the villagers put them to the only possible use: firewood. So
what had happened to the millions of dollars promised to
the villagers? Of the promised money, 20 percent of it was
taken as UN head office costs in Geneva. The remainder
was subcontracted to an NGO, which took another 20
percent for its own head office costs in Brussels, and so on,
for another three layers, with each party taking
approximately another 20 percent of what was remaining.
The little money that reached Afghanistan was used to buy
wood from western Iran, and much of it was paid to Ismail
Khan’s trucking cartel to cover the inflated transport prices.
It was a bit of a miracle that those oversize wooden beams
even arrived in the village.
What happened in the central valley of Afghanistan is not
an isolated incident. Many studies estimate that only about
10 or at most 20 percent of aid ever reaches its target.
There are dozens of ongoing fraud investigations into
charges of UN and local officials siphoning off aid money.
But most of the waste resulting from foreign aid is not fraud,
just incompetence or even worse: simply business as usual
for aid organizations.
The Afghan experience with aid was in fact probably a
qualified success compared to others. Throughout the last
five decades, hundreds of billions of dollars have been paid
to governments around the world as “development” aid.
Much of it has been wasted in overhead and corruption, just
as in Afghanistan. Worse, a lot of it went to dictators such
as Mobutu, who depended on foreign aid from his Western
patrons both to buy support from his clients to shore up his
regime and to enrich himself. The picture in much of the
rest of sub-Saharan Africa was similar. Humanitarian aid
given for temporary relief in times of crises, for example,
most recently in Haiti and Pakistan, has certainly been
more useful, even though its delivery, too, has been marred
in similar problems.
Despite this unflattering track record of “development”
aid, foreign aid is one of the most popular policies that
Western governments, international organizations such as
the United Nations, and NGOs of different ilk recommend
as a way of combating poverty around the world. And of
course, the cycle of the failure of foreign aid repeats itself
over and over again. The idea that rich Western countries