Bled dry by Western agencies' goodwill

KABUL - Samihullah is just the kind of returned refugee his country needs. Aged 30, with a wife and two children, he was well educated in the camps across the border in Pakistan. After the Taleban were pushed out in 2001, he returned home and joined the Afghan Ministry of Education, where he helped to rebuild the higher-education sector.

But not any more. I found him working as a guard at the UN's World Food Programme headquarters in Kabul. With allowances, he earns a total of US$270 a month there, compared with US$50 at the ministry. The decision to move jobs was not hard.

But it is the international system that is sucking Afghanistan dry. Any returnee who speaks English is guaranteed a high-paying UN job, or with the myriad non-Government agencies that have set up shop in Kabul.

Ashraf Ghani, who was Finance Minister after the Taleban fell, and is now chancellor of Kabul University, says the international community has failed Afghanistan. Rather than build up the Government, it has created a parallel system that has actively weakened its ability to run its affairs.

Ghani's greatest fear is that by failing to empower the Government, the world could be helping the Taleban to regroup, as they feed on people's resentment at the slow pace of change.

The scale of the international machine has dwarfed the indigenous Government. Large parts of the capital are closed to normal traffic because of security concerns. The remaining traffic paralyses the city for much of the day. To the east of Kabul the UN has built a base the size of a small town.

The frustration of the Afghan Government system at the way the money is spent surfaced at the London conference on funding earlier this year. A World Bank report calculated that 90 per cent of international aid continued to be spent outside the Government.

Author William Byrd described it as an "aid juggernaut, still outside the budget and outside Government control ... it does not build domestic capacity, which is what you need."

One initiative, called the National Solidarity Programme, is now channelling funds directly to Afghan control. The Cabinet minister responsible for this programme, Hanif Atma, spent the Taleban years studying in the UK.

He said "a parallel structure was needed at the beginning, but no country can be run and managed without a state" that has resources and credibility among its people.

One vivid example shows what happens when the international community goes ahead without proper local consultation.

A half-finished school for girls is derelict after funds ran out. Above it another school is being built with Japanese money. The first school could not be completed since it was not in their plan.

The United States and Japan, both large donors to Afghanistan, are the two countries who are most responsible for spending money outside the Government budget, and much of what they have built is sub-standard.

The US development arm USAID boasts about of the number of girls' schools it has built. Girls, of course, were not educated under the Taleban.

I asked to see one in Kabul, and was shocked by the state of it. A plaque on the wall boasts of this as a gift from the American people, but the Lycee Mariam is nothing to be proud of.

Teachers there say the Americans did little more than add a coat of paint on the one standing building, and replace the roofs of makeshift huts.

The new roofs are already leaking, and in the courtyard hundreds of girls are still being taught in tents. The school looked like an emergency had just hit.

- INDEPENDENT

* David Loyn is the BBC's developing world correspondent.