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""I've often worried that the lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan - and especially Afghanistan - is that we don't know how to do foreign aid, and therefore we shouldn't continue to provide aid at the levels we have been," said Ms. Wadhams of the Center for American Progress. "

I detailed aid failure in "Funding the Enemy."

"A report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), an independent watchdog set up to scrutinise the UK government's aid spending, has raised concerns about the financial management of British development projects in Afghanistan."

"The main US foreign aid agency is preparing to switch from private security contractors in Afghanistan to Afghan government-provided security this month under a new policy mandated by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, raising concern in Washington that this could put US civilians at greater risk. "

"The Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a report Wednesday looking at U.S. assistance to Afghanistan.... The Senate report called for our aid to Afghanistan to be far more sustainable, while questioning whether many of the programs the United States has conducted under the broad banner of "stabilization" have actually made Afghanistan more stable or secure."

"Afghanistan's Fiscal Cliff Kabul-watchers are rightly worried about what the withdrawal of Western aid money will mean for one of the most impoverished countries on the planet. "

"A close look at Mr. Karzai's growing alienation from the U.S. helps to explain why so many of America's war objectives in Afghanistan remain unfulfilled. It seems increasingly likely that the U.S. will leave behind both an undefeated Taliban insurgency and a dysfunctional government mired in corruption and utterly dependent on foreign aid."

"The Afghan central bank's efforts to curb the exodus of money abroad are bearing fruit...The money flow-part of it suspected by U.S. and Afghan officials to be stolen foreign aid and proceeds from the drug trade-undermines the country's economy just as foreign forces depart. The cash flight also raises Western concerns about Afghanistan, already the source of most of the world's illicit opiates, becoming a global money-laundering center. "

"It was just one brief exchange about Afghanistan with an aide late in 2009, but it suggests how President Obama's thinking about what he once called "a war of necessity" began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House. "

"The U.S. has been financing both sides of the war in Afghanistan since 2001 as a startling percentage of foreign aid continues to flood Taliban coffers on a daily basis, according to Douglas A. Wissing in his new book, Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban."

"Another lucrative source of income has been the foreign funding of aid and development projects. Estimates of Taliban income from contracts funded by the United States and other overseas donors range from 10 to 20 per cent of the total, usually by the Taliban agreeing protection money with the contractor or demanding a cut," the report said.

" As Americans pull back from Afghanistan, Kabul Bank's Mr. Farnood exemplifies how the United States is leaving behind a problem it underwrote over the past decade with tens of billions of dollars of aid and logistical support: a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, and despised by most Afghans for it. "