ARTICLE: “The New Colonialists,” by Michael A. Cohen, Maria Figueroa Kupcu and Parag Khanna, Foreign Policy, July/August 2008, p. 74.

An exploration of the “vicious cycle of dependency” and capacity destruction.

The killer call-out text: “None of the new colonialists is anxious to perform so well that it works itself out of a job. They need weak states as much as weak states need them.”

History seems pretty clear: long-term aid does not work, but short-term bursts can. And they can’t get too big, so no big pushes please. Once aid gets much over 15% of national GDP, it’s like the oil curse: making governments unresponsive to citizens.

Good, scary example: of all the aid flowing into Afghanistan, this article notes, only one-third is actually controlled by the government and up to 80% of all services there are delivered by NGOs and PVOs.

The complaint? NGO-ism replaces Talibanism. Those are Karzai’s words.

That’s why we stick to the “in-the-box” metaphor. We want to deliver a company-in-a-box or a department-in-a-box, but the locals need to own the box.