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To Aid Afghanistan, Offer Less Aid
KABUL, Jul 16 2012 (IPS) - It is customary to focus on the amount of money the international community offers Afghanistan: the higher the sum and the longer the commitment, the lower the risk of further destabilisation. And so the 16 billion dollars pledged by the donors for the next four years at the Tokyo conference earlier this month has been widely welcomed. But such aid may not be quite the virtue it seems.
The message of strong support at Tokyo for Afghanistan’s economic development aimed to reassure Afghan people and others who are concerned that the money needs of the Afghan state cannot be met by domestic revenues.
This financing gap, “according to the World Bank, is likely to be 25 percent of GDP by 2021/22 and may be even higher in some of the intervening years,” Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), writes in a recent comment.