When US troops leave Afghanistan, will US aid dollars be withdrawn as well? The Obama administration says no. But House Republicans are beginning to push back, bolstered by damning testimony from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the watchdog tasked with overseeing US aid to Afghanistan, arguing that American aid is being wasted on a corrupt regime.
We returned last week from a brief trip to Afghanistan, where we met with people on all sides of Kabul’s enormous aid industry – representatives of several donor agencies, contractors, NGOs and current and former Afghan government officials – about the underlying strategy of the U.S. aid effort in Afghanistan, and how it must change during the upcoming transition. As we departed Afghanistan, President Karzai flew to Tokyo asking for at least $4 billion per year for the next four years, and he appears to have gotten it. Is this good news? Is $16 billion too much or too little? And does the mutual accountability framework agreed to by the Afghan government and the international community mark a real turning point in the aid strategy for Afghanistan, or is this just more of the same? Here are a few reasons that the results of the Tokyo conference are mostly good news.
It’s hard to get anything done in most developing countries if you don’t know your way around. Although it seems obvious, aid agencies often overlook the basic fact that effective development programs require experienced staff who know the local context and who have forged working relationships with key interlocutors. It was in this spirit that the report of our study group on the U.S. development strategy in Pakistan criticized USAID, claiming that it was “neither empowered nor equipped to succeed”.
Bill Easterly stirred up the blogosphere last week with a call for USAID to get out of the national security business, declare that “aid is for poverty relief and only for poverty relief,” and “build a firewall between USAID and the defense department.”
Tomorrow, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will convene for a much-anticipated hearing in which secretary of state Hillary Clinton will testify on U.S. goals and progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Coincidentally (?), this hearing will start barely 12 hours after President Obama finishes telling the nation and the world about his plans to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
In the space of one week, two studies – one on Pakistan and the other on Afghanistan – were released by two separate entities. The first study, Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan by Nancy Birdsall, Wren Elhai and Molly Kinder, was released after more than a year of work by a CGD-led study group on Pakistan.
In the week since our study group released its report on U.S. development programs in Pakistan, I’ve been fascinated with the range of opinions on what our most important message was.
This is a joint post with Wren Elhai and Molly Kinder and first appeared on ForeignPolicy.com’s AfPak Channel blog. Read the report of the Study Group on U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan here. A response from Alexander Thier, head of USAID’s Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs can be found here.
For nearly two years, the United States has been trying something completely new in Pakistan. In 2009, with President Obama’s backing, Congress passed a bold piece of legislation that committed the United States to support Pakistan’s people and its economy, as opposed to focusing almost exclusively on the country’s military. The United States would try to help Pakistanis consolidate the transition to democracy they won in 2008, and -- for the first time -- it seemed the United States would place an equal emphasis on long-term development and short-term stability in Pakistan.
So far, however, this new approach has not lived up to its potential. During a recent trip to Pakistan, we listened to dozens of Pakistanis in and out of government tell us of their frustrations with the U.S. aid program and American inaction on trade and investment policies (just look at the ongoing debate about lifting tariffs on the Pakistani textile trade with the United States) that would naturally complement aid. Over the past year, a study group of American and Pakistani experts convened by the Center for Global Development have gathered to figure out what’s amiss—and how to put it right. In a report released today, we sum up the problem this way:
House appropriators marked up the FY2011 foreign affairs spending bill at $52.656 billion yesterday. The subcommittee mark up is roughly $4 billion above last year’s enacted levels, but also $4 billion below the president’s request for FY2011.
Yesterday, the U.S. Congress struck a blow against corruption abroad when Chair of the Foreign Ops Appropriations Subcommittee Nita Lowey (D-NY) removed all non-military and non-humanitarian aid to Afghanistan from the FY11 budget. She claimed: