Donors ask Kabul to trim building plan

Afghanistan is coming under pressure from western countries to slim down its $50bn national development plan in the run-up to a conference in Paris on Thursday, when international donors are expected to pledge support.

For weeks, the government of President Hamid Karzai has been warned that donors have grave doubts about the viability of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy to rebuild the war-shattered country over the next five years.

Although the $50bn (€32bn, £25bn) price tag represents a sharp increase on previous plans drawn up since the US-led invasion in 2001, critics have pointed out that the country is still struggling to spend the money it is given effectively.

Government departments often fail to exhaust their annual budgets – in part because they are still failing to attract sufficient skilled administrators happy to take government salaries, which are often derisory compared with potential earnings at Kabul’s many international organisations.

Last week, the World Bank said Afghanistan had made “little headway” against corruption. It gave warning that finding ways to improve the way aid was spent would be more important than the total amount of resources required by the plan.

Donors are also concerned that the plan does not “sequence” development projects – by focusing on areas such as rural development before moving on to others, such as urban renewal and higher education.

William Byrd, economic adviser at the bank, said there was an “urgent need for stronger prioritisation of programme in the strategy”.

“The number of policy measures and other actions is overwhelming and needs to be streamlined, for decision-making, implementation and monitoring purposes,” he said.

The scale of the plan dwarfs the amount of resources requested at previous international conferences.

“Why are we giving a lot more money without a thorough review of the last few years and some searching questions about what went wrong?” said one western official in Kabul.

The biggest items in the plan are for security, which will consume $14.2bn, and infrastructure projects estimated to cost $17.2bn.

Because the Afghan government says it will raise some of the $50bn in taxes, and already has commitments from the international community for $25bn, the country will need to extract $18.6bn in new money from donors in Paris.

But the country is unlikely to get anything like that much at the conference, partly because the US, the most important donor, is unable to make multi-year donations. Besides this, the European Commission has already made its funding commitments for the next few years and is unable to make more.