As The Washington Post reports, Gen. David H. Petraeus and other commanders in Afghanistan are planning to allow commanders to have access to large amounts of money from a discretionary fund so that they can support reconstruction projects that should be done in a hurry. The money, says Petraeus, is “a weapon system.”
Not everybody agrees. International-aid experts point out that developing the infrastructure of a devastated country takes time and cannot be put on a fast track, regardless of how much money is poured into the projects. Often, the beneficiaries of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan are the tribal leaders who become business partners with American contractors and friends of U.S. military commanders and intelligence officers. As Jake Sherman, the associate director of a New York University project on peacekeeping and the security sector, told me, “You’re empowering alternative structures of power that have the potential to fight amongst themselves or against the authority of the Afghan state.” Under these conditions, certain tribal leaders end up as winners.
The losers are ordinary Afghans who are left out of the deals or, even worse, targeted because of the false tips that corrupt tribal leaders have provided. Altogether, international-aid experts believe that it is a flawed system that is based on cash payments, with potentially disastrous results for the Afghan people and their nation.
