Costs of African aid

From an LA Times op-ed by Edward N. Luttwak and Marian L. Tupy:

On a micro level, Africa is littered with failed projects financed by foreign aid, including a steel plant in Ajaokuta, Nigeria, that does not produce steel and agricultural projects in Mali that decreased rather than increased the production of grain. Millions of Africans have been uprooted, with their livelihoods destroyed, by the pursuit of harebrained agricultural and irrigation schemes dreamed up by ignorant and arrogant, if well-meaning, foreigners.

On a macro level, aid has kept predatory African states alive by enriching corrupt political leaders and paying the salaries of their bureaucrats, soldiers and police. Uganda, by no means an outlier when it comes to "budget support," receives 50% of its annual government revenue from foreign aid. Economist Paul Collier of Oxford University showed that aid pays for up to 40% of African weapons purchases. On a continent where interstate conflicts are mercifully rare, those weapons are often used to crush domestic opposition -- as has been happening in Zimbabwe.

Pulling aid away from dysfunctional African states seems like a shocking move. Allowing failing states to collapse, it will be said, could lead to anarchy and turn Africa into a haven for terrorists. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, many now believe that terrorists are best confronted by security measures, including intelligence gathering and surgical strikes against individual terrorist groups, rather than by social engineering on the scale of entire countries.