Editor's note: This is Part I of a two-part seriesfocusing on aid provision in conflict zones, with tomorrow's edition to focuson Afghanistan.

Although the White House was cautiously optimistic in itsrecent strategy review on Afghanistan, even for seasoned AfPak watchers, itcan be difficult to discern exactly what the U.S. strategy istowards Afghanistan. The sound bite summary "clear, hold, build" may besimplistic, but it still offers a useful starting place to evaluate U.S. andNATO efforts. The "clear" and "hold" represent the straightforward ideas (intheory if not execution) of taking and holding ground, operations with whichmilitaries are well-acquainted. The real issue, and the key to success orfailure, is defining what "build" really means, and examining how the United States andNATO are "building" in Afghanistan.

While many factors in Afghanistan (and Pakistan, for thatmatter) are unique, in a larger sense, the challenges faced there are the sameissues, with new faces, that the United States has been long been struggling with inother countries. The U.S. government clearly hopes to "build" the Afghangovernment and military up to the point that it will take the lead in battlingthe Taliban. For decades now, in countries around the world, the tool mostfrequently called on to "build" countries is aid. Sometimes aid comes in theform of humanitarian, short-term assistance, i.e. emergency food, medicine,water, and shelter, aimed at stabilizing crisis situations. In other cases, aidcomes in the form of "official development assistance" or ODA, most often adirect cash transfer from a donor government or donor institution to arecipient country, usually in the form of grants or low-interest loans, andaimed at promoting long-term growth by developing infrastructure, education,and more. In the case of Afghanistan (and Pakistan), aid to the region hasconsisted of a mixture of both humanitarian and strategic (ODA) aid.

Is it working? If the recent comments of General Sir DavidRichards, the former NATO Commander in Afghanistan, are any guide, the trackrecord of aid in building Afghanistan is mixed at best. "It may have beenbetter and more efficient if the international community had simply air-droppedbundles of money throughout the country," he said in an interview,"It's a very interesting philosophical point, the effect of aid. It can have apernicious effect."

A look at three short books may shed some much-needed lighton how efforts to "build" countries' capacity for self- government have faredelsewhere, and when taken in combination, offer a fresh perspective that canhelp evaluate the successes and failures of "building" Afghanistan. The firstis The Crisis Caravan; What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid by Dutchjournalist Linda Polman. The second is Dead Aid; Why Aid Is Not Working andHow there is a Better Way for Africa by Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo. Last,but not least, is the cultural primer by Afghan sociologist Ehsan Entezar, Afghanistan101.

As a veteran foreign correspondent, Polman has seen the mostappalling conflict zones of the last three decades. She starts by looking atthe refugee camps in Goma, Zaire in the mid 1990s, populated by thousands ofthe same Hutu "genocidaires" that initiated the anti-Tutsi orgy of killing in Rwanda,then fled in fear of retribution as a Tutsi army entered Rwanda to put a haltto the slaughter. The aid workers running the camps proved willfully blind bothabout who their "clients" were, and the implications of providing thosemurderous clients aid. These "genocidaires" first inflated the number ofrefugees to the aid groups, then took the excess provisions provided by aidagencies, sold them on the black market, and used the money to buy weapons tocontinue the anti-Tutsi genocide in the country surrounding the camps. Evenworse, though, was the blatant refusal on the part of aid agencies toacknowledge the campaign of murder and intimidation the genocidaires wagedwithin the camps themselves. Most inexcusable was the frenzy to land aid contracts,which lead aid groups into arrangements that in any other circumstance would becalled open collaboration with war criminals. Polman sums this attitude up witha quote from an aid worker, "For the aid organizations in Goma, it was a matterof feed the killers, or go under as an organization."

The next stop of Polman's "Crisis Caravan" is Ethiopia inthe 1980s. Polman takes a hard look at the "famine" in the mid 1980s inNorthern Ethiopia, coverage of which culminated in the world-wide fund raising effortsknown "Band Aid" and "Live Aid." In the first half of the 1980s, Ethiopia'srepressive government found the northern regions of Eritrea and Tigray in openrebellion. Government troops blockaded the area, and then began a methodicalcampaign of atrocities. Murder, rape, arson, destruction of food and livestockcreated a refugee crisis. The Ethiopian government then invited in theinternational media to witness the tragic refugees and attributed theirsuffering to "famine arising from drought." The various Band/Live Aidfundraisers in response generated more than $100 million dollars, which werethen spent in compliance with conditions laid-down by the Ethiopiangovernment...the very same government whose atrocities caused the refugee crisisin the first place. The strategy worked so well, the Ethiopian governmentconducted another round of atrocities in 1999, and then extended invitations toforeign journalists to cover see the refugees. In 2007, more atrocitiesemerged, with the result that in 2008, Ethiopia was the third-largest recipientof humanitarian aid in the world, totaling 807 million dollars.

While revealing the Ethiopian aid travesty, Polman relatesat the same time how neighboring Sudan adopted a similar strategy, deliberatelycreating a refugee crisis as part of a civil war, and then cynically milkingthe international community for all the aid it was worth. And it worked, there,too. In 2008, Sudan was one of the only two countries that received even morehumanitarian aid than Ethiopia. While the recent South Sudan referendum offersa glimmer of hope that the crisis may be abating, in a region where failednation-building and relapse into civil war is common, it is too early to judgewhether the civil war is truly extinguished, or merely subsided into bankedcoals awaiting fresh fuel.

Polman winds up with a look at war-torn Sierra Leone. Thescene starts in Murray Town Camp, where a group of amputees become willingparticipants in a fund-raising farce, displaying their mangled limbs in dailyphoto opportunities with countless aid organizations, all the better to tug onthe heart-strings of various donors. Next is an interview with a rebel captainwho admitted that the campaign of mass amputations during Sierra Leone's civilwar was no accident, but carefully calculated savagery to lure western press,and thus Western aid dollars, to the area. Polman's exposition of SierraLeone's heart of darkness is wrapped up in a visit to one splinter group ofrebels that refused to sit down at the peace table when other rebel factionshad laid down their arms. When asked why they were not at the peacenegotiations in Freetown, one of the fighters yelled the response, "Do you knowwhat WAR means? ... WAR means ‘Waste All Resources.' Destroy everything. Thenyou people will come and fix it."

Damibasa Moyo's Dead Aid, as befits a book penned bya Harvard and Oxford-trained economist who has worked at both the World Bankand Goldman Sachs, is less anecdotal and polemical than Polman's work, and morean exercise in crunching numbers. After putting decades of ODA to Africa underthe financial microscope, Moyo's conclusions, while less viscerally upsettingthan Polman's tales, are no less damning to the notion that aid provides adevelopmental boost.

Moyo starts with the Marshall Plan, the post WWII aid effortto revive and rebuild war-ravaged European economies, one trumpeted as theprime example of the successes possible with aid. A tour of the facts show thatwhile the Marshall Plan was a notable success for aid, the very thingsthat made the Marshall Plan a success are absent from ODA programs. Unlike mostODA to Africa, the Marshall Plan was limited to reconstruction of physicalinfrastructure. War-ravaged though Europe was, it nevertheless retained theframework of functional financial and governmental institutions and know-how toefficiently and honestly distribute Marshall Plan Funds. Even at itsheight, aid flows under the plan never exceeded 3% of Gross Domestic Product(GDP) to the recipient countries. The Plan was not attempting to build what hadnever existed, but rather rebuild what had once been. Most important, theMarshall Plan was finite, with a five year cut-off period.

Contrasting the Marshall Plan's success with the typicalsituation of aid recipients in Africa, Moyo notes that currently 15% ofAfrica's GDP comes from aid, five times the percentage of GDP of the MarshallPlan. Most of the recipient countries have weak civil institutions, making italmost a certainty that ODA dollars will be stole by recipient governments. Notlimited just to infrastructure, ODA has poured into all sectors of society,permeating health care, education, various militaries, and every level of civilsociety, with the net result of encouraging bloated budgets and staffs. Worstof all, as the aid kept flowing for decade after decade; it created a cultureof dependence that smothers nascent economic development.

While acknowledging the various well-intentioned attempts tomake aid "work," Moyo does not shy from analyzing the roots of the serialfailures. For instance, though donor nations/institutions usually attempt toattach conditions to the way ODA is to be used, those conditions are blatantlyignored on an ongoing basis. She cites World Bank studies that show almost 100%of aid tranches were distributed, even when compliance with conditions attachedto the aid was less than 50 percent, and another that noted that 72 percent of aid goes tocountries with poor compliance records. In one specific example, she reports onone education project in Uganda in which 80 cents of every dollar sent to theproject was stolen.

Moyo also notes that aid in the form of direct transfer ofgoods is incredibly counterproductive: farmers cannot grow grain for sale whendonor countries depress prices by providing vast quantities of free grain. Makersof mosquito netting cannot make and sell their products if they are given awayfor free by NGOs. Every item delivered for free delivers a short termbenefit...and a death blow to domestic production of those same items. One of themost telling statistics Moyo cites about the efficacy of ODA is the simple factthat "Over the past 30 years, the most aid dependent economies have on averageshrunk at .02 percent per annum," precisely the opposite of what one wouldexpect if ODA had a positive effect.

Although Polman's book is largely about humanitarian aid,and Moyo's is about strategic or "ODA" aid, Polman does look at ODA in achapter aptly titled "Afghaniscam." The spectacularmismanagement of a housing project in Bamiyan province is emblematic of thefailures of ODA in Afghanistan. The project started with 150 million dollars indonor funds, which was given to an aid agency in Geneva, which kept 20% for"expenses" and passed the contract onto a Washington D.C based agency, whichkept 20%, and passed it on to a further contractor, which kept a further 20%. Whatwas left was passed onto an organization which purchased wooden beams fromIran, and trucked them to Bamiyan province at five times the normal freightfee, the haulage provided by a trucking company owned by the governor ofBamiyan province. Upon arrival, the (alleged) beneficiaries of the projectimmediately realized the beams were too heavy to be used with the loam-walledconstruction common to the area, so the wood was chopped up and used to fuelcook-fires, providing what was surely the single most expensive load offirewood in the history of man.

As one former director of the World-Bank in Kabul putit, "In Afghanistan, the wastage of aid is sky-high: there is real lootinggoing on...It's a scandal. In my 30-year career, I've never seen anything likeit." In the uniquely useful dictionary of "aid-speak" that follows the mainbody of the Polman's book, she enlightens the reader about "phantom aid", ofwhich the Bamiyan housing project was a prime example. "Phantom aid" is one ofthe dirtiest little secrets of the aid world: most aid dollars never leave thedonor country, but are instead paid straight into the bank accounts of aidagencies, lobbyists, and interest groups in the donor country, where the fundsare absorbed by administrative expenses or spent purchasing goods and servicesfor shipment to the crisis zone at exorbitant first-world rates. The averagerate of "phantom aid" is 60%, but for the U.S. government-funded donations, itis closer to 80%. One study found that U.S. aid expenses in Iraq could havebeen cut by an astonishing 90% if the infrastructure projects had beencontracted to Iraqi rather than American companies, and noted that over halfthe U.S. aid dollar expenditures in Iraq had been spent providing food,housing, and protection to the Americans sent to Iraq to implement the aidprojects. Given that the same "usual suspects" of the contracting world whichoperated in Iraq are also operating in Afghanistan, it is hard not to draw theconclusion from the Crisis Caravan that similar rates of wastage areprobably going on in Afghanistan as well.

One area in which Polman's Crisis Caravan and Moyo's DeadAid are in perfect agreement is that aid programs, be they humanitarian orODA, actively fuel and intensify civil conflict, with the strugglevirtually always expanding from the original casus belli into one overcontrolling the resources the aid provides. Moyo puts it like this: "Theproblem is that aid is not benign-it's malignant. No longer part of thepotential solution, it's part of the problem-in fact, aid IS theproblem." (Note: neither Moyo nor Polman argue against short term emergency aidfor natural disasters, i.e. tsunami or earthquake relief. It the pouring of aidinto man-made disasters that makes those disasters worse.)

Art Keller is a former case officer for the CentralIntelligence Agency's National Clandestine Service. He participated incounterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda in the FATA of Pakistan in 2006.