Tageszeitung (Berlin), 17 January 2014
In an op-ed commentary on the German military withdrawal and promises to keep up development spending, AAN’s Thomas Ruttig demands transparency as a basis for future strategies. He calls attempts, now taken back, by the German forces to stop giving details about violent incidents an attempt to keep control over the narrativ: Everything’s going well in Afghanistan. But, Thomas adds, increased fighting activity also diminishes access, including for development actors. He also points out that the first and last publicly available evaluation of German development spending in Afghanistan is from 2010, only covers northern Afghanistan and takes a survey of locals as the only basis – “important but insufficient” as a criteria. He demands that, as a first step, a list of all German aid projects and programs since 2001 is published. Thomas also calls the practice “to make development a function of counter-insurgency” one of the gravest mistakes committed in Afghanistan (in German).
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This article was last updated on 9 Mar 2020
Tags:
Aid
Development
evaluation
Germany
militarisation
