WO RID It!' FAI Money Pit: The Monstrous Failure of US Aid to Afghanistan Joel Brinkley: JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013 More than half of Afghanistan's population is under twenty-five, which shouldn't be surprising since the average life span there is forty-nine. But the United States Agency for International Development looked at this group and decided it needed help because, it said, these young people are "disenfranchised, unskilled, uneducated, neglected—and most susceptible to joining the insurgency." So the agency chartered a three-year, $50 million program intended to train members of this generation to become productive members of Afghan society. Two years into it, the agency's inspector general had a look at the work thus far and found "little evidence that the project has made progress toward" its goals. The full report offered a darker picture than this euphemistic summary, documenting a near-total failure. It also showed that USAID had handed the project over to a contractor and then paid little attention. Unfortunately, the same can be said for almost every foreign-aid project undertaken in Afghanistan since the war began eleven years ago. In a recent quarterly report, the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said that, when security for aid workers is figured in, the total amount of nonmilitary funds Washington has 1 age of 7 EFTA01195732