What on Earth is Going On?: A Crash Course in Current Affairs. Arthur House

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СКАЧАТЬ multilateral aid, chiefly to the European Commission’s Development Fund, followed by the World Bank and the United Nations.

      How effective is aid?

      There are plenty of success stories that testify to the effectiveness of aid in saving the lives of poor people, particularly those suffering from diseases; for example in Morocco, cases of blinding trachoma—a bacterial eye infection—have fallen 75% since 1999 thanks to a massive donation of antibiotics from a pharmaceutical company; in China, a World Bank loan financed a tuberculosis project which is now saving an estimated 30,000 lives per year; and in Uganda and Malawi, anti-retroviral drugs issued by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria have kept hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS sufferers alive since 2001 who would otherwise have died. However, there are many cases where aid has not reached its intended target, or has been hampered by poor planning, corrupt governments in recipient countries or war. In 2007, the fighting in southern Afghanistan made it too dangerous for DFID to deliver much-needed food aid to thousands of starving people, which only increased local support for the Taleban insurgents. Beyond the effectiveness of delivering food or medicine, the effectiveness of development aid is difficult to measure and is a matter of some controversy.

      Why?

      On the face of it, richer countries helping poorer countries seems like a straightforwardly good thing. And it is true that if all aid were suddenly to stop, millions of people around the world would suffer as a result. However, there is an ongoing debate surrounding the long-term effects of aid on developing countries. It often centres on the fact that aid is seldom given for purely altruistic reasons, but usually comes with strings attached. Aid programmes were started in earnest during the Cold War by the USA/NATO and the Soviet Union as a way of fostering alliances with weaker countries and influencing their politics with capitalist or communist ideology. Since the collapse of communism, the World Bank and the IMF have been accused of being run (at least in part) by people with vested business interests who use aid programmes to open up new opportunities for global capitalism in developing countries. Some say this sort of ‘neo-colonialism’ leads to exploitation and benefits the corporations more than the countries concerned, whereas others argue that aid creates a dependence on the donor countries, and that increased trade is instead the key to sustainable development—hence the slogan ‘trade not aid’. The OECD estimates that 58% of all foreign aid is ‘tied aid’—consisting of bilateral agreements in which money has to be spent in the donor country, thereby increasing the donor country’s exports and exerting its political influence over the recipient country. Tied aid is also less efficient than ‘untied’ aid, increasing costs for the recipient country by around 20%, much of which is spent on paying the high wages of international consultants. Aid has also been criticised for sustaining weak or corrupt governments; with a steady stream of unearned revenue at their disposal, they do not need to rely on the taxes of their citizens, who thus lose the ability to hold them accountable. Alternatively, it might allow such governments to free up funds to spend on potentially dubious areas such as defence, while the essential needs of their people are left to aid programmes.

      ‘Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but have increased.’

      DAMBISA MOYO, Zambian economist and author of Dead Aid

      ‘Development assistance based on proven technologies and directed at measurable and practical needs—increased food production, disease control, safe water and sanitation, schoolrooms and clinics, roads, power grids, Internet connectivity, and the like—has a distinguished record of success.’

      JEFFREY D. SACHS, American economist, Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and author of Common Wealth and The End of Poverty

       Al-Qaeda

      What is it?

      Al-Qaeda (meaning ‘the Base’) is an international Sunni Islamist movement founded in 1988 by the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden. Since 1992 it has carried out terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets across the world in an extreme interpretation of jihad (see Islam), the Islamic doctrine of holy struggle. Most devastatingly, it was responsible for the attacks

      on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, which claimed around 3,000 lives and injured 6,300.

      How is it run?

      The command structure and operational methods of al-Qaeda are a matter of some debate. Al-Qaeda has been known to operate cells (small groups of clandestine agents) in Western cities and to have local networks across the Muslim world (in Iraq and North Africa, for example). However, the extent to which these regional representatives are controlled by the central leadership is disputed; some claim that al-Qaeda is a coherent militant organisation, while others see it as a loosely defined concept, with a few core members providing ideology and inspiration for followers around the world. Despite this uncertainty, the ‘destruction of al-Qaeda’ was a key aim of George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ and the US invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. What is left of al-Qaeda today is unclear, but its leaders are believed to be hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas next to the Afghan border, where several other jihadi groups are based. Al-Qaeda is known to share training camps with these groups, such as the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, as well as fostering contacts with other militant Islamist movements such as the South-East Asian Jemaah Islamiyah.

      What are al-Qaeda’s aims and beliefs?

      Al-Qaeda aims to remove foreign, especially Western, influence from Muslim countries and establish a new Caliphate (an Islamic empire based on Sharia law—see Islam) across the Muslim world. Bin Laden and his followers are thought to be heavily influenced by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a mid-20th-century Egyptian Islamist intellectual who

      Apart from 9/11, which other attacks have been attributed to al-Qaeda?

      1992: Hotel bombings in Aden, Yemen (2 killed, 7 injured)

      1993: First World Trade Center bombing, New York, USA (6 killed, 1,042 injured)

      1998: US Embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya (212 killed, around 4,000 injured) and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania (11 killed, 85 injured)

      2000: Attack on the USS Cole, Aden harbour, Yemen (19 killed, 39 injured)

      2003: Truck bombings in Istanbul, Turkey (57 killed, 700 injured)

      2003-6: Attacks in Iraq on UN, US and Shi’ite targets by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (thousands killed and injured)

      2007: Car bombings in Algiers, Algeria (roughly 90 killed, 350 injured)

      2008: Danish Embassy bombings in Islamabad, Pakistan (6 killed, 24 injured)

      advocated offensive jihad to rid the world of non-Muslim influences. He also declared that any Muslim not living under Sharia law is automatically an apostate (i.e. guilty of renouncing their faith), a crime punishable by death. This idea has been used by al-Qaeda to justify the killing of fellow Muslims. Bin Laden has been quoted as saying that Afghanistan under the Taleban regime of 1996-2001 was the ‘only Islamic country’ in СКАЧАТЬ