2022 Wally Awards: Best pictorial explanation of "our" foreign aid policy

Sometimes it's hard to understand government policies, particularly foreign policy and the trillions spent on foreign. For a clearer understanding of how your tax dollars are spent to help the development of third world shitholes, check out this photo, taken somewhere in the Middle East.

One picture may be worth 1000 words, but is it worth $1000? You be the judge. And be sure to let the rulers of your country know how proud you are of their wokeness.

Footnote and protest alert! Organizers of the original Freedom Convoy protest that paralyzed the capital of Canuckistan (Prime Minister McBlackface's residence is pictured above) for three weeks in early 2022 say they're planning on bringing a new convoy to Winnipeg MB next month. 

In a Facebook post reported by CTV, Canada Unity shared a live video in which they proclaimed that a "world unity convoy” would be held in Winterpeg, so named because of its insalubrious climate, from the 17th to 20th of February, to coincide with the Whitewash Rouleau Commission report into last year's protest.

Mr Socks is said to be making reservations for a skiing holiday at "an undiscosed location" (read: NOT Winnipeg) for the 16th through 21st.

Zimbabwe: Bob's not your uncle any more

So, farewell at last, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, former tinpot dictator of what he turned into a shithole country. "Uncle Bob" (as no-one called him, ever) died early today in Singapore at the age of 95.

Most Zimbabweans would say (in whispers, if not out loud) that his death did not come soon enough to save his country from its precipitous descent into chaos and bankruptcy. Your Obdt Servant laboured in Zimbabwe during the late 1990s, trying to help its businesspeople learn modern, Western management techniques. But they couldn't adopt or adapt the things they learned, because they were stymied at every turn by Comrade Bob's Marxist policies, which turned the once-prosperous Rhodesia into an economic basket case.

"Things will be better once Bob goes," people said. But Bob replied, "Handiende!" It means "I will not go!" And he didn't, ruling the country with the proverbial iron fist from its independence in 1980 until, late in 2017, he was finally deposed by Comrade ED [No relation! Ed.] Mnangagwa (pictured below) in a bloodless coup. Since then, things have gotten no better, proving yet again that there is not one country in Africa who leaders -- black or brown -- are capable of managing an economy.

Instead, they rely on massive injections of foreign aid supplied by us chumps in the West, and latterly the Chinese, who still have a lot to learn about Africa, the land of bambazonke. Incompetence and corruption come naturally to African leaders. When mismanagement and kleptomania become too much for even the Swedes and the Brits to stomach (see "Reform or no support, UK tells ED", Zimbabwe Newsday, 6/9/19), the aid money stops flowing and the people starve.

Comrade Bob, who took power after the perfidious Brits sold out their Rhodesian kith and kin in 1980, said more than once that he wanted to rule for life. In that he was typical of the African "Big Man" syndrome, in which the people of shithole countries acquiesced in one-man rule by the likes of Hastings Banda (Malawi), Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (Congo/Zaïre/Congo), Jean-Bédel Bokassa aka Emperor Bokassa I (Central African Republic) and Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi (Libya - not all the Big Men were black Africans). But growing discontent about his government's maladministrationd a military intervention, impeachment proceedings by the parliament and large street demonstrations for his removal.

The November 2017 announcement of Comrade Mugabe's resignation (after he initially ignored escalating calls to quit, and take his lovely and fragrant wife Grace with him) triggered wild celebrations in the streets of the Ha-ha-harare, the fun capital of Africa. Well into the night, cars honked and people danced and sang in a spectacle of free expression that would have been impossible during his years in power and reflected hopes for a better future. But there has been no change for the povo (= poor people) of Zimbabwe, only more of the same, with an even Bigger Man ruling the roost. Prognosis? Dim and getting dimmer. Don't bother to stay tuned.

Further reading: The picture above was scraped from the Associated Press article "A look at the shattered Zimbabwe that Mugabe left behind", as posted on the CTV News site, 6/9/19. Quote from one of the povo: "Life was not that good [under Mugabe], but it was never this bad."

Canada to fund killing of 1000s of Third World babies

In the sort of humanitarian gesture for which its elitist liberals are famous, Canada's International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau will announce this week that her alleged country will support a global "safe-abortion fund" set up in response to... wait for it... President Donald Trump's order banning American financing for any organizations that promote killing of unborn children.

Speaking to the Globe and Mail while on a junket to Amman, Jordan, Ms Bibeau said Canada will join an international campaign to fill a US$600 million gap left by President Trump's reinstatement of the so-called "global gag rule" prohibiting funding to international organizations that fail to disavow abortion. This is part of an initiative called "She Decides", sponsored by the Netherlands. The idea, you see, is to promote human development and help the world's poor by killing them before they are born, thus keeping population under control. Got it?

Ms Bibeau is touring the Armpit of the World (the Middle East) this week to announce that Canada will provide C$240 million (about $182 million in real money) over three years to address humanitarian needs in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. The latter two countries are already benefiting from Canadian assistance in reducing filthy cities like Raqqa, Palmyra and Mosul to rubble. The additional funding will be used to rebuild the shattered cities and support the basic needs of those hit hardest by the Muslim civil war, including food, shelter, health care, water, sanitation, hygiene, and... of course... abortion.

On a totally unrelated note... a new report from the Toronto Dominion Bank (TSX symbol "TD" -- worth a look!) predicts that Canada's budget deficit for this year could be as high as C$34 billion (roughly $26 billion US) -- $5 billion higher than the Liberal government planned for last March, thanks to weak economic growth and, errr, pouring beaverbucks down Third World ratholes. Good thing for the Gliberals that Canucks aren't allowed to vote until 2019!

News (?) from Africa: Ebola aid money gone missing

What's wrong with Africa? Why is it that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa are, almost without exception, worse off now than they were in the bad old days when the white colonists ran things? Agent 3, who is by way of being an OAH (Old Africa Hand) says the answer is simple. Africans don't know how to run a railroad, or anything else. And they steal. Incompetence and corruption, he says, are the twin scourges of the Dark Continent, and will ever be so.

Case in point: Sierra Leone, one of the west African countries worst affected by the Ebola plague. Almost 23,000 people have been infected since the outbreak in neighbouring Guinea in December 2013. 9000 have died. The good-hearted (and guilt-ridden) governments of Europe and North America pledged some £2.9 billion in aid, of which about 40% actually reached the affected countries.

Why have some of the donors held back on actually signing the cheques? Perhaps the answer has something to do with what happens to the aid money when it gets to Africa. An audit of Sierra Leone's Ebola funds have not been properly accounted for. According to an official report published today, 25 billion leones (= £3.7 million of US$5.7 million) was paid from various emergency accounts with no proper receipts or other supporting documentation.

Sierra Leone's national audit service said the country's health ministry had showed "complete disregard" for the law in its disbursement of emergency funds. The 25 billion leones not properly accounted for amounted to no less than a third of the 84 billion paid out by the health ministry between the beginning of the outbreak in Sierra Leone in May 2014, and the end of October.

Of the 25 billion leones -- the name means "lions", by the way -- 14 billion was completely unaccounted for and 11 billion only partially accounted for, according to the report. What the auditors called "lapses" in the financial management of the funds resulted in a loss of quality in the treatment of the disease.

The audit team said the health ministry failed to produce documentation for contract agreements for the purchase of 50 vehicles and ambulances. They also pointed out large gaps in the serial numbers listed for frontline health workers as "possible misappropriation" of hazard payments.

Frontline workers like those in the picture are eligible for extra hazard pay to compensate for the risk of infection. But the auditors' review of such payments at the Connaught Hospital revealed that soldiers and police officers were included on the list of eligible health workers, in spite of the fact that hazard funds had already been transferred to both forces separately. In other words, it looks like the workers got paid twice. Either that or the paymasters pocketed the extra.

The audit service has submitted the report to parliament for action, but are not holding their collective breath. As the OAHs say, MAWA -- "Mother Africa Wins Again".

Dambisa Moyo advocates end to foreign aid, makes Bill Gates angry

On Tuesday Walt reviewed Dead Aid, by Dr. Dambisa Moyo, an African economist. As noted, her book is a well-written, compelling argument for an end to foreign aid, which she says is a waste of money and actually works against the goals of development and poverty reduction. Here's a four-paragraph summary, taken from the final chapter.

What if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call...telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off -- permanently?

What do you think Africans would do if aid were stopped, simply carry on as usual? Too many African countries have already hit rock bottom -- ungoverned, poverty-stricken, and lagging further and further behind the rest of the world each day; there is nowhere further down to go.

Isn't it more likely that in a world freed of aid, economic life for the majority of Africans might actualy improve, that corruption would fall, entrepreneurs would rise, and Africa's growth engine would start chugging? This is the most probably outcome -- that whewre the real chance exists to make a better life for themselves, their children and Africa's future generations, Africans would grab it and go.

Aid came from the West (and continues to do so), and it's up to the West to take it back. Why have people in the West not demanded that something be done? It is, after all, their money being poured down the drain.

Predictably, writing such politically incorrect heresy brought Dr. Moyo a lot of flak from "progressive thinkers" and aid advocates such as Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates. [Not to mention Al Gore and Jimmy Carter? Ed.] It will be noted that all of those named are rich American white guys -- the sort of Western liberals whose feelings of guilt are assuaged by persuading governments to throw their money -- and ours! -- down the toilets of the Third World.

Dambisa Moyo, on the other hand, is an African woman. (See picture.) Click here to read "Dambisa Moyo counter-attacks Bill Gates’ critique of her work as ‘evil’". Then read Dead Aid and figure out for yourself whose approach to helping Africa makes more sense.

$1,000,000,000,000 down the African drain

In case you missed it [As if you could, with all the negative stories in the lamestream media! Ed.], Ugandan President Yoweveri Museveni yesterday signed into law a statute criminalizing homosexual behaviour in his small African country. Click here to see a short report and video clip from BBC News. Fudge-packing and other gay things can now get you up to life in a Ugandan jail -- not a pleasant prospect.

What does this have to do with the headline above? Well... in response to the Ugandans' refusal to bend over for political correctness and the LGBT agenda, Prez B. Hussein Obama (who does a lot of bending in that direction) announced that the Excited States of America would "review" its programme of foreign aid to Uganda.

So what?! Well... in Walt's humble opinion [!!! Ed.], cutting off aid to Uganda and the rest of Africa would be doing the Dark Continent a huge favour! Before you accuse me of being callous, uncaring and racist, let me point out that the same opinion has been voiced -- very eloquently too -- by William Easterly in The White Man's Burden (Penguin, 2007) and Dambisa Moyo in Dead Aid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). Walt recommends both books highly.

Both Dr. Easterly and Dr. Moyo are economists. Both have worked for the World Bank, one of the chief dispensers of "development aid", which is one of the three types of foreign aid extended by the West to the Rest (as Dr. Easterly puts it). In the last half-century, over a trillion US dollars in aid has been doled out to Africa. That's US$1,000,000,000,000 -- a thousand billion or a million million bucks, dear taxpayers, of your money and mine.

What do we have to show for it? Are the countries of Africa better off today than they were in the bad old colonial days, 50+ years ago? Errr, no. So say both of the esteemed doctors. Dr. Moyo tells us that her best friend, a Zambian who was educated and working in America, returned home to find "that her country continues to flounder in a seemingly never-ending cycle of corruption, disease, poverty and aid-dependency."

Why so? Dr. Moyo explains. "Aid has failed to deliver the promise of...poverty reduction.... [Instead] it perpetuates the cycle of poverty and derails sustainable economic growth."

Dr. Easterly takes up the same theme at considerably greater length. The White Man's Burden is replete with the charts, graphs and tables so beloved of economists, which suffer from being over-simplified to print in black and white, but the statistics are there. And both authors reach the same conclusion, that all this well-intentioned "aid" has been largely wasted.

Dead Aid suggests five possible reasons for the discrepancy between the promise and the result. One possibility -- and it's significant that Dr. Moyo says this -- is "the largely unspoken and insidious view that the problem with Africa is Africans -- that culturally, mentally and physically, Africans are innately different. That, somehow, deeply embedded in their psyche is an inability to embrace development and improve their own lot in life without foreign guidance and help."

Dr. Easterly wouldn't touch that one, and neither will Walt.

Part of the "problem with Africans" -- that's me speaking, now -- is the corruption which is endemic to every single African country with the possible exception of Botswana. Dr. Moyo returns us to our point of beginning. "In Uganda, for example, aid-fuelled corruption in the 1990s was thought to be so rampant that only 20 cents of every US dollar of government spending on education reached the targeted local primary school."

Quoting now from Niall Ferguson's foreword to Dead Aid, "Despite the widespread Western belief that 'the rich should help the poor, and the form of this help should be aid', the reality is that aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower. In Moyo's startling words: 'Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster..."

Both Dr. Moyo and Dr. Easterly offer alternative sources of funding for the economic and humanitarian help Africa so badly needs. Dr. Easterly's remedy requires the people he describes as "Searchers" -- those in need of help and those looking for a practical way to help -- to find their own solutions, rather than holding out the begging bowl yet another time.

Walt suggests this paraphrase of a much-used cliché: don't give them a fishing rod; make them go and find one! And before you can do that, you have to stop giving them fish!

Further reading on WWW: "Jeffrey Sachs and the great Ugandan donkey fiasco".

Jeffrey Sachs and the great Ugandan donkey fiasco

Jeffrey Sachs had a Big Idea: to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa -- maybe the entire world -- by 2011, or maybe sooner. And why not? After all, the self-celebrated Dr. Sachs had already single-handedly salvaged the economies of Bolivia, Poland and even Russia. (Well, maybe not Russia, so much.)

In his influential bestseller The End of Poverty, he posits that poverty is simply an economic problem that can be solved. So, with single-minded determination, he set out to put his theories into practice, to prove that the world's most destitute people could be lifted onto "the ladder of development".

The proving ground that he chose was Africa, site of most of the world's truly wretched countries. Wisely, he didn't attempt to develop and enrich the whole of the Dark Continent at once. Rather, he launched the Millennium Villages Project, a five-year experiment in bringing progress and prosperity to a handful of impoverished rural communities.

One of the villages selected was Ruhiira, a flyspeck in southwestern Uganda, very near the Heart of Darkness. To organize and manage the Ruhiira operation, Dr. Sachs chose David Siriri, a man of good intentions and credentials -- a Ph.D. in forestry and agronomics, a local person who knew the language and the people.

The team of geniuses working with Dr. Sachs in New York made a plan for Mr. Siriri to follow. What they must do, he was told, is move from the subsistence farming of matoke (bananas) to the commercial farming of crops which could be sold elsewhere in Uganda, or even exported. Cash crops like ginger, cardamom and pineapples. Seriously.

Mr. Siriri told the folks in New York that the proposed crops needed water...lots of water. Ruhiira does have a water source, down in the valley. Unfortunately, the community's shambas (small farms) are on a ridge...about 1000 feet higher.

But Sachs had an answer. (He had an answer for everything!) The good doctor convinced JM Eagle, the world's largest manufacturer of plastic pipes, to donate $150,000 worth of PVC pipes to Ruhiira. They were ready to be shipped, and would be, once someone figured out who was going to pay the $120,000 needed to get them from the USA to rural Uganda.

Of course the pipes would still need to be installed. Unfortunately the Eagle pipes were manufactured to American standards, with American fittings, whereas Uganda uses British standards.

While the boys in New York were wrestling with this problem, the chief of the MVP funding arm came up with his own brilliant solution. Donkeys! Yes!! "Did you know that just four donkeys can carry eight hundred litres at a time?", the NY pointdexter asked Siriri. "We could create water-filling stations at the top of the cliffs and have people collect their water there for a small fee. We'll prove that people can make money on their crops even if they have to pay for water."

In short order, eight donkeys arrived in Ruhiira. Within a couple of months, four of them died of exhaustion. The Eagle pipes were eventually shipped, but the boat carrying them was hijacked by pirates in the Indian ocean, off the coast of Kenya.

A few pineapples were grown, but proved too difficult to store and ship. No cardamom or ginger was ever sold. The small farms of Ruhiira are still growing...wait for it...bananas.

The great Ugandan donkey fiasco is just one of the many examples of the folly of trying to solve Africa's problem with Eurocentric ideas and techniques. Dr. Sachs was informed and guided by western economic ideas centred on the concept of "the rational man". This theory presumes that, given two choices, the rational man will choose the better option, regardless of religious and cultural influences. In Africa, that's simply wrong.

In another Millennium Village, in Dertu (in northeastern Kenya, near the border with Somalia), the local people -- mostly ethnic Somalis, thus Muslim -- refused to build a clinic because, they said, descendants of Ibrahim (Abraham) do not do manual labour. Instead, MVP funds were used to hire ethnic Bantu (black) labourers to do the work while the Somalis sat around and chewed qat.

These stories, and many more, are to be found in The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk (Signal/M&S 2013). Walt recomments it highly!

With the co-operation of Dr. Sachs -- let's be fair about this -- Ms Munk spent six years reporting on the Millennium Villages Project.
She shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, sat in on conversations with heads of state, and interviewed scores of people involved, from high officials right down to illiterate inhabitants of Ruhiira and Dertu. Here's a quote from the second-last paragraph of the book:

"In the beginning, Jeffrey Sachs had set out on a question to validate his scientific approach to ending poverty. He'd used the Millennium Villages Project as a laboratory to test his theories and to prove that his series of 'interventions' could transform the lives of the world's poorest people. He'd spent more than $120 million on his experiment.

"For all that, however, he had misjudged the complex, shifting reality in the villages. Africa is not a laboratory: Africa is chaotic and messy and unpredictable." [My emphasis.]

Walt can add only that the failure -- for that's what it was -- of the MVP experiment is a classic example of "MAWA" -- the short epitaph beloved of old Africa hands: Mother Africa Wins Again.

Further reading on WWW:
"Have you given yet to help Somalia? Don't! "
"Biggest ratholes named and shamed"
"Coming soon - another 'nation' to help"
And there's much, much more! Use the search tool to check the posts with the "foreign aid" tag. And remember...you can't help those who won't help themselves!

Kenya: a lot of damage for only 4 terrorists

New estimates of the death toll in the terrorist attack on a Nairobi shopping mall keep coming in. The Kenyan government -- whose president is awaiting trial in the International Criminal Court -- says there might be another 4 bodies left in the rubble. Or maybe 6. The Red Cross says there are three dozen (or so) still missing. As with most things in Africa, who knows?

Another interesting number has leaked out this week. Reviews of extensive CCTV footage suggests that there were fewer al-Shabaab terrorists than the Kenyan army claimed. It is now believed that the Islamic extremists numbered four. That's 4 -- count `em, FOUR!

Which begs the question, how could four crazed Muslims cause so much damage? You've likely seen video clips showing a huge crater which used to be the centre of the Westgate Mall, apparently destroyed by the explosion of several RPGs. The grenades seem to have been fired by, errr, "rescuers" from the Kenyan army. How many bodies are buried in the rubble is as yet unknown.

Other videos seen in this report from the Sydney Morning Herald, show a horrendous amount of looting -- much more than could have been perpetrated by four crazed Muslims who were probably already dead. Mannequins were stripped clean, jewellery cases smashed, racks of expensive suits carted off, and dozens of cash registers cracked open. At least one member of the Kenyan "security services" was arrested, caught with a bloody wallet.

According to the paper, the looting appeared to have the scope and organisation of a large-scale military operation, and many Kenyans are speculating that it was just that. From the first hours after Islamist militants burst into the mall on September 21 until a week later, when shopkeepers were let back in to sweep up the broken glass, very few people were allowed inside the mall except the Kenyan security forces, mainly the army.

More and more Kenyans believe those soldiers methodically cleaned out the mall, and that the barrages of gunfire ringing out for days were being directed not at the last of the militants but at safes and padlocks to blast them open. Some business leaders even question whether the Kenyan army deliberately prolonged the crisis by saying shooters were still in the building when they were actually dead, to give themselves extra time to steal.

Witnesses said that the most they saw militants loot was a couple cans of soda, and shopkeepers cited no instances of panicked shoppers helping themselves to merchandise as they ran for their lives, leading to the widespread conclusion that the security forces must have been involved.

The Herald reports, rightly, that Kenyans are accustomed to corruption. Corruption is the norm in sub-Saharan Africa, and Kenya is consistently rated as one of the worst of the worst.

And there's a second payoff for Kenya. Western governments, still suffering pangs of white liberal guilt, are falling all over themselves to send millions of your tax dollars to Kenya's corrupt government and thuggish military. It's all about fighting terrorism, they say. But who are the terrorists? Will Western aid and intervention succeed in making Africa a safe and better place to live? Walt says there are two chances -- slim and none.

Thanks to Agent 17 for sending along the report from the Antipodes.

Highly recommended reading: The Africans, by David Lamb. Vintage Books, 1987.

Canada gives up on Haiti, freezes foreign aid

Michaëlle Jean, Stephen Lewis, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the 1000s who do well out of doing good... Colour them astonished! Mouths were agape in Ottawa, Paris and New York (wherever the lovely and fragrant Ms Jean is these days), and of course Port-au-Prince, when Canada's International Co-operation Minister said today that Canada will stop funding new aid projects in Haiti until Ottawa finds a better way for the struggling nation to, errr, help itself. Imagine that!

In an interview with La Presse, Julian Fantino said he was "disappointed" with what he considered the lack of progress he saw -- or rather, didn't see -- during his November visit to the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

So great was the consternation in the homes and offices of the chattering classes, that Canada's lamestream media [meaning the Globe and Mail. Ed.] asked its token francophone if perhaps there had been some error in translation. Or was it possible that the minister was just making it up as he went along? Speaking out of his ass, as the French say? After all, this sort of thing would normally be announced in the House of Commons, and some sort of notice would usually be given to the agencies and dips involved.

But not this time. Fantino indicated that Canada has poured $1,000,000,000 ($999 million in real money) down the Haitian rathole since 2006. And as a former chief of both the Ontario and Toronto police forces, Fantino knows how quickly money can disappear when you have a potent mix of ignorance, incompetence and corruption. Nevertheless, he said, his department will continue to fund programmes in Haiti that are already in progress, provided that even the most minuscule signs of life can be detected.

Minister Fantino, who took over the portfolio from "Limousine Bev" Oda last year, said Canadian taxpayers cannot take care of Haiti's problems forever. (Hey, they can't even take care of their own!) Fantino also compared Haiti's terrible state with much-better conditions in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Fantino remarked about the filth and garbage he saw during his recent visit to Haiti. He wondered aloud how a country with so many unemployed people had not found a way to clean it up, like the neighbourhood shown in the picture.

The Canadian International Development Agency said Mr. Fantino would not be available for further comment until he gets his prescription refilled.

Further reading, highly recommended by Walt: 'Most everything went wrong': Three years after an earthquake devastated Haiti, the reconstruction has barely begun - from the New York Times and National Post Wire Services. It's quite possible Minister Fantino may have read this [with his lips moving? Ed.] before giving his bombshell interview to La Presse.   And here's the interview: «Nous ne sommes pas une oeuvre de charité», dit Julian Fantino. For all the Canadians (especially readers of the Niagara Falls Review) who don't speak French, that means "We aren't a work of charity" says Julian Fantino. Indeed.

How do we get out of Afghanistan?

Walt's been reading A Short History of World War I, by James L. Stokesbury. (Quill, New York, 1981) Dr. Stokesbury was a professor of history at Acadian University. Like many historians, he developed a realistic and therefore somewhat jaundiced view of human nature. Here's a quote from the beginning of Chapter 8 of his book.

It is a rare people -- or state -- who, caught in a bad war, can have either sufficient sense or sufficient control over events to get out of it. Wars are meant to be won, and government do not readily confess to mistakes, especially after they have killed several million of their citizens in the making of them. As soon as it became apparent to the belligerents that they were not going to achieve victory by late 1914, they began a frantic search for some magic ingredient that would solve their problems.

Although millions of Western civilians have not been killed in NATO's adventure in Afghanistan, several thousand NATO troops (and a few civilians) have come home in body bags, and support for the war in Canada, France, Britain and even the USA is at an all-time low. So now the frantic search has begun in earnest. Plus ça change...

Trouble is, the "magic ingredient" is proving just as hard to find as it was in 1914-18. New technologies, which hastened the end of World War I, aren't prevailing against the backward but deadly devices of the Taliban: IEDs and suicide bombers, for instance. Today a suicide bomber blew himself up in a wedding hall in northern Afghanistan, killing more than 20 people including a well-known commander.

The only good thing about that attack is that no NATO troops got killed, unlike last week when six American soldiers were killed in the volatile Wardak region. What killed them? An IED. Who killed them? The Taliban.

Yes, gentle reader, the Taliban is still fighting the infidels, and the assorted Afghan tribes are still fighting with each other. Those people live in that country, and they're not going away. Plus ça change.

Only we Westerners are going away. The French are leaving (early) at the end of the year. The Canadians, in typical Canuck fashion, have left... except for the 1000 or so that are still there enjoying Tim Horton's coffee and donuts while they train the so-called Afghan army to, errr, kill other Afghans. Or whoever happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The magic ingredient that is so sorely needed is an exit strategy. Faut de mieux, NATO has decided to buy its way out of the sandpit. A week ago, Afghanistan's "democratically elected president" Karzai took his rather large begging bowl to an international donors’ conference in Tokyo. He came away with a pisspot ["begging bowl", surely! Ed.] full of "conscience money": $16,000,000,000 in pledges to be exact.

In exchange for the 16 billion -- only a fraction of the billions that have already been spent on the futile invasion of one of the poorest and most backward "nations" on earth -- Krazai pledged, amont other things, to step up the fight against the corruption for which his country and the prez himself are famous.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Roland Paris, director of the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa, says we would be wrong to place too much faith in Karzai's commitment.
There is virtually no chance that the Afghan government will tackle corruption – and everyone knows it. President Hamid Karzai has made similar commitments for years, yet not a single high-level official has been convicted for graft, in a country whose public sector ranks as the third-most corrupt in the world, according to Transparency International.

The hope seems to be that ongoing international financial support for the Afghan government -- plus continuing occupation by a few thousand US troops -- will be sufficient to avert a sweeping military victory by the Taliban, or a return to the civil war that raged in the 90s.

What do the Afghans think? By all accounts, the country’s major parties are rewinding their turbans and quietly rearming themselves in anticipation of a collapse of the Afghan government and a return to civil war, about 37 seconds after NATO forces and the main body of Americans leave.

Roland Paris, again. The message to Afghanistan’s parties and factions seems clear: “We will continue to support and subsidize the Afghan government for many years. There is no need to prepare for a possible collapse. Remain calm.” It’s not clear whether Afghans find this message adequately convincing.

For taxpayers in donor countries, it is an even tougher sell, particularly at a time of fiscal retrenchment. Why should we continue to provide billions of dollars to a regime and country where corruption is not just a problem but an integral part of the governing system? Our governments have difficulty answering this question truthfully. For them, losing enormous sums of money to graft may be an acceptable price to avoid an even costlier repetition of history.

Afghanistan: exemplar of the failure of post-colonial policy

In 2002, a Scottish lad by the name of Rory Stewart walked, west to east, across the centre of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. Why anyone would do this, especially in the middle of a shooting war, is beyond me. Stewart himself seems to have lost the point of the exercise, as he admits towards the end of The Places in Between (Picador, 2004).

If it was poppies the lad was looking for, he was disappointed. All he saw was sand, rocks, snow and the occasional mud building. The book has pictures, in black and white, which rather surprised me until I read the author's description of the dun monochrome he looked at from dawn till dusk. No point in spending extra on four-colour printing for that.

It turns out Mr. Stewart is a historian or ethnologist or a bit of both. He wanted to follow the path taken in the 16th century by the great Babur (it means "tiger") a descendant of Timur the Lame, who succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in the Indian subcontinent and became the first Mughal emperor.

Of Babur's mighty works in Afghanistan, virtually nothing remains. Stewart didn't even see ruins. What he saw were ruins of ruins, such as what's left of the Bamiyan Buddha, a world heritage site dynamited by the Taliban just before Stewart got there. Something similar happened in Timbuktu (Mali) last week. No competing religions allowed in Muslim countries, you know.

All in all, The Places in Between is, like the journey it describes, tedious and depressing. I did, however, find a nugget, a footnote to the chapter headed "@afghangov.org". I present it here for the stone truth the author tells about the failure of Western foreign aid -- indeed of Western foreign policy -- in places like Afghanistan, which is a metaphor for all of the Middle East and Africa. The words are Stewart's; the added emphasis is mine.

Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans' diverse experiences, [Western] policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a 19th century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.

They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens.

They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices.

There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact, their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action of judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

America to promote "the English vice" overseas

Used to be homosexuality was known as "le vice anglais" -- "the English vice".
But now, under Al O'Bama and his sidekick Hellery Clinton, America is striving for world dominance in promoting the LGBTQ agenda all over the world. Let deviant behaviour be unconfined!

Yesterday Hellery told a Geneva assemblage of diplomats, "Gay rights are human rights." Her pronouncement was followed by the sound of the scraping of chairs on the floor, as dozens of ambassadors from countries like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia rushed out of the room. Homosexuality is illegal in those and many other countries where "western values" have not yet taken hold.

But the Obama-Clinton administration is going to fix that. The US has publicly declared it will fight discrimination against gays and lesbians abroad by using foreign aid and diplomacy to encourage libertine licence ["reform", surely. Ed.]

A memo from the Obama administration directs US government agencies to consider gay rights when making aid and asylum decisions. The official memorandum does not outline consequences for countries with poor records on gay rights, but it allows US agencies working abroad to consult with international organisations on discrimination.

In the US, Republican presidential candidates criticised the administration's decision, with Rick Perry saying in a statement that "promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America's interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers' money".

Is that going to stop the Democrats from pushing their gay agenda? Not likely! The announcement, described by the White House as the "first US government strategy to combat human rights abuses against gays and lesbians abroad", is a big part of the Obama administration's outreach to the politically powerful LGBTQ crowd ahead of the 2012 election.

Apology to P.J.

Ed. thinks I was too hard, in my review last week, on P.J. O'Rourke's new(ish) book, Don't Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards. How could I pan someone who's Republican, Catholic and (mostly) libertarian in his political views? After all, that pretty much describes Walt.

What I said, in sum, was that you should give it a pass if you'd read O'Rourke's previous books such as Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance. I stand by my assertion Don't Vote is largely money for old rope, and not even O'Rourke's old rope but a pastiche of quotes from just about everyone who's said anything about politicis and politicians over the last two millennia.

That said, the stew of quotes, aphorisms and witticisms is rich enough. There are some good chunks of beef floating amidst the lentils. Here's one about foreign aid:

I hope we're not expecting our distant relations [in the family of nations] to be grateful. A hundred years ago when foreign aid was unthought of (except as tribute or bribe) we were a respected and admired country. After a century of philanthrophy everyone hates our guts.

In the same chapter on American foreign policy -- or lack thereof -- O'Rourke makes a pretty good case that Al O'Bama should read Kipling, particularly the short story, The Man Who Would Be King. (The movie version, starring Sirs Sean Connery and Michael Caine, is one of Walt's Top Ten Movies of All Time.)

Why? Because Kipling was a believer in the White Man's Burden -- to bring the Western concepts of political liberty and human dignity to the benighted nations of the east and south. This civilizing mission -- hopeless un-PC these days -- has been in the minds of European political leaders going all the way back to Alexander the Great.

What Kipling added to the debate, in the eponymous poem and in The Man Who Would Be King, is the prophecy that all the Western goodwill and striving to make the world a better place is doomed to failure. O'Rourke quotes bits of the poem:

To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride...
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need...
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease...
[And] Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to naught.

As we look at the mess that is today's Middle East, we must admit that Kipling was right. But for a 21-st century writer to quote Kipling's dicta, to remind us of the folly of our liberal "we're all one big family" policies... that takes not a little courage. And you have to have read Kipling! So I haven't "unfriended" P.J. O'Rourke. Neither should you.

Footnote: The "Kafiristan" of which Kipling wrote in The Man Who Would Be King is a real place, by the way, in the northeast corner of what is today Afghanistan! You could look it up!

Have you given yet to help Somalia? Don't!

Have you been moved by the pictures of the starving children in famine-stricken Somalia? Have you sent your widow's mite to World Vision or Oxfam? Do you think your contribution is going to improve the lives of those poor (but somehow attractive) kids you see on TV? Before you reach for your credit card, think again.

Back in November 2009, in "Foreign aid: hurts us, hurts them", Walt talked about the bureaucratic mess that is USAID and its Canadian counterpart, CIDA. I've forgotten which impoverished hellhole was the "victim of the month" at that time. That was before Haiti, wasn't it? So perhaps it was Rwanda or Somalia, or some other African hellhole.

The same countries keep appearing in the Top Ten Aid Recipients. The droughts and famines recur again and again. And guilt-ridden white westerners -- the Volvo liberals, I call them -- keep raising money to throw at the problems of the Third World, money which is for the most part wasted, misappropriated or stolen by the corrupt and venal dictators and warlords who rule the world's poorest places.

Today's case in point is Somalia, where famine is officially widespread. The United Nations implores the rich countries to forget about their own problems and send billions of dollars to feed the hungry in the Horn of Africa. Just as we did about 20 years ago, the last time Somalia was the biggest basket case.

Michael Maren writes of his experiences in Somalia (and other sandpits) in The Road to Hell (The Free Press, 1997). The subtitle says it all: The ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity. Here are a couple of pertinent paragraphs.

Aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. [Aid organizations] are paid by the U.S. government to give away surprlus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food [they] give away, the more money they receive from the government to administer the handouts.

Food aid attracts people to refugee camps, where they die from dysentery or measles or other diseases they wouldn't have contracted in the bush. Is there really a food shortage when anyone with money can find all the food he wants, when the aid workers themselves enjoy meals that the locals could never get even in the best of times? And why does it always seem that a group of local elites finds a way to get rich from the disaster? Are we contributing to the problem by dealing with the businessmen-politicians who lease Land Cruisers and homes to the aid agencies and who provide trucks to transport food?

Maren goes on to make the connection between famine and dictatorship.

No country was ever transformed from being famine-prone to food self-sufficiency by international charity. As Harvard economist Amartya Sen has shown, famines always occur in authoritarian states, when the government mismanages the economy. Famines disappear when those countries become market-sufficient. India, for example -- the epitome of the famine-afflicted land when I was a child -- no longer suffers famines despite its huge populations.

And some targets of charity get worse. Today, after huge infusions of international aid, Somalia and all its formerly self-sufficient neighbors are chronically hungry and dependent on foreign food. It becomes increasingly difficult for aid workers to ignore the compelling correlation between massive international food aid and increasing vulnerability to famine. "Our charity does not overcome famine, and may help to prolong it", someone will always lament. Those who spend the time to study the local economies see that the people have now geared their own activities not to returning to their old lives but to getting their hands on aid.

The emphasis above is mine. Please keep in mind, dear reader, that Maren wrote those words in the mid-90s. Has anything changed in Somalia as the result of the billions of dollars of our money -- yours and mine -- poured down that rathole in the 15-20 years since the last "crisis"? Evidently not.

The great escape

Today Walt is reading reports out of Kabul -- capital of the sandpit known as Afghanistan -- that forty dozen (= 480) Taliban prisoners escaped from the local hoosegow over the course of some four or five hours yesterday.

How did they do this? Through a thousand-foot-long tunnel that took approximately five months to dig. All this happened under the watchful eyes of the Afghan police, the same police to whom NATO is handing over responsibility for national security.

An Afghan government spokesthingy confirmed the tunnel was dug from a house within shooting distance of the prison [Did he/she really use that phrase? Ed.] and that the inmates had somehow gotten out of their locked cells and disappeared into the night. Kandahar remains relatively warm even during winter and the ground would not have frozen while insurgents were digging the tunnel.

It is unclear how the Taliban were able to move so many men out of the prison so quickly. Also unclear is why guards would not have heard the diggers punch through the cement floor, and whether they supervise the inside of the perimeters at night. The word "bribery" remains unspoken.

The picture at the right is supposed to show an Afghan policeman looking into the escape hatch. Walt can reveal that the hole is actually the prison toilet, hence the presence of the fan just behind it. The fan [made in China? Ed.] was probably purchased with western "humanitarian aid" money.

Tale of two earthquakes

As I follow the news from Japan, I can't help but contrast the reactions and behaviour of the Japanese with those of the people of Haiti, who were similarly afflicted just over a year ago.

One can't help but be impressed by the calmness, verging on stoicism, being shown by the Japanese in the face of a calamity which to us is barely imaginable. The Japanese have seen worse, of course -- the devastation of their country in the last days of World War II, and ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps this has given them the collective strength to endure.

Looking at the videos of the survivors, I see sorrow and anguish, but I don't see hysteria. I see people queuing patiently to get their share of the limited food and water. I don't see people looting or fighting like dogs snarling over scraps.

I see supplies and machinery being distributed to people who, even though it's not their job, are pitching in to do whatever they can to clean up the debris and start making their city habitable again. In Haiti, meanwhile, grass is starting to grow into the engine compartments of motor vehicles sent there a year ago, because the Haitian "authorities" demand payment of "customs duties" before the machinery can be moved off the dockside.

And I see the Japanese doing all they can -- themselves -- rather than sitting on their collective ass waiting for boatloads of foreign aid to arrive, along with foreigners to do everything for them. The Japanese will recover and rebuild, just as they did after WWII...themselves.

A couple of days ago, CNN's Jack Cafferty posed the question, "Why hasn't there been widespread looting and crime after the [Japanese] earthquake?" No answer was forthcoming. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.

Corruption in a time of cholera: update on Haiti

Did you give money to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake? If you're Canadian, you certainly did, whether you know it or not. About $220 million was raised through private donations to the Red Cross and other charities. The Canadian government -- sorry, Canadian taxpayers -- added $220 million. And now that a cholera epidemic is raging, they've kicked in another $5 million or so.

That makes $445,000,000 in Canadian aid money which is supposed to be helping the most impoverished and disaster-stricken country in the western hemisphere. Is it?

No need to send your answer to Walt on the back of a postage stamp. Yesterday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a good exposé on where your aid money is going. Watch the video and you'll see a first-hand account -- just one of many -- of how some of your money is being paid directly to corrupt officials of the Haitian government. They're the ones getting fat off your generosity.

From other sources, Walt has learned that only about a third of the funds -- $146 million -- has actually been spent on disaster relief. And that includes the salaries and expenses of all the aid industry workers who are administering and delivering the relief services. Figures on the cost of that overhead are unavailable.

What of the nearly $300 million still in the bank? According to published reports, that's for "reconstruction", which of course can't begin until things settle down. That means having an election to throw out the rascals and bring in new rascals. (No, Wyclef Jean is not running. I'm talking about other rascals.)

It also means getting the cholera epidemic under control. Notice I didn't say eradicating cholera. Cholera is pandemic in Haiti as in many black countries where poverty goes hand in hand with insanitation and disease.

Where in all this, you might ask, is Michaëlle Jean, the Haitian-born woman of colour who spent too long as Canada's Governor-General? I'm happy to report that Her Jeanness landed with her brown bum in the butter. Shortly after being evicted from Rideau Hall she was appointed as UNESCO's "special representative to Haiti".

So she's in Haiti then? Errr, no. She's in New York at UNESCO HQ. But her staff says she's "fully engaged" with Haiti and will be going there "sometime in the future".

Biggest ratholes named and shamed

Every year Transparency International compiles a list of the most corrupt countries in the world. They rank 178 countries on a scale of 10 to 0, with ten being the least corrupt and zero the most corrupt.

Coming in at the bottom of the league table for 2010, with a score of 1.1, is ... the envelope please ... Somalia! Tied for second-worst are Myanmar ("Burma" to the old Asia hands) and ... wait for it ... Afghanistan!

Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore topped the list as the countries with the most virtuous public sectors. China is No. 78, the USA No. 22, Britain No. 20 and Canada No. 6. Canada's ranking improved from No. 8 last year, presumably because the White Elephant Inquiry [Oliphant enquiry, surely! ed.] couldn't pin anything on former PM Brain Baloney.

OK, we all know most of those Third World countries are more corrupt than are we westerners. If you entertain any doubt, click here to see the corruption map. Note how the colours get deeper as you go south and west. So what?!

I'll tell you what. Ask your congressman or MP which countries receive the largest chunk of your country's foreign aid. If you're a Canadian taxpayer, you will be less than pleased, I would think, to know that Afghanistan -- specifically the régime of Mohammed Karzai -- is the Number 1 recipient of the largesse of the régime of "Call me Steve" Harper.

Canada has earmarked nearly $2 billion for "development assistance" to Afghanistan, blithely ignoring concerns about corruption which have been expressed for years and years. Just last week, Krazai admitted that his government receives millions of dollars in cold hard cash from ... wait for it ... Iran!

But wait a minute. The krazai guy is our friend, right? And Iran is our enemy, right? Why would our friend be taking money from our enemy? Turning the question around, why would we be giving billions of dollars to someone who is also in the pay of our enemies?

Doesn't make sense, does it... But then, the whole concept of pouring money down Third World ratholes doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe Hellery Clinton or Lawrence "Loose" Cannon can explain it to me.

Pakistani Taliban: "We don't want your aid!"

BBC News passes on a warning from an anonymous "senior US official" that the Pakistani Taliban is planning to attack foreigners helping with flood relief efforts in the country.

The official told the BBC the Taliban plan "to conduct attacks against foreigners participating in the ongoing flood relief operations in Pakistan." He (or she) added that "provincial ministers in Islamabad" may be at risk.

The warning comes as thousands flee their homes in southern coastal areas as floods sweep down from the north. The UN says more than 17 million people have been affected by the monsoon floods, and about 1.2 million homes have been destroyed.

Some five million Pakistanis have no shelter, and urgently need tents or plastic sheeting to protect them from the sun. But do they want our help? Apparently not.

Walt wonders who the "senior official could be". Just by coincidence this morning's Globe and Mail quotes Rajiv Shah, a senior administrator of USAID, as saying that Pakistan will have to demonstrate it can spend relief funds transparently and well if it wants more help in rebuilding after its massive floods.

There are concerns, he said, about how the foreign aid money will be spent by the government, which has a reputation (well-deserved, in my view) for inefficiency and corruption. You read it here first!

Pakistan flood relief trickles in

Associated Press reports today that although devastating floods have "disrupted" the lives of 14 million people across Pakistan, foreign aid is only trickling in. ["Trickling" is AP's word, not Walt's attempt at a pun. ed.]

The UN says $310 milliion is needed, down from $450 million reported yesterday. Of that, under $100 million has been collected, with about another $30 million pledged.

That compares rather poorly with the billion dollars in aid has been pledged to Haiti. (But see my recent post saying that less than half the help pledged has yet to arrive.) International do-gooding experts are trying to figure out why.

Among the theories being considered is "bad attitudes to Pakistan" engendered by links to terrorism or corruption. Could it be that someone has been reading Walt's blog? Or possibly the hundreds of reports recently leaked through Wikileaks. [Update: Wikileaks head honcho says more are on the way. ed.]

Some even suggest Pakistan's own handling of the disaster has done little to instill confidence foreign aid would be put to good use. You read it here first!

Molly Kinder, a Pakistan aid expert with the Washington-based Center for Global Development, suggests the lack of celebrity involvement may be a factor. She told AP, "I haven't exactly seen Lady Gaga go on Oprah to pledge donations to Pakistan's flood victims."

A UN spokesperson in Pakistan has a more macabre explanation. "Unfortunately, sometimes a segment of the public only looks at the death toll," Maurizio Giuliano told AP, noting that only around 1,500 people have lost their lives in the Pakistan floods so far. Efforts are under way to get the body count up into the catastrophe range.