Afghan Donors Wary As Karzai Shops for More

Six weeks after he survived another assassination attempt, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, will march into a conference hall in central Paris today with a long and rather pricey shopping list.

He is looking for $50bn in foreign assistance over five years to pay for schools, roads, guns and other things deemed necessary to rebuild his conflict-ridden country. It is the latest of several donor jamborees – he has already been to Tokyo, Berlin and London. As ever, the mantra is to put an "Afghan face" on the effort.

But among the representatives of the 80 countries and international organizations gathered in Paris, there will be a gnawing sense of unease. Despite some bright spots, reconstruction is not going well and is ridden with allegations of corruption and incompetence. Karzai's store of international goodwill is dangerously depleted.

Donors worry their money will be frittered away into the pockets of greedy officials. Karzai's government is riddled with graft, much of it hitched to the insidious drug trade. Yet instead of introducing reforms, critics say the president is building political alliances with unsavory characters in the run-up to presidential elections scheduled for late next year.

Karzai defended his alliances with former warlords in a recent interview with der Spiegel. "We lack the power to solve these problems in other ways," he said. And he refuted long-standing accusations that his brother is a major figure in the narcotics mafia. "Ahmed Wali has been accused of drug-dealing. I have thoroughly investigated all these accusations and, of course, none of them is true," he said.

Outside politics, there is also the question of capacity. Of the $25bn pledged by foreign donors since 2002, only $15bn has been spent. A dearth of qualified professionals means some government ministries have difficulty spending their budgets. And a raging insurgency in the south and east means that government officials cannot travel to some areas for fear of being shot by the Taliban.

It's not all bad. Post-Taliban Afghanistan has some proud achievements to boast of including a popularly elected government, two million girls in school and improving health services available to 80% of the population. In opinion surveys Afghans insist they want the foreigners to stay.

Last Monday the American first lady, Laura Bush, flew in to bolster Karzai, her husband's old ally. "I don't think it's really that fair," she said of the criticisms against him. Yet Afghanistan still ranks 174th out of 178 countries on the UN Human Development Index and public disillusionment is setting in.

Many Afghans will greet the Paris conference with a cynical shrug as the latest money-wasting step in a process that benefits them little.

According to a recent study by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a Norwegian-funded, Kabul-based watchdog, two-thirds of Afghans feel there is corruption in aid, and a large majority believe that less than 40% of foreign funds actually reaches the people it is intended for.

Suspicions are fueled by anger at the high salaries and relatively comfortable lifestyles of western aid workers. Up to 20% of international aid is spent on "technical assistance" - jargon for highly paid foreign consultants - according to IWA. Some staff at the US government's development agency USAid, for example, earn $22,000 a month - 367 times more than an Afghan teacher.

The solution, experts say, is to concentrate on quality rather than quantity of aid. But that will require urgent reforms on all sides - including among donor nations. "Quality of spending is really crucial. That's where more attention should be paid," said Mariam Sherman, country director of the World Bank in Kabul.

Some government programs work well, Sherman said, and corruption is a problem only if there is weak oversight. The World Bank has spent $2.4bn of foreign aid without major worries, she said. "The assumption that somehow the money is getting stolen is not what we are finding."

The problem, the World Bank says, is that two-thirds of aid is channeled outside the government. This has resulted in a "second civil service", staffed by overpaid and loosely supervised consultants who are dispatched to government ministries by their own governments - the notorious "technical assistance".

Outside the cities, foreign aid is subject to "cascading contracts" - aid projects that are sub-contracted from one private company to another several times until the amount spent is a fraction of the original donation.

In Paris, few expect Karzai to get the requested $50bn but he will almost certainly return home with a batch of handsome promises. The question is how to translate them into progress on the ground - and fast.

The high number of western military casualties - Britain lost its 100th soldier this week - is sapping patience with Afghanistan in western capitals. But the stakes are higher than ever. A retreat by western forces could trigger a civil war and create a haven for Islamist militancy. As the International Crisis Group warned in a recent report, "the risk of losing Afghanistan is very real".