Prompt:

America's foreign aid mushroomed after WWII. With most of Europe and Japan in ruins, America became the
manufacturing giant of the world. Our burgeoning export markets, intact factories, abundant raw materials, and willing
workers contributed to a booming economy. Over time, we helped many of those countries to rebuild their
infrastructures and their economies. Influenced by complex economic, social and foreign policies over the years,
America's economy has seen a considerable shift from heavy manufacturing, to agriculture and service industries. Our
domestic markets now account for a greater share of our GDP.

With a National Debt topping $19 Trillion, can we afford to continue foreign aid at current levels? What would the main
motivating factors for sustaining, or cutting foreign aid be? What impact does US foreign aid have on the World, and
what would a change in foreign aid mean?

Foreign Aid: The Good And Bad by James K. Glassman

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesglassman/2011/04/08/foreign
-aid-the-good-and-bad/#5ab9bef8311a
Faced with cutting government spending to reduce record debt, politicians have found a popular
target. After reviewing respondents reaction to a list of budget reductions including defense,
education, food stamps and cultural programs ABC News-Washington Post pollsters found
that the only possible federal spending cut a majority favored was for foreign aid.

But not so fast.

Support to foreign governments has become more strategic in recent years, and much of it
serves important purposes. As David Rothkopf writes in Foreign Policy, this is just the moment
when aid is most critical on initiative of vital national security from fighting terror to stabilizing
the Middle East to winning support for the U.S. in regions where our rivals are spending furiously
to tip the scales in their favor.

One of those regions is Africa, where China is trying to make friends and influence people. The
U.S. has spent billions of dollars the largest single government effort to fight international
disease to help Africans overcome epidemics of AIDS and malaria. Its the right thing to do in a
moral sense, but it also advances U.S. public diplomacy and national security. Tens of millions
more African orphans would add to instability on a pivotal continent.

Additionally, economic aid to Afghanistan makes that troubled nation and erstwhile terrorist
launching pad more secure and ultimately protects U.S. military personnel. And aid to Haiti
helps a neighbor in terrible distress.

Consider the work of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, launched with bipartisan support in
2004 and currently spending about $1 billion a year. The MCCs mission, according to its fiscal
2012 budget proposal, is to reduce poverty through investments promoting growth in poor
countries that create and maintain sound policy environments.

The MCC provides funding for projects in nations that demonstrate a commitment to such goals
as free markets and a corruption-free bureaucracy. The program has scored major successes in
such countries as Tanzania, where road, water, and sanitation projects have helped 5 million
people, with an estimated economic gain of well over $1 billion.
Some foreign aid, however, is far more questionable. For instance, why should U.S. taxpayer
dollars flow abroad to projects that are so distasteful at home that they cant get support here?

An example is a program to spend tens of millions of dollars in Indonesia to try to reduce the
threats of deforestation and climate change and help to conserve the countrys tropical forests,
wildlife, and ecosystem processes, according to a White House fact sheet. The program is
backed by such aggressive Green groups as WWF and Greenpeace, and no wonder.

Cap-and-trade and similar climate change legislation could not get through the U.S. Congress for
the simple reason that their potential benefits were outweighed by their significant economic
costs. But the expensive experiment continues, with U.S. taxpayer funding, in Indonesia. If
anything, the costs of such policies are even higher in Indonesia, where they harm the livelihoods
of poor farmers, than in the United States.

Since 2006, the MCC has provided aid to help Indonesia, the worlds largest Muslim nation,
strengthen its judiciary and government procurement system and to institute a nationwide
immunization program for five million children. That sort of aid makes sense. Now, unfortunately,
assistance to the country is being shaped by rejected ideology. This is precisely the kind of
foreign aid that American taxpayers should be concerned about.

The Indonesia funding is part of a $1 billion pledge, offered in November by Agriculture Secretary
Tom Vilsack, to slow and reverse deforestation in the tropics. But in Indonesia, at least,
deforestation is often a politically charged term that means substituting one kind of planting
for another.

The bone of contention is that some Indonesia farmers are converting forested lands to
productive agriculture use. That is a change that helps boost the Indonesian economy, and, as
decades of history have shown, the single most important factor in an improved environment is a
robust economy.

Wealth makes health. In his 2004 book The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not
Affluence, Is the Environments Number One Enemy, Jack Hollander, professor emeritus of energy
and resources at the University of California at Berkeley, powerfully demonstrates the link
between poverty and environmental degradation. Its obvious to anyone who sees charcoal being
burned as fuel in Uganda or dried dung in rural China.

The best kind of U.S. aid, like most of the work of the MCC, seeks to build economic growth in
poor countries by strengthening health care, education, and governmental and physical
infrastructure. Economic growth in developing nations helps the United States by increasing
stability in those countries, contributing to more vibrant trade in both directions and, in fact,
producing a cleaner environment.

If, however, programs like the one for Indonesia prevail, then poor people in the developing
world will be subject to lower economic growth rates and see larger percentages of their income
devoted to energy costs, wrote Niger Innis of the U.S.-based Congress of Racial Equality last
month. This means they will have less to spend on education, food, shelter, and other staples.

Washington budget cutters should not slash foreign aid mindlessly, but they would do well to
target for extinction aid that harms economies and is based on a philosophy that cant pass
muster among the American people.
 Why Foreign Aid is Important Kimber Kraus

http://borgenproject.org/why-foreign-aid-is-important/

Here at The Borgen Project, we are often asked why foreign aid is important. Foreign aid can save
the lives of millions of people living in poverty around the world. It addresses issues such as
health, education, infrastructure and humanitarian emergencies.

Foreign aid is a broad term. In a wide sense, it can be defined as financial or technical help
given by one countrys government to another country to assist social and economic
development or to respond to a disaster in a receiving country.

There are numerous reasons why foreign aid is important to help impoverished countries,
including the following:

1. Infrastructure: roads, bridges, institutions and sewer systems get built, giving people the
ability to be mobile and have access to basic necessities such as electricity and running
water.
2. Agricultural technology improvements: improvements enter the infrastructure within
the agricultural businesses within recipient countries.
3. Education: classrooms get built, teachers receive training and children gain basic
educational needs.
4. Health: vaccinations, mosquito nets, safe drinking water, access to hygiene education
and basic sanitation are all brought in.
5. Humanitarian issues and natural disaster emergencies: life-saving support comes
to those affected and possibly displaced due to natural disasters, emergency shelters are
built for people affected by violence, and counseling services are made available.
6. National security: recipient countries can combat terrorism with the help of foreign aid
as it decreases poverty, weak institutions and corruption and can help strengthen good
governance, transparency and the economy.

Another reason why foreign aid is important is how it fosters a conducive diplomatic
relationship between the donor and the recipient.

Impoverished nations receiving aid can eventually become independent and move towards
democratic fundamentals with the help of donor countries.

There are hundreds of different donors of foreign aid. One of the most well-known donors of
foreign aid comes in the form of Official Development Assistance (ODA).

It is provided by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic

Development Cooperation. The ODA provides foreign aid to poor countries in the form of grants
and loans.
The ODA is important to impoverished countries as it provides specifically the materials needed
to build effective infrastructure and expand educational programs and the access to schools.
Additionally, it provides efficient responses to humanitarian emergencies.

One of the most well-known and largest providers of foreign aid is the International Development
Association (IDA), which is part of the World Bank. It has 173 shareholders that provide grants
and loans to 77 countries around the world, 39 of which are located in Africa.

The main goal of the IDA is to reduce inequalities, increase economic growth and improve the
living conditions of those in poverty. These goals are addressed as IDA funds are given directly to
the sectors of education, water, sanitation, agriculture and infrastructure.

The IDA provides little to no interest on its grants and loans and allows for a grace period of up to
10 years. It also allows the recipient country to make debt payments of up to 40 years.

Since 1960, the IDA has provided $312 billion in investments in 112 impoverished nations. In the
last three years alone, there has been an average of $19 billion in grants and loans.

Foreign aid truly makes a difference to people living in poverty. It provides access to basic
necessities and provides people essential conditions for living a peaceful and secure life.

Does foreign aid really do good?

By JONATHAN FOREMAN 9/27/15 12:01 AM

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/does-foreign-aid-really-do-
good/article/2572875
About a decade ago, a five-car convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers pulled up in a cloud of dust at a
remote village on the edge of a South Asian mountain range. The passengers, all of them
Westerners apart from an interpreter, walked over to where a canopy had been set up by an
advance team the previous day. About 25 villagers were already there, enticed by free cookies
and snacks.

One of the new arrivals gave a quick talk that was translated into a local language and then the
others handed leaflets to the villagers. Then the foreigners climbed into their Land Cruisers and
raced back to the relative safety and comfort of the capital. The leaflets concerned a micro-
finance scheme, and the men and women handing them out were part of a project sponsored
by the World Bank.

Not a single person in the village ever read the leaflets for the simple reason that no one in the
village could read, a problem that had apparently not occurred to the people running the
project. Nevertheless, the forms sent to Washington would, no doubt, confirm that outreach had
taken place and that awareness had been raised.
A key step had been taken in the process of helping members of an impoverished community
help themselves. Their expedition took place in Afghanistan, but it could have been in any of a
dozen heavily aided countries. While it would be an exaggeration to say that no local person
benefited from this particular project (after all, its foreign and local employees probably
contributed a good deal to the capital's economy), its wastefulness was arguably a betrayal
both of the taxpayers who funded it and of its purported beneficiaries.

If that weren't bad enough, even if this particular project had been better conceived and
executed, and awareness really had been raised, it probably wouldn't have done much good.
That is because micro-finance, celebrated as a development panacea, simply doesn't work in
certain cultures. It can be successful especially in quasi-matriarchal societies such as
Bangladesh where it was invented; but it has abjectly failed in violently macho cultures like
those of Rajasthan or Pashtun Afghanistan.

The point of this story isn't to imply that all aid is a similarly arrogant waste of effort and
money, but to serve as a counter-anecdote: a reminder that real aid requires more than just
good intentions, and a snapshot of the realities that all too often lie behind the heartwarming
imagery and simplistic appeals to compassion used by aid advocates when selling the work of
their vast global industry to the public.

To be fair, the aid industry has in the last couple of decades come to acknowledge that good
intentions are not enough. Hence the conferences and academic papers on "aid effectiveness,"
the shift to "evidence-based aid" and the increasingly rigorous efforts to understand what
programs work with real people in specific cultures. Critics, skeptics and disillusioned
practitioners such as William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, are now
given a grudging hearing rather than ignored or dismissed as apostles of heartlessness.

That is not quite the same as conceding that seven decades and trillions of dollars in
development aid have had remarkably disappointing results, in stark contrast to the Marshall
Plan that was its original inspiration. And you will rarely encounter any acknowledgement that
those countries that have emerged from long-endured poverty and underdevelopment, for
instance South Korea after the 1960s, or some of today's booming African economies, have
done so for reasons unconnected with aid.

Moreover, you will still hear aid advocates misleadingly cite the success of a handful of
relatively simple and untypical interventions, such as immunization, as if those interventions
are representative of development aid as a whole. Few of the goals implicit in the idea of
development, such as making a poor or damaged society wealthier, better educated, better-
nourished, more technologically sophisticated, more politically stable, are so easy.

Another awkward fact is that many of the attempts to bring accountability, transparency and
value for money to the enterprise of development aid have actually made it less rather than
more effective. U.S. aid efforts are especially compromised by the oversight requirements that
would be comical if they didn't do such a disservice to both the taxpayer and the theoretical
beneficiaries of aid.

USAID in particular is notorious for an obsession with "metrics" strongly reminiscent of the
McNamara approach to "winning" the Vietnam war; an approach that inevitably prompts
managers to favor projects that produce crunchable data, no matter how useless those projects
might otherwise be.

Moreover, as the anecdote above should suggest, a great deal of aid data isn't worth the time it
took to input into a spreadsheet. The more impoverished, chaotic and badly governed an aid-
receiving country is, the less you can or should rely on official data or even aid agency
estimates of its birth rates, population, mortality, literacy, family size, income. Most statistics
from basket-case countries, those in which it is too difficult or dangerous for researchers and
officials to visit villages far from the capital, are a combination of guesswork and garbage.

No one knows, for example, how many people live in countries like Afghanistan that have not
had a census in decades, let alone how much they live on or how long they live. Often, statistics
from even the largest and best-funded aid organizations are based on marketing needs rather
than rigorous research. For instance, last year a U.N. agency claimed that malnutrition has
gotten worse in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban, even though it's almost
impossible to know with any degree of accuracy how good or bad malnutrition was anywhere in
the country in 2001 or how bad it is in large swaths of the country today.

In general, those who market development or humanitarian assistance to the public are still
unwilling to admit that delivering effective aid is difficult in the best of circumstances, and even
harder in the ill-governed, chaotic, impoverished societies where it seems most needed. They
are even less likely to confront the reality that foreign aid all too often does actual harm.

This awkward fact is true of both development aid and humanitarian or emergency aid. The
former accounts for more than 85 percent of American foreign aid even though it's less visible
to and much less understood by the public. And, if you take seriously the criticism coming from
a growing number of African dissidents, activists and intellectuals, it has contributed massively
to the corruption, misgovernment and tyranny that has kept their nations mired in misery.

Even before people such as Zambia's Dambisa Moyo, Uganda's Andrew Mwenda and Ghana's
George Ayittey became a public relations nightmare for the aid industry, some economists had
noted a correlation between being aided on a huge scale and subsequently experiencing
economic, political and social catastrophe.

It was after the great increase in aid to sub-Saharan Africa that begin in 1970, that per capita
income dropped and many African countries endured negative growth. Other circumstantial
evidence for aid as a corrosive force includes the fact that the countries that have received the
most non-military foreign aid in the last six decades have a disproportionate tendency to
collapse into anarchy: Besides Afghanistan and Iraq, the countries that have received the most
aid per capita include Somalia, pre-earthquake Haiti, Liberia, Nepal, Zaire and the Palestinian
territories.

It's almost as hard to measure the alleged harm inflicted by aid as it is to find reliable and truly
relevant metrics for aid success. On the other hand, the evident failure of many heavily aided
societies speaks volumes.

How aid feeds corruption

As Mwenda said, having such a huge source of unearned revenue allows the government to
avoid accountability to the citizenry. This is true of his own Uganda, where foreign aid accounts
for 50 percent of the government's budget. There, President Yuweri Museveni, once hailed as a
model of modern, democratic African leadership, has responded to the generosity of the rich
world not by pursuing the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, but instead by purchasing top-
of-the-line Russian Su-30 warplanes for his Air Force and a Gulfstream private jet for himself.

Nor is it just in Uganda that foreign aid actually seems to discourage what donors would regard
as good behavior. A recent study from the Lancet magazine showed that aid funding earmarked
to supplement healthcare budgets in Africa invariably prompted recipient governments to
decrease their own contributions.

It also enables it to avoid or postpone necessary reforms, such as the establishment of a

working tax system. In Pakistan, for example, a country with a significant middle class as well
as a wealthy ruling elite, less than 1 percent of the population pays income taxes. Because
states with little or no income from taxation cannot afford to pay decent salaries, this makes
large-scale official corruption and extortion all but inevitable.

Aid feeds corruption in other ways as well. This is partly because large-scale, state-to-state aid
has the same economic and political effects as the discovery of a natural resource like oil. But it
is also because so many aid agencies will do almost anything to ensure that their good works
can continue.

This is especially true in humanitarian intervention. Disasters such as earthquakes and

tsunamis can be tremendous windfalls for ruthless officials in places such as Sri Lanka, India
and Pakistan. Their people know that if they want to help the poor and vulnerable, they will
have to pay bribes to government officials. And the government officials know that the agencies
they are extorting will never close their offices and pull out rather than pay upfront.

Large inflows of development aid also seem to encourage political instability. This makes sense
to the extent that once the state becomes the sole source of wealth and leverage, getting
control of it for one's own party or tribe becomes all the more important, certainly worth
cheating, fighting and killing to secure.

Aid can also encourage a dependency that is not just morally problematic, but also dangerous.
Food aid is particularly destructive. When foreign aid agencies hand out grain, it bankrupts local
farmers or at least discourages them from sowing next year's crops, all but guaranteeing future
shortages.

At the same time, governments that ought to be preparing for the next famine don't bother
because they assume that the foreigners will deal with the problem. The United States is by far
the worst offender in this regard. Its food aid programs are now and have always been little
more than a corporate welfare program for American agribusiness. It boosts the bottom line of
companies such as Cargill while wreaking deadly havoc abroad.

On the other hand, the United States has pioneered aid to encourage the civil society
organizations that are essential checks on "poor governance," that is, irresponsible and corrupt
government officials. Unfortunately, such efforts are often undermined by other forms of aid
such as budget support. After all, it's deeply discouraging for third world anti-corruption
campaigners, civil society organizations and political dissidents when they see foreign aid
agencies talk about the importance of good governance, democracy and human rights while
handing over yet more money to tyrants and kleptocrats.

One of the less dramatic but no less damaging side effects of humanitarian aid is the distortion
of local economy when aid agencies arrive to set up refugee camps or hand out emergency
rations. Not only do prices go up for everything from water to fuel, but professionals abandon
their jobs to work as interpreters and drivers. The standard aid agency/media salary of $100 per
day can be more than a doctor makes in a month.

Then there are the "taxes" that the agencies routinely pay local warlords or garrison
commanders to secure permission to operate or in return for "security" in dangerous regions.
These payments sometimes take the form of food, radios or even vehicles. As a result, the
armed payee is not only wealthier, and better able to continue the fight against his rivals, he
also gains vital prestige; local people see that foreigners pay court to him.

Sometimes agencies go further and allow militias or equally vicious army units or oppressive
political parties to control who gets food and water. This notoriously happened in the Hutu
refugee camps in Goma and happens today in parts of Ethiopia.

Some moral compromise is inevitable in the grueling, dangerous business of emergency aid.
But again and again, as critics Linda Polman, David Rieff and Michael Maren have shown, aid
agencies have followed the path of "Apocalypse Now's" Col. Kurtz in pursuit of their ideals. They
have become the enablers and accomplices of murderous militias and brutal regimes,
prolonged wars, and even collaborated in forced relocations. The refugee camps they operate
have become sanctuaries for terrorists and rear bases for guerrilla armies.

The most infamous example of this was the aid complex that grew up on Goma in what is now
Eastern Congo but was then Zaire in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. There, as chronicled
by Linda Polman in her devastating book War Games, the world's aid agencies and NGOs
competed fiercely to help the Hutu power genocidaires who had fled Rwanda with their families.

As so often happens, they ran the refugee camps, taxing the population, taking vehicles and
equipment when they needed it, and controlling the supply of food to civilians so as to favor
their members. Even worse, they used the Goma refugee camps as bases for murderous raids
into Rwanda. The massacres they carried out stopped only after the army of the new Rwandan
government crossed the border and overran the camps.

As Rieff pointed out, an analogous situation would have been if at the end of World War II, an SS
brigade fled from the death camps it was administering and took refuge, along with its families,
in Switzerland, and then, fed by aid workers, raided into Germany in an effort to kill yet more
Jews.

There are many other examples of conflict being fomented and prolonged by those housing and
aiding refugees, accidentally or deliberately. Refugee warriors, as some have called them,
operating from the sanctuary of camps established by the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees and others, have created mayhem everywhere from the Thai-Cambodia border to
Central America and the Middle East.
Sometimes aid agencies have allowed this to happen as a result of ignorance. Sometimes it's a
matter of Red-Cross-style humanitarian ideology taken to the edge: a conviction that even the
guilty need to be fed or a belief that providing security in refugee camps would be an
abandonment of neutrality. And sometimes it's because those providing aid are supporting one
side in a conflict. The U.S. and Western countries did so from Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan
war.

For decades, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan allowed or encouraged Palestinian refugee camps to
become bases for guerrilla and terrorist activity. This should make it clear that the aid world's
traditional ways of dealing with refugee flows are inadequate. Even purely civilian camps such
as Zaatari, the sea of tented misery in Jordan that houses a million Syrians, quickly became
hotbeds of radicalism and sinkholes of crime and violence, not least because they are unpoliced
and because they are filled with working age men with nothing to do.

The American way of aid

American foreign assistance is carried out by a number of different agencies. USAID, founded in
1961, continues to be the largest and most important. Its priorities have shifted over the years.

During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, USAID emphasized the development of
infrastructure and embarked on large-scale projects modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority.
President Nixon took American aid in a different direction, working with Hubert Humphrey to
pass the so-called "New Directions" legislation that prompted a new emphasis on health,
education and rural development. It wasn't until the Reagan administration that USAID began to
emphasize democracy and governance.

The next revolution in American foreign aid took place during the administration of George W.
Bush, who almost tripled USAID's budget. The Bush administration also began two huge aid
initiatives outside USAID: PEPFAR America's HIV/AIDS program, which has been a great success,
and the Millennium Challenge Corp. But the most radical Bush administration shift in aid policy
may have been its increase in aid to Africa. Among other initiatives, Bush more than quadrupled
funding for education on the continent. It was subsequently cut by the Obama administration.

Although aid is traditionally divided into two main types, development aid and humanitarian
aid, one can categorize American aid in terms of the places it's sent, bearing in mind some
amount of foreign assistance goes to 100 countries.

There is aid given to genuinely poor countries in an honest effort to help needy people there.
Then there is aid to relatively wealthy states whose elites are too irresponsible to take care of
their own people. A good example is the aid the United States sends to India, a country that can
afford to send rockets to Mars and which has its own growing aid program, but whose ruling
elite is content to tolerate rates of malnutrition, illiteracy and curable disease that are worse
than those of sub-Saharan Africa.

A third category is aid given as a foreign policy bribe. This is not the same thing as aid used as
a tool of public diplomacy, because its target is a foreign country's ruling elite. The most
obvious examples are Egypt and Pakistan. America gives Egypt money and in return the
enriched Egyptian military, with its prestigious American weaponry, promises not to attack
Israel. U.S. aid to Egypt has preserved peace, but it has not been successful in its secondary
purpose of promoting economic development and political stability.

Aid to Pakistan is arguably less successful. Its purpose was to persuade the Pakistani military
and intelligence establishment to reduce its sponsorship of Islamist terrorism in the region and
in particular its murderous efforts to destabilize the U.S.-supported government in Afghanistan
in favor of its Taliban clients.

A fourth category is aid given as part of what was called the war on terrorism, which has been
dominated by reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A fifth, linked category is aid used for the purpose of public diplomacy. This has become
increasingly controversial in the aid community.

Controversies about the utility and effectiveness of aid do not necessarily break down along
conventional Left vs. Right ideological lines. Interestingly, people who identified with the Left
rather than the Right have recently argued that foreign aid does not win friends for America
and should not be seen as a useful tool of public diplomacy.

They often refer to Pakistan and a study that showed that American humanitarian aid after the
2005 Kashmir earthquake did not have a lasting positive effect on Pakistani attitudes toward
the United States. This is a problematic argument, not least because Pakistan is a special case.
It is a heavily aided country in which key state actors foster anti-Americanism and have done so
for a long time. An American rescue effort in one corner of the country was never likely to win
over the population, especially as the state played down that effort in order to make its own
efforts seem less feeble.

Moreover, those who insist that aid does not win friends abroad or influence foreign populations
may have philosophical and ideological reasons for taking such a view. Many in the aid industry
prefer to see aid as something that should be given without regard to any benefit to the donor
country, other than that feeling of having done the right thing that comes from an altruistic act.
Others are politically hostile to efforts by Western governments to win hearts and minds as part
of the war on terrorism.

My experiences in aided countries in Africa and South Asia tend to contradict this argument. In
Somalia, for example, the vital but decayed highway between the capital and the coast is still
referred to affectionately as "the Chinese Road" some three decades after it was built.

It's also no secret that in many parts of Africa, you encounter positive attitudes to
contemporary China thanks to more recent infrastructure projects, despite the abuses and
corruption that so often accompany Chinese economic activity.

In Afghanistan's Panjsher valley, any local will tell you how grateful the people are for the
bridges built by the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team before it closed. This is a localized
response to a local benefit. It would be naive, though not unusual on the part of U.S. officials, to
expect people in other Afghan localities to be grateful for help given to their fellow countrymen.
At the same time, there seems to be evidence that bad aid makes things worse. That could take
the shape of shoddy or failed projects; projects that employ disliked outsiders, and programs
that everyone knows have been commandeered or ripped off by corrupt local officials.

It is probably fair to say that effective foreign aid can win friends for America, but mainly on a
local basis and only if it reflects genuine local needs and preferences, and if the beneficiary
population is not already steeped in anti-American prejudice.

Aid and Afghanistan

Anyone who follows media reports about the American-led reconstruction effort in Afghanistan
the greatest aid effort since the Marshall plan could be forgiven for thinking it has been a
total disaster. But anyone who has spent time there and seen how much has changed since
2001 knows that this is nonsense. The millions of girls in school, the physical and economic
transformation of Kabul and other cities, the smooth highways that make commerce possible
are only the most obvious manifestations of success. At the same time, the waste, theft,
corruption and incompetence is at least as spectacular as these achievements.

It is not clear that Afghanistan is a radically more corrupt society than other countries that have
been the target of major aid efforts, that its ruling elite is uniquely irresponsible, cynical and
self-interested, or that foreign government agencies and NGOs working there have been
especially naive and incompetent.

But it's important to remember that aid to Afghanistan is not just on a uniquely large scale,
offering vast opportunities for theft, misdirection and waste. It's also much more closely
scrutinized than any other aid effort in history.

Nothing like the same level of skeptical attention has ever been paid by media organizations to
development or humanitarian aid programs in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. Nor has there
been an equivalent of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction turning a
jaundiced eye on big, notoriously inefficient U.N. agencies such as UNHCR, or the efforts of
giant nonprofits such as Oxfam and Save the Children.

On the other hand, Afghanistan may well be uniquely infertile ground for development aid,
thanks to decades of brutalizing war, a historically feeble state whose primary function has
been preying on those who lack access to effective armed force and a traditional political
culture in which no one expects government officials to be better than licensed bandits.

Much of the controversy that has accompanied the aid effort in Afghanistan has involved
criticism of work by the Defense Department and the military.

No one who has seen how weapons systems are procured for the U.S. military would be
surprised if some Defense Department-funded aid projects in Afghanistan turned out to be
wasteful, ill-considered and poorly administered. But whether they are that much worse than
efforts funded by other government departments such as the State Department or USAID is
another question. That they have tended to attract particular opprobrium from news media and
the special IG could simply reflect institutional dislike of the military or opposition to the Afghan
war.
There is evidence that in many places the military did a better job of providing aid than USAID
and the rest of the aid establishment. This was partly because the military wasn't hamstrung by
security concerns; unlike USAID, its employees were willing and able to go anywhere in the
country. Local commanders with the ability to hand out funds may have lacked development
experience, but they were there where help was needed and, unlike many aid professionals,
saw no shame in asking locals what assistance they wanted.

USAID's bureaucratic, box-ticking approach was arguably unsuitable for a country as damaged,
impoverished, misgoverned, traumatized and dysfunctional as Afghanistan. Where the military
decided to build schools, it did so quickly and efficiently, assuming that American or Afghan aid
agencies would then find teachers, buy schoolbooks and make the projects sustainable.

USAID, by contrast, was required to get the relevant permissions from the ministry of education
in Kabul and then provincial ministries, both of which were incompetent and corrupt, and was
so slow in the execution of its mandates that its tardiness threatened to undermine the war for
hearts and minds.

The Obama administration and Aid

Despite what one might have expected from the candidate's internationalist rhetoric, foreign
aid was far from a priority for the first Obama administration. Key positions such as the head of
the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance went unfilled for an unconscionably long time, and
overall aid spending fell. To the extent that the administration paid attention to foreign aid, its
primary concern seems to have been to reverse or undo the priorities of the Bush
administration.

Accordingly, efforts to promote democracy and civil society in third world countries were
defunded. Countries that had been given more aid as an apparent reward for joining the
international coalition in Iraq were now penalized for the same reason.

The second Obama administration has seen a relative normalization of aid policy and an
increase in overall aid spending. Although democracy promotion is not the priority it was during
the Bush years, it is still a sufficiently important part of U.S. foreign aid to cause USAID to be
expelled from Bolivia and Ecuador. In both cases, USAID was targeted by authoritarian left-wing
governments for supporting the kind of civil society organizations that can make a genuine
difference to bad governance in poor countries.

But normalization is not necessarily a good thing. It means that the United States is still
committed to the U.N.'s absurd Millennium Development Goals, a vast utopian list of targets
whose realization would, as Rieff has put it, amount to "quite literally, the salvation of
humanity," and was always hopelessly unrealistic.

It also means that those guiding America's aid efforts continue to be naively enthusiastic about
cooperation with big business and to put excessive faith in the potential of high technology to
solve third world problems. It has become increasingly clear that the Gates foundation and
other new philanthropic giants are influencing the overall direction of U.S. development aid in
undesirable ways.
In particular, it has meant a heightened, even feverish emphasis on technological solutions for
development problems, as if cheap laptops or genetically modified crops might really be the
magic bullet that "ends poverty." As David Rieff has pointed out, such "techno-messianism" has
often failed in the past. If you have a high-tech cyberhammer, all problems start to look like
nails.

But reducing poverty, promoting economic growth and rescuing failing states are this is the
real lesson of six decades of development aid extremely difficult and complicated things to
achieve. One gain can lead to new problems in the way that lowering infant mortality may have
contributed to overpopulation and therefore malnutrition and even starvation in some African
societies.

The challenge presented by the influence of Gates and other tech billionaires on American
government aid policy is not just a matter of a techno-fetishism even more intense than that of
the rest of American society. It's also a matter of priorities, of which problems get the most
attention. It may be that the only thing worse than aid directed by ignorant box-ticking
bureaucrats or by self-serving aid industry ideologues, is aid directed by the spouses of Silicon
Valley billionaires.

The way forward

Foreign aid has so far not been a key topic for presidential candidates. Those who have said
anything on the subject have tended to be relatively uncontroversial.

Hillary Clinton is especially keen on aid that benefits women and girls. Jeb Bush believes that
aid is a vital instrument of U.S. foreign policy and approves of the administration's aid boost to
Central America. Marco Rubio is, perhaps surprisingly, a stalwart advocate of foreign aid,
though not, of course, to Cuba while it remains in the Castro family's grasp. His fellow
Republicans Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee also see aid as key to America's moral authority,
though the latter is particularly enthusiastic about faith-based aid efforts.

On the other hand, both Rand Paul and Rick Perry have expressed a libertarian or isolationist
suspicion of foreign aid, although the latter has also indicated that he thinks aid should be used
more explicitly as a foreign policy lever, calling for aid to Mexico and Central American states to
be withheld until those countries do more to stop the flow of immigrants to the United States. It
matters less since he has dropped out of the race.

Ted Cruz supported Paul's 2013 proposal to withhold aid from Egypt after the military coup that
ousted President Mohammed Morsi, but does not seem to be against the idea of giving aid to
key allies. On the other hand, Cruz did say that same year that "we need to stop sending
foreign aid to nations that hate us."

It's a reasonable sentiment that could resonate with the public. Carrying out such a policy
switch would entail stopping aid to Pakistan (one of the countries where American aid is not
only unappreciated but seems actually to feed anti-American resentment), the Palestinian
territories (whose citizens are per capita the most aided people on Earth), Turkey, China and
Russia.

Whatever Republican and Democratic candidates say now, it seems unlikely that questions of
cutting or boosting or reforming foreign aid will play a major role in the 2016 election. That is
unless the migrant and refugee crises in the Middle East and Europe gets so much worse that
there are loud and popular calls for Washington to intervene in some way.

If that does happen, then it will be probably be the military that once again leads an American
humanitarian effort, assisted, with the usual reservations and resentments by USAID and other
agencies. It is worth remembering that during the Asian tsunami and Philippine typhoon
disasters, no aid agency rescued as many people, did as much good or could have done as
much good as the United States Navy, and that this was a source of pride for most Americans.

This article appears in the Sept. 28 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.

The Continuing Failure of Foreign Aid

By James Bovard
January 31, 1986
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/continuing-
failure-foreign-aid
Executive Summary

For 40 years, U.S. foreign aid has been judged by its intentions, not its results. Foreign aid
programs have been perpetuated and expanded not because they have succeeded, but because
giving foreign aid still seems like a good idea. But foreign aid has rarely done anything that
countries could not have done for themselves. And it has often encouraged the recipient
governments worst tendencieshelping to underwrite programs and policies that have starved
thousands of people and derailed struggling economies.

In agriculture, in economic planning, in food assistance, U.S. foreign aid has routinely failed to
benefit the foreign poor. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the U.S. Agency for International
Development (AID) has dotted the countryside with white elephants: idle cement plants, near-
empty convention centers, abandoned roads, andperhaps the biggest white elephant of them
alla growing phalanx of corrupt, meddling, and overpaid bureaucrats.
Since 1946, the United States has given over $146 billion in humanitarian assistance to foreign
countries. In 1985, the United States provided over $10 billion in non-military aid abroad, ranging
from free food to balance-of-payments support to project-assistance and population-planning
programs. AID employs over 4,500 employees to administer these programs, many of which
have expanded rapidly under the Reagan administration.

Americans have a long tradition of generously aiding the victims of foreign earthquakes, famines,
and wars. Before World War II, private citizens provided almost all of Americas foreign
assistance. After World War II, the Truman administration decided that a larger, more centralized
effort was necessary to revitalize the war-torn economies of Europe. Economic planning was the
rage in Washington in the late 1940s, and Marshall Plan administrators exported their new-found
panacea. The Marshall Plan poured over $13 billion into Europe and coincided with an economic
revival across the continent. The best analysis indicates that Europe would have recovered
regardless of U.S. aid, and that the clearest effect of the Marshall Plan was to increase the
recipient governments control of their economies.[1]

The apparent success of the Marshall Plan led Truman in 1949 to propose his Point Four Program
to provide a smaller version of the Marshall Plan for poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Central
and South America. Truman declared that Point Four would be a bold new program for making
the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and
growth of undeveloped areas.[2]

In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration downplayed humanitarian aid, concentrating on

security assistance to strategic allies. In 1954, Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey pushed the Food For
Peace program through Congress, but that was the largest innovation in economic assistance
during the decade. When John F. Kennedy took the helm in 1961, the stage was set for a huge
expansion of foreign aid. In a special message to Congress, Kennedy called for a dramatic
turning point in the troubled history of foreign aid and proclaimed that the sixties would be the
decade of developmentthe period when many less- developed nations make the transition
into self-sustaining growth. Kennedy placed heavy stress on the willingness of recipient
governments to undertake necessary internal reform and self-help.[3] In 1961, AID was
created, and the U.S. foreign aid bureaucracy came into its own.

Despite Kennedys stress on requiring reforms from recipient governments, foreign aid routinely
went to countries pursuing policies destined to turn them into permanent economic cripples.
Partly as a result of a widespread perception that such aid was usually wasted, it consistently
ranked as one of the least popular government programs with the American public.[4]

From the mid-sixties to the early seventies, South Vietnam received the bulk of U.S. economic
aid. In 1973, Congress, concerned about the ineffectiveness of U.S. aid, heavily revised aid-
program goals to focus more on social services and less on economic development.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, many observers expected a thorough reform of U.S.
foreign aid. Reagan declared in a major speech before the annual meeting of the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, Unless a nation puts its own financial and economic house in
order, no amount of aid will produce progress.[5] Since then, despite Reagans tough rhetoric on
requiring reform from recipient governments, little has changed. American foreign aid still suffers
the same problems it did when Kennedy took office in 1961. Despite countless reforms, foreign
aid is still a failure.
Instead of breaking the endless cycle of poverty, foreign aid has become the opiate of the
Third World. AID and other donors have encouraged Third World governments to rely on
handouts instead of on themselves for development. No matter how irresponsible, corrupt, or
oppressive a Third World government may be, there is always some Western government or
international agency anxious to supply it with a few more million dollars. By subsidizing political
irresponsibility and pernicious policies, foreign aid ill serves the worlds poor.

American foreign aid has often harmed the Third World poor. In Indonesia, the government
confiscated subsistence farmers meager plots for AID-financed irrigation canals. In Mali, farmers
were forced to sell their crops at giveaway prices to a joint project of AID and the Mali
government. In Egypt, Haiti, and elsewhere, farmers have seen the prices for their own crops
nose-dive when U.S. free food has been given to their countries.

AID cannot be blamed for all the mistakes made in the projects it bankrolls. However, by
providing a seemingly endless credit line to governments regardless of their policies, AID
effectively discourages governments from learning from and correcting their mistakes. Giving
some Third World governments perpetual assistance is about as humanitarian as giving an
alcoholic the key to a brewery. Good intentions are no excuse for helping to underwrite an
individualsor a countrys self-destruction.

Foreign aid programs appear to be incorrigible. For 35 years, American foreign aid policymakers
seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. U.S. foreign aid projects routinely repeat
the same mistakes today that were committed decades ago. One telltale ironic report title from
the General Accounting Office says it all: ExperienceA Potential Tool for Improving U.S.
Assistance Abroad.[6]

This study focuses on the failure of U.S. humanitarian aid to achieve its goals. It begins with a
close examination of one of the most popular foreign aid programs, Food for Peace. Then comes
a review of AIDs record in resurrecting the economies of Central America, followed by an
analysis of AIDs role in African agricultural development. AIDs achievements in Egypt and
Indonesia are then reviewed, followed by an analysis of AIDs role in spurring the development of
private business and capitalism in poor countries. The study concludes with an analysis of why
U.S. foreign aid has failed in the past and why it will most likely fail in the future. Military aid and
security assistance is a different issue and is not examined here.