TIMES: ' Give money for aid...but not to DFID'

Excellent article in The Times by Alice Thomson Give money to aid. But don

quoting a new book by foreign Correspondent Jonathan Foreman called 'Aiding and Abetting '

In her article Alice Thomson comments:

Ahem...Dear Jim30, yes we KNOW you have a blog. yes we KNOW you have worked in MoD ( though not as long as some of the older and bolder here on Arrse)...please let some of your peers on this board who have direct experience of attempting to administer Quick Impact Projects in dusty places have their say too

 

Quite right, we don't 'inadvertently sponsor local warlords', we cut deals with them directly.

 

A couple of years ag Private Eye did a seven pages special supplement about the DFID entitle “on how Britain’s poverty relief fund abandoned the poor while lining its bosses’ pockets”. It was somewhat scathing.

And this is interesting - How journalism and politics work: Justine Greening’s shift in policy at DFID « Trial by Jeory

 

I had the 'luck' to be on a CP team in Afghanistan sometime ago that was looking after a team of DFID contractors.

I found them to be very anti British Army and dismissive of any advice or requests made to ensure their safety.

They seemed to see ISAF as part of the problem in the country, which I found very strange from another government department!

Very NGO in their outlook.


Posted from the ARRSE Mobile app (iOS or Android)

 

I have said this before on other threads, but from working with the DfID crowd in Helmand I found the majority of them little more than an exercise in diversity. They were fine as long as they could mince around the Fuhrer bunkers in LKG, where the only Afghans they ever meet were cleaning up after them.

Ones sent out to FOBs were useless and out of their depth. This did change once they started recruiting ex forces types. Some seemed obsessed with pushing 21 century western values to a 13th century population and could not see that from a cultural awareness point of view, you may as well have been handing out Bacon sandwiches.

I left the comprehensive approach experience with the view that the sole purpose of DfID was to preserve DfID, with a secondary roll as a pipe line for Bribes (sorry aid) to countries that may buy crap from Big and Expensive.

 

Delete DfiD and insert RAF.





Posted from the ARRSE Mobile app (iOS or Android)

 

Do expand on your witty one liner...............

 

ISAF is part of the problem.

 

It was kind of a given that the Arrse view of DFID would be ' They're Arrse'....but it would be interesting to know if Auld Yin and his crew of book reviewers got hold of Jonathan wossname's book and let someone on here who has done the CIMIC/POLAD job give it the once over, for the good and benefit of the Troop, as it were ?

I met some people from DFID a few years back just after Teflon Tone was installed ....can't say I was overawed with their brilliance....

 

The part of the article where she writes

does on the face of it seem rather sensible. Since one of the arguments given for international aid aside from doing the right thing is that as soft power it's an adjunct to foreign relations and getting people to like us, bringing these two together - what with jointery/joined up government being all the rage - would appear to be the obvious choice. Of course you'd have have to make sure that measures were in place so that the Foreign Office didn't try and raid the funding to help prop up their own spending programmes or shuffle it off into an ignored second class posting but that's hardly an insurmountable challenge. Likewise the idea of diverting some of it off to the MoD, I remember reading about the US Marines commanders on the ground having some form of discretionary funding that they could spend fairly widely on whatever they felt would do the most good whether that be helping with infrastructure projects, buying in stuff the locals needed or simply hiring local youths to do manual labour improving the local environment and also provide alternate employment to the Taliban.