According to UN reports, Afghanistan has received a total of 60 billion US dollars in international donations since the start of the Afghan war in 2001. Yet it remains one of the poorest countries in the world. So where has all the donation money gone?
Najib Manalai, Special Adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Finance, said, “I think there is a waste of international aid in this country. The aid is not being invested in Afghanistan or its people.”
Najib Manalai says that between 2002 and 2010, 97 billion dollars of non-military aid was pledged by western countries. Afghanistan only received 57 billion dollars and only 10 billion dollars of this made it into the government’s fiscal budget. The rest was allocated directly by aid-providing countries and organizations.
“80 percent of the aid money was out of the government’s control and the Afghan government doesn’t have information about this money. We cannot say how much money went where and how effectively it was used. Studies have been published to show that the effectiveness of the aid has been very low.”
According to Manalai, a large portion of the aid has been spent on the salary and living expenses of staff from foreign countries and organizations stationed in Afghanistan, such as car rental costs.
Wahid Jamshady is the owner of a car rental company in Kabul. His main clients are foreign organizations. Over the past ten years, his company has expanded from 12 vehicles to over 100. The majority of these vehicles are SUVs, popular among western customers. He says the cost of importing each vehicle into Afghanistan is around 60 to 70,000 US dollars, including things like shipping and customs clearance fees.
Wahid Jamshady, owner of a car rental company, said, “Some of the clients don’t mind the high prices because they’re VIPs. They don’t even mind being charged extra, as long as they get a good service.”
Apart from covering things like car rental fees, the salaries of security personnel employed by some U.S. organizations in Afghanistan are also believed to have been paid out of the international aid coffers. Some of the foreign experts hired by the Afghan government are reported to be paid in the same way. So just as Manalai says, international aid may have been spent in Afghanistan’s name, but it appears that much of the money hasn’t been spent on Afghanistan or the Afghan people.
By Vanessa Duffy the CCTV correspondent