The international community should back a $50-billion Afghan development strategy at a donors' conference in Paris next month, but Kabul must also fight rampant corruption, the UNs special envoy said on Thursday. Afghanistan depends on aid for 90 percent of its spending. But international donors have fallen behind in paying what they have already pledged and much of the money goes straight back to donor countries in salaries and profits. Official corruption eats into the remainder. More than six years after US-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban, Kabul and its Western backers are faced with a revived insurgency and a public frustrated by the lack of security and disappointed with the slow pace of development. “It's obvious the international community does not spend its resources as well as it should and it's obvious that corruption is a much too widespread phenomenon in Afghanistan,” the U.N. Special Envoy Kai Eide told a news conference in the Afghan capital, Kabul. “I would like to see a partnership coming out of Paris where the international community says ‘yes, we will spend our resources better' and the government says ‘yes, we will fight corruption more vigorously',” he said. International donors have pledged some $24 billion at three donor conferences since 2002, but the level of aid to Afghanistan is still many times lower per head than to other countries struggling to emerge from conflict such as Kosovo or East Timor. This was partly due to the international community underestimating the scale of the problems faced by Afghanistan after nearly three decades of war and also due to the failure to foresee the re-emergence of the Taliban insurgency. Afghan plan The Afghan government has now also drawn up a 5,000-page national development strategy, setting out its goals which it is to present to the June 12 Paris conference hosted by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Afghanistan is seeking $50.1 billion from Paris, more than half of which it wants spent on security and infrastructure, the lack of which hampers almost every level of economic development. “There are certain priorities as set by the Afghan government in its development strategy,” said Eide. “We in the international community have to align our resources behind that strategy.”Many donors are wary of giving funds directly to the Afghan government fearing much of it will disappear into the pockets of corrupt officials. Afghanistan is ranked 172 out of 180 countries on Transparency International's corruption perception index. Consequently, some two-thirds of aid is not channeled through the Afghan government, meaning Kabul has almost no control how the money is spent and the state remains weak and ineffectual.
