Hold the Troops: Send Money to Afghanistan Instead
By Niaf Sag Tan on April 1, 2009 at 8:00 AM in Afghanistan
What are we fighting for? Where’s the aid? Reconstruction? Here is an example of the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, how ‘average’ people get by. What if this were you?
So what do we do about this?
Seventy nations met on Afghanistan on March 31st, according to Al Jazerra:
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, speaking at the opening of the conference on Tuesday, welcomed commitments to prevent civilian casualties and urged his country’s allies to invest in the development of national security forces.
“Building up the Afghan security capacity will be the surest, most sustainable and least costly way to overcome the threat of terrorism, provide security and law and order to the people of Afghanistan.
“The Afghan people also expect that any military scale-up will be used effectively to protect civilian lives and to stem the infiltration of terrorists from across Afghanistan’s borders,” he said.
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is quoted in the March 30th Washington Post:
“For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don’t work,” she said. “There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line.” Clinton called the amount of money spent without results “heartbreaking.”
Since 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $5 billion in Afghanistan, according to figures on the agency’s Web site. Clinton oversees USAID, which has boasted a number of success stories, including building hundreds of schools, distributing 60 million textbooks and vaccinating 90 percent of children against polio. But a report by Oxfam last week charged that much of the U.S. aid in Afghanistan is wasted on consulting costs, subcontractor fees and duplication.
Clinton’s blunt comments on past aid programs — which appeared to also indict the broader international effort — will probably raise the bar for the administration’s aid programs. “We are scrubbing every single civilian program,” she said. “This is part of my mission as secretary of state. We are looking at every single dollar as to how it’s spent and where it’s going and trying to track the outcomes. We want to see real results.”
And how did our great diplomat, Richard Holbrooke do?
James Bays, Al Jazeera’s correspondent at The Hague, said he understood Karzai had met with Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy.
“We don’t know exactly what they discussed. But members of the Afghan delegation told Al Jazeera that was a stormy meeting and that the president was extremely angry at the end of it,” he said.
He added that ordinary Afghans want the conference to produce something that is going to change their lives.
Do you think 70 nations would meet on Darfur? They don’t have an oil pipeline route through their country. Take some action, please. Call the White House at 202-456-1111 and tell them to not send more troops to Afghanistan, but to increase humanitarian aid through third parties. Stop the killing. Instead of spending $775,000 USD for one troop member for one year of active duty (including all support), let’s give that $775,000 directly to programs that will reach the people who need help the most.
With Hillary Clinton on duty, it would be done right.
by Ronald Scott
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