By Ellen Knickmeyer

Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, believes he knows what it takes to make the Afghan government more effective: funnel billions of dollars of U.S. aid directly into President Hamid Karzai’s ministries.

Holbrooke, since late summer, has begun calling for the United States to send 40 to 50 percent of all its aid and development money for Afghanistan through the Afghan government. The New Yorker’s George Packer recounted watching Holbrooke spread that message in a trip south of Kabul, where Holbrooke, in effect, chided a Texas National Guard unit for undertaking a local agricultural training project. Afghanistan’s agriculture minister, also in attendance on the tour, should be doing the work instead, Holbrooke said. “Mr. Minister, we want the people… to think of your government as the place where they can go for services,” Holbrooke told the Afghan official. Otherwise, Holbrooke warned, the development effort “will come and go like the wind. It’ll be a memory.”

Currently, no one – neither Afghans nor international development officials – thinks of Karzai’s government as the go-to place for state-building. The United States has given roughly $20 billion for humanitarian aid and civilian development projects in Afghanistan since 2001. Only 10 percent of U.S. aid goes directly to the Afghan government; the United States deems only the Afghan ministries of health and communications sufficiently free of corruption to receive the U.S. money themselves.

For Holbrooke, the motive for direct funding to Karzai’s government is building its capacity to govern. People who support that idea say that the United States and other donors weaken the Afghan government, in the eyes of their people and in fact, when the donors entrust funding for projects to NGOs and contractors rather than Afghan leaders.

“From what I have heard and seen, it is best to funnel aid through local powers that you want to reinforce. This could be community leaders, sheikhs, tribal chiefs, even local police,” Tom Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C., and a supporter of direct funding, said in an e-mail, adding, “obviously, to work, it has to be part of a larger strategy of supporting legitimate leaders who help the people more than they hurt them.”

Currently, in Afghanistan, there is a  “huge amount of pressure on donors to put their money through the government,’’ said Nigel Pont, a former Afghanistan country director for Mercy Corps, now at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

The topic has been a matter of dispute for Karzai and donors from the start, said James Bishop, vice president for humanitarian policy and practice at InterAction, a Washington, D.C.-based umbrella organization for aid and development groups.  “The Afghan government obviously would like all the money and the donors are saying you don’t have the (means) to use it,” Bishop told me by phone. “There’s a problem of capacity… There’s a problem of corruption.”

In March 2009, independent consultants commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development to look at steering more aid through the Afghan government concluded the same. The direct-funding effort would face difficulties given corruption that was “entrenched” and “pervasive,” the consultants wrote.

In fairness to Afghan officials, they have plenty of company when it comes to wasting aid and development money for Afghanistan. Foreign contractors and subcontractors in Afghanistan take up to 50 percent of each project’s funding as their profit, according to Matt Waldman, a former analyst for Oxfam, also now at the Carr Center.

And to an Afghan, the $250,000 and $500,000 salaries of Western consultants draw for advising development projects surely must look like corruption as much as any pocketing of aid money by an Afghan official.

The issue for the United States in Afghanistan clearly isn’t one of deciding whether to give the Afghan government or foreign contractors development money to waste.  Capacity building isn’t just about handing client-governments bankfuls of cash. If it were, African countries, recipients of more than $50 billion in Western aid during the Cold War and after, would be models of efficiency and productivity. They are not.

Capacity building entails building the capacity to govern, not building the capacity to spend. For Afghanistan, that means not just giving Afghan ministries the money to spend themselves, but holding them accountable for how the money is spent.

True capacity building would be helping to guide the Afghan government in budgeting, financial management and fiscal controls. The United States should step up that training, but continue to withhold direct funding for projects from ministries that fail to master a reasonable, Afghan-appropriate level of financial accountability.

Cynics scoff, knowing the difficulty of reform. But targeted accountability efforts have worked before, in Africa, South America and elsewhere.  Without the accountability, U.S. aid funds truly will be gone with the wind, a memory, as Holbrooke said. And Afghanistan’s government may be more corrupt, and less legitimate, for it.

Ellen Knickmeyer is in the Master of Public Affairs/Mid-Career program at Harvard Kennedy School. She was formerly Bureau Chief for The Washington Post in Cairo and Baghdad, and West Africa Bureau Chief for The Associated Press.