UK aid to Afghanistan entrenched corruption and injustice, report finds

The aid ‘benefited a narrow group of Afghan political elites at the expense of the population at large’, such as these internally displaced families. Photograph: Jalil Rezayee/EPA

The UK’s £3.5bn aid to Afghanistan between 2000 and 2020 was implicated in corruption and human rights abuses and failed to achieve its primary objective of stabilising the country’s government, an assessment by the UK government’s aid watchdog has found.

Describing the two-decade aid project as the UK’s single most ambitious programme of state building, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) says decisions to spend aid on counterinsurgency operations were flawed, adding that efforts to reduce gender inequality are likely to be wiped out by the Taliban.