WASHINGTON — Afghanistan is at risk of a deep financial crisis when foreign troops leave in 2014 if the United States is unable to overhaul its multibillion-dollar package of nation-building assistance, according to a congressional report that comes as President Barack Obama weighs the size and scope of the initial phase of a U.S. troop drawdown.
The report, completed over two years by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.S. stabilization programs in Afghanistan have had limited success despite about $18.8 billion in U.S. foreign aid over 10 years — more than any other country, including Iraq.
Misspent foreign aid can result in corruption, alter markets and undercut the ability of the Kabul government to control its resources, said the report, which was posted Tuesday night on the Senate committee's website. The World Bank found that a whopping 97 percent of the gross domestic product in Afghanistan is linked to spending by the international military and donor community.
But can that 97% really be true? I have always assumed that the opium trade was quite profitable; this would seem to suggest that it's not. Let's see; $1.8 bill a year aid, plus in-country spending by the US army (they must have to buy something in the market sometimes) taking it up to two bill on the GNP, that would mean that the remaining GNP including drugs is about sixty-one million dollars, which hardly seems worth the bother one way or another. That's about six hundred times the size of DEAL, for example. Even if my GNP figure is off by an order of magnitude, it still doesn't seem enough.
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