[R-G] Kabul's New Elite

[Anthony Fenton]

http://counterpunch.org/patrick05012009.html

Weekend Edition
May 1 - 3, 2009
Living High on the West's Largesse
Kabul's New Elite

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Kabul.

Vast sums of money are being lavished by Western aid agencies on their  
own officials in Afghanistan at a time when extreme poverty is driving  
young Afghans to fight for the Taliban. The going rate paid by the  
Taliban for an attack on a police checkpoint in the west of the  
country is $4, but foreign consultants in Kabul, who are paid out of  
overseas aids budgets, can command salaries of $250,000 to $500,000 a  
year.

The high expenditure on paying, protecting and accommodating Western  
aid officials in palatial style helps to explain why Afghanistan ranks  
174th out of 178th on a UN ranking of countries' wealth. This is  
despite a vigorous international aid effort with the US alone spending  
$31bn since 2002 up to the end of last year.

The high degree of wastage of aid money in Afghanistan has long been  
an open secret. In 2006, Jean Mazurelle, the then country director of  
the World Bank, calculated that between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of  
aid was "badly spent". "The wastage of aid is sky-high," he said.  
"There is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is  
a scandal."

The dysfunctional reputation of the US aid effort in Afghanistan is  
politically crucial because Barack Obama, with strong support from  
Gordon Brown, has promised that a "civilian surge" of non-military  
experts will be sent to Afghanistan to strengthen its government and  
turn the tide against the Taliban. These would number up to 600,  
including agronomists, economists and legal experts, though Washington  
admitted this week that it was having difficulty recruiting enough  
people of the right calibre.

Whole districts of Kabul have already been taken over or rebuilt to  
accommodate Westerners working for aid agencies or embassies. "I have  
just rented out this building for $30,000 a month to an aid  
organisation," said Torialai Bahadery, the director of Property  
Consulting Afghanistan, which specialises in renting to foreigners.  
"It was so expensive because it has 24 rooms with en-suite bathrooms  
as well as armoured doors and bullet-proof windows," he explained,  
pointing to a picture of a cavernous mansion.

Though 77 per cent of Afghans lack access to clean water, Mr Bahadery  
said that aid agencies and the foreign contractors who work for them  
insist that every bedroom should have an en-suite bathroom and this  
often doubles the cost of accommodation.

In addition to the expensive housing the expatriates in Kabul are  
invariably protected by high-priced security companies and each house  
is converted into a fortress. The freedom of movement of foreigners is  
very limited. "I am not even allowed to go into Kabul's best hotel,"  
complained one woman working for a foreign government aid  
organisation. She added that to travel to a part of Afghanistan deemed  
wholly free of Taliban by Afghans, she had to go by helicopter and  
then be taken to where she wanted to go in an armoured vehicle.

There have been numerous attacks on foreigners in Kabul and suicide  
bombings have been effective from the Taliban's point of view in  
driving almost all expatriates into well-defended compounds where  
living conditions may be luxurious but which are as confining as any  
prison. This means that many foreigners sent to Afghanistan to help  
rebuild the country and the state machinery seldom meet Afghans aside  
from their drivers and a few Afghans with whom they work.

"Risk avoidance is crippling the international aid effort," said one  
aid expert in Kabul. "If governments are so worried about risk then  
they really should not be sending people here and having them work  
under such restricted conditions."

The effectiveness of foreign advisers and experts in Iraq is often  
further reduced by the very short time they stay in the country. "Many  
people move on after six months," said one expatriate who did not want  
to be named. "In addition some embassy employees receive two weeks off  
work for every six weeks they are in the country, on top of their  
usual holidays."

Some officials working for non-governmental organisations in  
Afghanistan are themselves troubled by the amount of money which  
foreign government officials and their aid agencies spend on staff  
compared to the poverty of the Afghan government.

"I was in Badakhshan province in northern Afghanistan which has a  
population of 830,000, most of whom depend on farming," said Matt  
Waldman, the head of policy and advocacy for Oxfam in Kabul. "The  
entire budget of the local department of agriculture, irrigation and  
livestock, which is extremely important for farmers in Badakhshan, is  
just $40,000. This would be the pay of an expatriate consultant in  
Kabul for a few months."

Mr Waldman, the author of several highly-detailed papers on the  
failures of aid in Afghanistan, says that a lot of money is put in at  
the top in Afghanistan but it is siphoned off before it reaches  
ordinary Afghans at he bottom. He agrees that the problems faced are  
horrendous in a country which was always poor and has been ruined by  
30 years of war. Some 42 per cent of Afghanistan's 25 million  
inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day and life expectancy is  
only 45 years. Overall literacy rate is just 34 per cent and 18 per  
cent for women.

But much of the aid money goes to foreign companies who then  
subcontract as many as five times with each subcontractor in turn  
looking for between 10 per cent and 20 per cent or more profit before  
any work is done on the project. The biggest donor in Afghanistan is  
the US, whose overseas aid department USAID channels nearly half of  
its aid budget for Afghanistan to five large US contractors.

Examples cited in an Oxfam report include the building of a short road  
between Kabul city centre and the international airport in 2005 which,  
after the main US contractor had subcontracted it to an Afghan  
company, cost $2.4m a kilometre – or four times the average cost of  
road construction in Afghanistan. Often aid is made conditional on  
spending it in the donor country.

Another consequence of the use of foreign contractors is that  
construction has failed to make the impact on unemployment among young  
Afghans which is crucial if the Taliban is to be defeated. In southern  
provinces such as Farah, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul, up to 70 per cent  
of Taliban fighters are non-ideological unemployed young men given a  
gun before each attack and paid a pittance according to a report by  
the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. By using these part-time  
fighters as cannon-fodder, the Taliban can keep down casualties among  
its own veteran fighters while inflicting losses on government forces.

Some simple and obvious ways of spending money to benefit Afghans have  
been neglected. Will Beharrell of the Turquoise Mountain charity,  
which is encouraging traditional Afghan crafts and reconstruction of  
part of the old city, says tangible and visible improvements are  
important. He said: "We went in for rubbish clearing because it is  
simple and provides employment. We brought the street level down by  
two metres in some places when we had cleared it away."

A striking feature of Kabul is that while the main roads are paved,  
the side streets are often no more than packed earth with high ridges,  
deep potholes and grey pools of dirty water. New roads have been built  
between the cities, such as Kabul and Kandahar, but these are often  
too dangerous to use because of mobile Taliban checkpoints where  
anybody connected to the central government is killed on the spot.

The international aid programme is particularly important in  
Afghanistan because the government has few other sources of revenue.  
Donations from foreign governments make up 90 per cent of public  
expenditure. Aid is far more important than in Iraq, where the  
government has oil revenues. In Afghanistan a policeman's monthly  
salary is only $70, which is not enough to live on without taking  
bribes.

Since the fall of the Taliban the Afghan government has been trying to  
run a country in which the physical infrastructure has been destroyed.  
Kabul is now getting electricity from Uzbekistan but 55 per cent of  
Afghans get no electricity at all and just one in 20 get power all  
day. Money can be distributed more swiftly by the US military but this  
may not undercut the political support of the Taliban to the degree  
expected.

Afghans themselves are unenthusiastic about President Obama's plan for  
more US military and civilian involvement in Iraq. And the failure of  
foreign aid to deliver a better life to Afghans also helps explain  
plummeting support for the Kabul government and its Western allies.  
Oxfam's Mr Waldman believes better-organised aid could still deliver  
the benefits Afghans hoped for when the Taliban were overthrown in  
2001, but he warns: "It is getting very late in the day to get things  
right."

Go figure: The West's spending in Afghanistan

$57 The foreign aid per capita to Afghanistan, compared with $580 per  
capita in the aftermath of the Bosnian conflict.

$250,000 Typical salary of foreign consultants in Afghanistan,  
including 35 per cent hardship allowance and 35 per cent danger money.  
Afghan civil servants typically receive less than $1,000 a year.

$22bn The shortfall in donations compared to the international  
community's estimate of Afghanistan's need – around 48 per cent.

40 per cent Share of international aid budget returned to aid  
countries in corporate profit and consultant salaries – more than $6bn  
since 2001.

$7m Daily aid spend in Afghanistan. The daily military spend by the US  
government is around $100m.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and  
daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle  
Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book 'Muqtada!  
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is  
published by Scribner.