Karzai Lashes Efforts to Bypass Govt With Foreign Aid
Says Aid Must Be Used to 'Demonstrate Afghan Leadership'
Speaking today in Munich, Afghan President Hamid Karzai today condemned efforts by NATO member nations to route their “reconstruction” projects around the notoriously corrupt government, saying it undermines the effectiveness of those projects.
Karzai also insisted that the government is “determined to demonstrate Afghan leadership” on the ground and suggested that the demonstration would have to include helping to coordinate those aid projects.
Karzai also insisted that the inefficiencies in the government were in part the result of “ill-coordinated technical assistance from our partners” and promised to modernize his nation’s bureaucracy.
He also promised to target corruption, which is a promise that has been made so many times that is borders on the absurd. Repeatedly NGO reports have put Afghanistan as either the most corrupt nation in the world or second most corrupt, depending on if they count the self-proclaimed government in Somalia or not.
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majorbang
February 7th, 2011 at 11:01 am
Like Karzai's repeated promises, it has also been pointed out repeatedly that the US and NATO are the occupying powers in Afghanistan and as such the buck regarding corruption stops with them. Moreover, most of the corruption occurs in relation to the aid that is coming in, whether military or otherwise (there is hardly any other source of income for the state of Afghanistan is there, having been reduced to this state by more than three decades of western interference?) and as such it should be obvious that it is the foreign contractors in the form of NGOs and mercenaries who are the biggest corrupt and corrupting entities in Afghanistan.
Jason Ditz « Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette
February 9th, 2011 at 12:20 am
[...] Ditz, managing news editor at Antiwar.com, discusses Hamid Karzai’s complaint about NATO reconstruction funds being re-routed around his notoriously corrupt regime; how the US [...]