Off the top: I’m not an expert on Afghanistan and it wouldn’t be overly surprising to me if we could find specific times in specific countries when aid did affect politics. Maybe post-invasion Afghanistan is one. All that said, my personal bet would be that aid just isn’t doing much in Afghanistan.
Now if the question is “does aid work well in Afghanistan?” then I’d guess the answer is “no.” I fully believe that politics can interact with aid to make aid more or less effective, especially in the sense that aid to very badly governed places might do very little. However, that isn’t the question. The question here is “would Afghanistan be better off without aid?” and while I’m open to the answer being “yes” I imagine that most of the problems are larger and more serious, and that aid offers only a very minor push in any direction. And of course this goes quadruple for Cameroon or Nigeria, where aid is a sideshow compared to the other money in the system.
I think it is very difficult to argue that aid “didn’t work well” in Afghanistan when you look at any education or health metric. According to UNICEF there was a 90% increase in child malnutrition in the year from June 2021-2022, capturing the period following the collapse of the state and the majority of aid projects (number is partially inflated by the expansion of UNICEF programming to cover gaps left by other actors).
I don’t think it is controversial that there was too much money and way too much corruption in Afghanistan. Obviously, the state-building project failed. But “aid” in that environment covered such an extreme range of activity. I’ll be honest, it’s a sensitive personal topic, having lived there and given everything that since happened, but it does bother me to see “aid” as a whole written off when it includes such diverse activities as addressing child malnutrition and funding unaccountable quasi-police forces.
Thanks for the comments!
Off the top: I’m not an expert on Afghanistan and it wouldn’t be overly surprising to me if we could find specific times in specific countries when aid did affect politics. Maybe post-invasion Afghanistan is one. All that said, my personal bet would be that aid just isn’t doing much in Afghanistan.
Now if the question is “does aid work well in Afghanistan?” then I’d guess the answer is “no.” I fully believe that politics can interact with aid to make aid more or less effective, especially in the sense that aid to very badly governed places might do very little. However, that isn’t the question. The question here is “would Afghanistan be better off without aid?” and while I’m open to the answer being “yes” I imagine that most of the problems are larger and more serious, and that aid offers only a very minor push in any direction. And of course this goes quadruple for Cameroon or Nigeria, where aid is a sideshow compared to the other money in the system.
I think it is very difficult to argue that aid “didn’t work well” in Afghanistan when you look at any education or health metric. According to UNICEF there was a 90% increase in child malnutrition in the year from June 2021-2022, capturing the period following the collapse of the state and the majority of aid projects (number is partially inflated by the expansion of UNICEF programming to cover gaps left by other actors).
I don’t think it is controversial that there was too much money and way too much corruption in Afghanistan. Obviously, the state-building project failed. But “aid” in that environment covered such an extreme range of activity. I’ll be honest, it’s a sensitive personal topic, having lived there and given everything that since happened, but it does bother me to see “aid” as a whole written off when it includes such diverse activities as addressing child malnutrition and funding unaccountable quasi-police forces.