Will Aid Escalation Finally Crash in the Mountains of Afghanistan?

There has been a remarkable escalation in the scale and intrusiveness of aid interventions over the years (this was one of the major conclusions of my survey paper on aid to Africa). It seems to be reaching the reductio al absurdum in the current debate on whether to escalate US intervention in Afghanistan.

Let’s review the record:

Aid Phase	Objective	Outcome	Time Period
Projects to improve infrastructure, health, education	Improvements in clean water, child mortality, school attendance, and literacy	Partial success	60s, 70s
Structural adjustment lending to fix economic policies	Change national economic policies to be pro-market and pro-development	Failure	80s
Institutional reforms	Clean up corruption and democratize	Mostly failure	90s
Fixing failed states, combining aid and military intervention	Peace/ Development/ Democracy	Failure	2000s

A few questions about this record:

(1) Why did aid change after partial success? (2) Why did aid try to do something more ambitious after a less ambitious effort failed? (3) Was there good evidence (or any evidence) to support each phase of escalation? (4) Is aid going to keep escalating, like say in Afghanistan? (5) Should the well-documented aid failures in Afghanistan (see recent stories in the FT and the New York Times) sound the alarm about aid escalation? (6) Would it be better to do less ambitious things that work rather than extremely ambitious things that don’t work?