Playing the Poor Mouth

I am also strangely unsurprised that of the countries pledging aid money to rebuild Afghanistan, the US contribution ($296m so far) is eclipsed by Japan’s ($500m so far).

The US, the world’s richest country, gives a smaller proportion of its gross domestic product in overseas aid than any other developed nation.

This is par for the course. UN member countries are supposed to donate around 0.7% of GDP for Official Development Assistance (ODA) towards the poorest UN member countries. While few countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Luxembourg) manage to meet this paltry target, the US has always been notable for being the stingiest when it comes to paying up, granting something like 0.01% of GDP.

This sort of short-sightedness is just typical of the blinkered opportunism of politicans. The share of GNP the United States contributes to ODA declined by more than half between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. And people are surprised when the disenfranchised and dispossessed in developing nations take up arms against the US? What have they got to lose? Aside from the Opium growers in Afghanistan, the only people making any real coin from will be the NGOs and their contractors.