Making sure money counts

Saturday, April 4, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters Monday, while flying to The Hague for an international conference on Afghanistan, that U.S. civilian aid programs in that war-torn nation have mostly failed.

“There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability,” she said.

As a result, the Obama administration will demand measurable results from future U.S. aid initiatives, she said.

It is troubling that the more than $31 billion spent in Afghanistan on noncombat military and civilian aid since late 2001 hasn’t yielded better results.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, which accounted for $6.9 billion of that spending, has touted successes in its bid to improve roads and utilities, and in its efforts to promote education, health care, economic development and democracy. But Clinton’s remarks weren’t made in a vacuum.

The previous week Oxfam, an international relief organization, issued a report that was highly critical of U.S. aid programs in Afghanistan. The programs were criticized for promoting short-term security objectives rather than long-term development, for relying too much on private Western contractors rather than on Afghans to do the work, and for neglecting agriculture and rural trade.

The report said U.S. agencies delivering aid “seem to lack strategy and coordination,” problems compounded by high turnover in staff. One person told Oxfam that two separate contractors funded by USAID were discovered performing virtually the same project in the same place.

Other failures included an attempt to establish an Afghan women’s business federation without any credible women’s business associations to draw from, and construction of a factory before a business plan was developed to market the factory’s output.

Clinton is certainly on the right track by demanding more accountability in the use of American taxpayer money in Afghanistan. Providing aid should be about making certain that Afghans will have a rewarding future.