Even weighed down by corruption and waste, it has given most of Afghanistan access to health care for the first time. It has drawn violent reprisals from the Taliban but educated a generation of Afghan girls. Accused of fostering a dependency culture, it has nonetheless provided the foundation for a functioning economy.
By some measures the most ambitious nation-building program undertaken to date by the United States - and no doubt the most scrutinized and second-guessed - the 12-year aid effort to modernize and stabilize Afghanistan is now starting to face questions about how, and how quickly, it should be brought to a close.
President Obama’s announcement on Tuesday that he would bring home more than half the remaining troops in Afghanistan over the next year, with nearly all the rest out by the end of 2014, put new focus on the future of aid programs in Afghanistan as the military presence thre diminishes. With foreign aid also facing budget-cutting pressure in Congress and much of Washington out of patience with the Karzai government’s record on corruption, defenders of the development effort are warning against too precipitous a cutoff of funding from the United States and its allies.
“Because we have so many of our own constraints economically right now, there’s a huge possibility that Congress will say we’re not going to provide $2.5 billion a year indefinitely,†said Caroline Wadhams, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the liberal research group.
The administration and other advocates of aid are trying to maintain support for an international plan to scale back aid gradually, and do so in a way that gives the Afghan government and other institutions plenty of time to adapt.
“Our record of creating really significant gains in Afghanistan over the last decade is what is going to enable us to continue to con! vince Congress and the American people that these investments are worth continuing to make,†said Alex Thier, who heads the United States Agency for International Development’s efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At stake, advocates of aid and other experts say, is Afghanistan’s ability to navigate through the next few critical years, when the Afghan government will have to wean its economy, budget and social programs from the flow of foreign aid even as it takes over responsibility for fighting the Taliban. In a recent speech, John F. Sopko, the inspector general who monitors the cost-effectiveness of the reconstruction effort, said United States officials in Afghanistan are keenly aware that the two transitions are linked to one another.
“I think it’s fair to say that the success or failure of our entire investment in Afghanistan is teetering on whether these two intrrelated and ambitious goals can be met,†he said.
By the broadest measure of accounting for the costs of the effort, the United States has spent $90 billion on aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2002, a figure that includes programs run by the United States military and the costs of providing security for the effort, according to Mr. Sopko’s agency, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
By the narrowest measure - money funneled through the United States Agency for International Development, the arm of the State Department that has taken the lead in the civilian aid program - the total is $15 billion since 2002. Mr. Obama likely to seek an additional $2 billion to $2.5 billion for each of the next several years to meet the commitments for continued assistance made by the United States at an international donors conference last year in Tokyo.
On a practical level, aid programs are already being constrained by the military pullback. With fewer base! s scatter! ed around Afghanistan, fewer troops on the ground and fewer helicopters available for shuttling people in and out of towns and villages, the military has less capacity to provide the necessary security for development teams.
More generally, some critics of the administration’s approach say, there is no credible plan for improving ethics and accountability in the Afghan government and insufficient assurance that aid programs can continue to function effectively as the international presence in Afghanistan diminishes - especially given all the other calls on taxpayer money and proliferating threats elsewhere.
Maintaining an effective and durable civilian presence in Afghanistan “requires a clear case from the president that the result over the next decade will be worth more than putting resources into Asia, a Middle East in turmoil, a truly international counterterrorism effort or dealing with our domestic financial crisis,†said a recent report by Anthony H. Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “No one in the administration has even begun to make this case, and it desperately needs to be made if we are to stay.â€
Congress will not take up the issue in earnest until later this year. But proponents of maintaining relatively robust aid appear to be benefiting from an alliance of Democrats and Republicans eager to avoid giving up the fragile stability gained by a dozen years of military presence in Afghanistan and concerned with protecting women and girls in particular from a Taliban resurgence.
“It’s not going to be easy, but it is possible to make a strong case for strategic investments so that our soldiers will not have died in vain,†said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who is a member of the appropriations subcommittee that allocates money for foreign aid.
Given the vulnerability of! Afghan w! omen and girls, support for continued aid from women senators on both sides of the aisle can be “a bulwark against the natural tendency to retrench,†she said.
But as the debate plays out, some advocates of aid say they are concerned that the problems that have surrounded aid efforts in the midst of United States military operations will taint the whole concept of civilian assistance at a time when foreign aid - while a tiny slice of government spending - is again in the sights of budget cutters.
“I’ve often worried that the lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan - and especially Afghanistan - is that we don’t know how to do foreign aid and therefore we shouldn’t continue to provide aid at the levels we have been,†Ms. Wadhams said.
Follow Richard W. Stevenson on Twitter at @dickstevenson.
