US Aid to Afghanistan Has Largely Been Wasted and Stolen, Report Says
By VICE News
October 14, 2015 | 6:05 pm
The United States has spent around $110 billion to rebuild Afghanistan since 2002, the year after American troops invaded the country in the wake of the September 11th terror attacks, according to the US government.
That's enough money to dig a new train tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Manhattan, lay a high-speed rail link from San Diego to Sacramento, reconstruct New Orleans' levees after a storm like Hurricane Katrina, and still have around $10 billion left over to construct a few hundred schools from Chicago to Houston.
Yet the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute issued a report on Monday saying that Afghan businesses have failed to capitalize on the loads of greenbacks that have rained down on the country in the past 13 years.
"The Afghan private sector has thus far failed to fulfill its potential as an engine of economic growth or an instrument of social inclusion," the report found. "While there is a prospect of tapping this potential, the country's economy is currently mostly deadlocked."
The Institute's report is a cautionary tale for American taxpayers as well as foreign aid groups that were dumping around $15.7 billion a year into the country annually — providing around 98 percent of the Afghan gross domestic product, according to a 2010 World Bank report — before the international community and American troops began pulling out in recent years.
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