Afghanistan will seek at least US$4 billion from international donors this weekend at a crucial aid conference aimed at propping up the country after most foreign combat troops leave at the end of 2014.
Nations that once gave liberally, however, want more guarantees that their taxpayers’ money will not be lost to corruption and mismanagement.
Representatives from about 70 countries and organizations meeting tomorrow in Tokyo will establish a roadmap of accountability to ensure that Afghanistan does more to improve governance and finance management, and to safeguard the democratic process, rule of law and human rights — especially those of women.
Foreign aid in the decade since the US invasion in 2001 has led to better education and health care, with nearly 8 million children, including 3 million girls, enrolled in schools. That compares to 1 million children more than a decade ago, when girls were banned from school under the Taliban.
Improved health facilities have halved child mortality and expanded basic health services to nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan population of more than 25 million — compared to less than 10 percent in 2001. However, donors have become wary of corruption-busting pledges that have not always been delivered. Some highly placed Afghan officials have been investigated for corruption, but seldom prosecuted, and some of the graft investigations have come close to the president himself.
The stakes are high as Afghan President Hamid Karzai faces international weariness with the war and frustration over his failure to crack down on corruption more than a decade after the US invasion that ousted the Taliban.
Afghanistan has received nearly US$60 billion in such aid since 2002. The World Bank says foreign aid makes up nearly the equivalent of the country’s GDP.
Those funds, which are needed for basic services such as health care, education and infrastructure, are expected to sharply diminish after international troops withdraw.
Karzai has said he will ask for US$4 billion annually for the first three years of what his government describes as a period of transformation from 2015 to 2025. That will come on top of US$4.1 billion pledged last May at a NATO conference in Chicago, Illinois, to fund the Afghan National Security Forces from 2015 to 2017.
The World Bank has calculated that Afghanistan will need US$3.3 billion to US$3.9 billion in annual non-security spending for those first three years of the transition to cover a shortfall in its GDP of just over US$17 billion.
However, donors will be looking to provide their funds through the government’s bureaucracy in a way that will minimize the risk of having them siphoned off in a country that was listed last year as the third-most corrupt in the world.
Despite the concerns, Britain and other nations agree Afghanistan will need significant help in the post-2014 era so it does not slip back into chaos and civil war.
The World Bank said the delivery of international aid and its use in building a more effective state has been hampered by “inevitable waste and corruption, aid dependency and use of parallel systems to circumvent limited government absorptive capacity.”
An abrupt aid cutoff, it warned in a report ahead of the conference, could lead to a collapse similar to the one after the Soviet Union pulled out in 1989, cutting off funding to the regime it once supported.
Humanitarian groups and aid agencies fear the conference will focus on accountability and managing declining funds to the detriment of Afghanistan’s needy.
“The Tokyo conference will decide the lives of millions of people for years to come. We know that when the troops leave the attention will leave,” said Christine Roehrs, spokeswoman for Save the Children in Afghanistan. “We are worried that at Tokyo they will be talking about the conditions for aid rather than the aid itself.”
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