Conservatives are rightly skeptical of much of what government does, and foreign aid has long been something that stuck deeply in conservatives’ craws, having a lineage of doubt going back to the John Birch Society and beyond. Mostly, it seems that hostility to the idea of foreign aid has centered around the fact that it involves taking money from honest, hardworking taxpayers and giving it to undeserving foreign governments. But there’s perhaps an even better reason for the abolition of foreign aid: far from helping, it actively hurts those it intends to help. So says the journalist Linda Polman in a new book, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?
Sierra Leone, the small West African state that was wracked by a brutal civil war – and where this writer lived many years ago working in, I now meekly report, humanitarian aid – is a classic example of the extremes which foreign aid has provoked. Foreign governments, along with various non-state actors, such as warlords and bandits, long ago learned that aid from the developed world and their various agencies is a fairly reliable source of cash. Being the shifty souls that so many of them are, they’ve learned to do whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing. In Sierra Leone, the appearance of amputation as a form of warfare and terror was somewhat mystifying; thoroughly brutal, it was hard to see for what purpose it could be used, other than terrorizing the civilian population – and they were seemingly already terrorized enough, being killed and maimed in the tens of thousands by roving bands of unspeakably violent marauders.
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