No surprise that President Ashraf Ghani fled last week, reportedly in a helicopter stuffed with stolen cash. Now the legacy is clear, with heartbreaking scenes of fundamentalist bigots seizing control. He called it the Taliban’s ‘No 1 recruiting tool’. More than a decade ago, Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to the region, said corruption was destroying efforts to create a fledgling democracy. Sadly, all the warning signs were ignored. It shows the lethal impact of pouring aid into a fragile, conflict-riven country – while the two-decade debacle, backed by floods of donor cash at times bigger than the entire Afghan economy, helped transform the aid sector into a greedy, pernicious and self-serving industry filled with fat-cats. The West’s plans were so naive, controls so weak, spending so vast, and changes in personnel and strategy so frequent, that this now serves as a textbook study in how not to build a better and democratic state. US diplomatic cables revealed one Afghan vice-president flew to Dubai with £38 million in cash, and that drug-traffickers and corrupt officials were shifting £170 million a week out of a country where average incomes were scarcely £430 a year. The International Monetary Fund may have blocked the latest £330 million tranche of aid from failing into their hands, but how much have they already pocketed?įor the waste of taxpayers’ money was astonishing, with ‘ghost’ schools and military forces, counter-narcotic efforts that backfired, dodgy construction and fuel deals siphoning off billions, and cash and gold smuggled out through Kabul airport. Squandered: A profligate £4.4million was spent on importing nine Italian goats to try to boost the Afghan cashmere industry (Pictured: Herd of goats near Bagram Airfield) Tony Blair declared it our ‘duty’ to rebuild Afghanistan as a ‘stable and democratic’ nation.īut despite some advances in education, female empowerment and prosperity, naive foreign interventions played a damaging role in fuelling corruption, furthering divisions and fostering a mafia state, thereby assisting the return of the Taliban. This farcical scheme perfectly symbolises the costly and corrosive folly of Western attempts to build a new society in Afghanistan, based on arrogance, arms and vast flows of aid. ‘We don’t know,’ said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Those in charge could not even tell if the unfortunate goats ended up in a cooking pot. The blond billy goats were sent to breed with darker females to boost the yield and quality of the luxury wool from nine million local goats.īut several fell sick, their newly designed home was too small, huge food costs made the plans unsustainable, the intended Afghan partner pulled out, and the project chief quit in dismay. These animals from Tuscany were airlifted into the country as part of a £4.4 million scheme planned by the Pentagon to help the Afghan cashmere industry and create thousands of jobs. Or you could consider the saga of nine Italian goats. If you want to understand the horrifying return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, you could delve into the history of a mountain nation that repeatedly repels foreign invaders.
0 kommentar(er)
