Donors Offer $16B in Afghan Aid

But this time, there's strings attached
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 9, 2012 3:33 AM CDT
Donors Offer $16B in Afghan Aid
An Afghan child looks at UN Humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, unseen, during her visit to an informal settlement in Kabul earlier this year.   (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

International donors pledged a total of $16 billion in development aid through 2015 to Afghanistan at a conference in Tokyo yesterday. The funding is intended to help steady Afghanistan during the NATO pullout but major donors, including the US, Japan, and Germany, stressed that the aid would be tied to economic and political gains for the first time. The aid deal will measure progress in areas including women's rights, free and fair elections, and efforts to tackle drug trafficking and corruption, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A separate aid agreement made in May provides $4.1 billion a year for the country's army and police. "We have agreed that we need a different kind of long-term economic partnership, one built on Afghan progress in meeting its goals, in fighting corruption, in carrying out reform and providing good governance," said Hillary Clinton at the Tokyo meeting. In a surprise trip to Kabul a day earlier, Clinton announced that Afghanistan is now America's newest "major non-NATO ally." (More Afghanistan stories.)

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