as it does Afghan power brokers.
MOTTRAM: His candid analysis stretches far and wide. Despite being far bigger and more populous than Iraq, only a fifth of what was spent in Iraq has been invested in Afghanistan. The world set about building a local police force there but didn't pay and left them under the control of local power brokers. Unsurprising that corruption was the result. Afghan civil servants too were unpaid, so they turned instead to jobs as translators, drivers and fixers where foreigners were paying. And then there's Doctor Cordesman's view of the recent election, which most observers thought had been rigged months earlier, when President Karzai did deals with a number of warlords.
CORDESMAN: Karzai seems to have panicked, rightly or wrongly, and stuffed the ballot boxes in remarkably clumsy ways.
MOTTRAM: But it's the aid effort in particular where he's most harshly critical, with the United Nations left to try to mop up.
CORDESMAN: The UN is where it often has been in areas like this: presiding over an uncoordinated, unmanaged mess.
MOTTRAM: There's no transparency and there are no audits, he says. Doctor Cordesman also brands many aid projects as nothing more than showpieces, often creating local tensions, so inappropriate and insensitive are they. Doctor Cordesman is not alone in his assessment.
MALEY: The agency that's probably attracted the most adverse comment in this respect is a UN agency, the UN Office of Project Services, about which some very serious audit questions have been raised.
MOTTRAM: Professor William Maley is director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University in Canberra and is a long time Afghan watcher. He was also an election observer at the recent poll. He says the aid wastage is a very serious problem .. at many levels.
MALEY: One problem in Afghanistan is that far too much of project aid has been implemented through multiple subcontracting which means that only a fraction of what is originally planned for a project reaches the ground level with a lot being skimmed off at different levels by the subcontractors as profit and that of course fuels perceptions of irregularity and corruption on the part of the local population who have become extremely cynical about this.
MOTTRAM: Professor Maley has also joined Doctor Cordesman in criticising countries which had not been registering their aid efforts with the Afghan government as is required.
MALEY: If one's aid is to build local capacity, then bypassing the Afghan state is something that contributes absolutely nothing.
MOTTRAM: The Special adviser on development to the UN Assistance Mission in Kabul is Mark Ward. He says things have begun to improve after the Mission's mandate was expanded last year .. seven years into the war .. to include donor co-ordination.
WARD: I think it's a little bit extraordinary that it took the international community until the beginning of 2008 to ask someone to lead on donor co-ordination. Yes, it's still a mess but it's getting better.
MOTTRAM: One of the comments he made was that governments are in some cases still not actually informing the Afghan authorities themselves about what they're spending. Is that still the case?
WARD: A year ago when the ministry of finance reported which donors were providing information and which ones weren't, a third of the donors were not providing information. UNAMA, we, pretty publicly named and shamed some of those donor countries and this year the Ministry of Finance's report is about to come out and there are very few countries that did not provide the information this year, so it's got a lot better.
MOTTRAM: Mark Ward says he's optimistic though he acknowledges it's a huge task. Anthony Cordesman strikes a deeply cautious tone though after such momentous and long-lived failures. He warns that one can't simply add money and sympathy and get an instant state.
