THE other day I had lunch with a guy whose first job out of college was as a foreign service officer in the American embassy in Saigon in 1965. He was one of 20 guys on the political desk assigned to head out to the provinces for a week at a time to check whether the things the South Vietnamese government was saying bore any relationship to reality. He would check in with John Paul Vann and send the information up to Richard Holbrooke and Robert Komer. Basically he was present at the formation of American counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. So I asked him what he thought the prospects were for applying COIN to Afghanistan.

What happens when America gets involved, he said, is that we bring in this immense amount of infrastructure and personnel. And the first thing you see is that inflation goes through the roof, which destroys the local economy right off the bat. So nobody in the government can survive on their salary. And then we complain that they all turn corrupt.

This is worth bearing in mind with regard to a question Spencer Ackerman asked the other day: when Admiral Michael Mullen says the Taliban is delivering better, less corrupt governance than the Afghan government is, why is that? In Afghanistan, inflation has not been the problem it was in Vietnam: it hit 20% last year due to high oil prices, but has mostly stayed in single digits since 2001. But as in South Vietnam, the economy and revenue flows in Afghanistan are being entirely driven by donor aid. Two-thirds of government spending is financed by donors. The country's GDP in 2008 was $23 billion; American aid, excluding the cost of combat, was $9.3 billion. The cost of combat operations in 2009 will be $60 billion. One hears a lot about the corrupting effects of the heroin trade, but it amounts to just $3 billion a year. You don't have to be William Easterly to surmise that this vast quantity of aid money sloshing around in one of the poorest economies in the world is guaranteed to create unmanageable corruption problems.

Or maybe "create" corruption is the wrong way to think about it. This 2007 report by the UN Office of Crime and Drug Control (UNODC) pointed out that since the foundation of the Kingdom of Afghanistan in the early 19th century, the state has never gathered much of its own revenue; it relied first on "protection payments" from the British Empire and, later, on subsidies from the USSR and, now, the US. Nor has it ever provided much in the way of services. There basically has never been much of a government in Afghanistan:

The erosion of the state, and its contestation and capture by different factions, meant that in effect the public sphere (and public positions) were appropriated (and misused) for private (including factional) gain through most of the period of conflict. Hence it is not very meaningful to try to delineate a concept of “corruption” within this nexus of state capture, state failure, and “privatization” of state functions.

Why the Taliban is doing a good job of governance is not yet clear. But why the Afghan government is doing a bad job of governance is pretty obvious. And it just doesn't seem likely that pouring in more aid will solve the problem, rather than exacerbate it.

(Photo credit: AFP)