Today I have read articles about two aid groups that interject into the foreign aid debate directly, functioning as Non Government Organizations or NGO’s as they are otherwise known.

Although there is an inordinate level of altruism involved in both case as happens often, they both have the problem that they provide a continuum of the very problems they propose to solve. Their premise for assistance involves a low level of dependence on their continued involvement.

The first case came about from a contact who is proposing to go to Afghanistan on the strength of an article he read in the Sunday Times early in the month. It was about a woman whom he regards as a “fearless campaigner”, Sofia Swire, an English woman working with the Turquoise Mountain Foundation who has taken to backpacking her way around the world and is now advising the Afghans how to make jewelry. That unfortunately brings out the cynical side of me, given that they have been doing that and are well known to have been making fabulous jewelry for thousands of years, it is something akin to taking sand to Mecca. I am more concerned for the security problems she poses for hundreds of others but that is another issue.

Looking at how we go about altering the circumstances of poor people through out the world, we are often vexed by what might otherwise seem to be insurmountable problems. In a country where the government is corrupt or at best inept, the traditional forms of providing international assistance are routinely frittered away on programs and projects that leave no useful end benefit for the people that most concern is being shown.

For almost a decade, the US and its allies have been waging battles against a rag-tag bunch of ill-equipped and greatly outnumbered Taliban yet are failing on all accounts to make significant in-roads towards winning the war.

Certainly the US can win battles yet it is the war that is at stake and ultimately it will come down to whether the US can maintain a military presence where they eventually capitulate due to pressures from the American public and Congress or will they continue to engage this intractable enemy ad infinitum? History would be on the side of the former rather than the latter.

While looking at the war objectively and arguing a purely neutral position while observing the political position of both sides, it is easy to, and many people are beginning to come to the same conclusion, that the fight being waged by the Taliban is one that has moral superiority over the west preferred partner. Theirs is not simply a religious fight, one that sees Islam prevail against Christianity, but one that prevails against what is demonstrably a corrupt and ethnically divided government administration that has received the west’s imprimatur and stewardship.

There was an interesting article on Matt Taibbi, the journalist for the Rolling Stone magazine who wrote about the Goldman Sachs conglomerate and how they precipitated and continue to precipitate the global economic meltdown in the news today

Taibbi was critical of and had called out CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent, Lara Logan whom had in turn been critical of fellow Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings whose forthright article had bought about the firing and the subsequent resignation of US General Stanley McChrystal as head of US Armed forces in Afghanistan.

H. L. Mencken wrote passionately about life and society in America one hundred years ago yet he may as well have been writing about events and the people of the United States today as his words still in many respects retain their import.  Citing from his reference in Wikipedia,

It is no coincidence he regarded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the finest work of American literature; much of that book details episodes of gullible and ignorant people being swindled by Confidence Men like the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them); by posing as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). The book can be read as a story of America's hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "... the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

Drew Harris is a neighbor of mine, each in our tired little pre-war houses located in a more sedate residential area of Georgetown in Penang, an island state in Malaysia that has a dignified if not colorful colonial background and has been home to numerous international artists and writers over the last two centuries. He has perhaps come to be more than simply a neighbor. We have become friends due in no small part to the fact that for a significant portion of the time we have lived here, I have been away in Afghanistan and left him and his wife to offer a protective neighborly contact for my wife.