I think we will see more of this kind of waste and ineffectiveness. . .and one might also begin to look at what has been spent in Iraq that has been wasted.
More than half of Afghanistan’s population is under twenty-five, which
shouldn’t be surprising since the average life span there is forty-nine.
But the United States Agency for International Development looked at
this group and decided it needed help because, it said, these young
people are “disenfranchised, unskilled, uneducated, neglected—and most
susceptible to joining the insurgency.” So the agency chartered a
three-year, $50 million program intended to train members of this
generation to become productive members of Afghan society. Two years
into it, the agency’s inspector general had a look at the work thus far
and found “little evidence that the project has made progress toward”
its goals.
After all the money spent, still today, the CIA says, Afghanistan has
the world’s highest infant mortality rate; one hundred and twenty-two of
every thousand children die before they reach age one. UNICEF reports
that fifty-nine percent of the nation’s children grow up “stunted” for
lack of nutrition during the early years of life. That’s the world’s
second-worst rate, behind Ethiopia. And even after more than a decade of
intensive development aid from not only the United States but dozens of
other nations, Afghanistan still ranks near the bottom on per capita
income, literacy, life expectancy, electricity usage, Internet
penetration, and on the World Bank’s broad Human Development Index.
USAID tries to defend its decisions and efforts. More criticism of USAID. The politics of USAID. USAID may be a good idea that has been subverted by bureaucratic and political agendas as well as business cronyism.
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