I've often seen the term "Toyota Taliban" used to refer to non-governmental 'aid' agencies and U.N. bureaucrats. I've even used it myself on occasion. What does it mean, and where does it come from? Here's an excerpt from U.N. Insider's June 04 summary:
In a letter from Kabul, British satirical biweekly Private Eye reported on the private life of international community members in the Afghan capital. It claims that only 16% of the $4.5 billion pledged at the Tokyo conference goes to the government; the rest in the hands of NGO; a term used to refer to "the well heeled" international staff of the U.N. and aid organizations who reportedly spend time shopping for wide screen tvs and laptops at a new Sony Centre. "Most other shopkeepers only ever glimpse them as they are driven past in one of the $75,000 Toyota Landcruisers most of them owned by the U.N. -- known here as the Toyota Taliban," the letter says, adding that the cruisers ferried them from office to restaurant to guest house. It continues: "There's a swimming pool at a central U.N. compound and regular parties and barbecues. Memories of a party held by the DHL courier group last November, when an opium pipe was passed around by U.N. staff, are still fresh. If boredom strikes, aid workers might also sign up for Tai Chi and Argentinean tango lessons."
Additional on-the-scene reports from Instapundit's Afghanistan correspondent Professor John Robert Kelly of Boston University, Congressional Chief of Staff Joseph Eule, and a Roger L. Simon commenter with 18 years experience in Afghanistan add further depth to the picture, in both positive and negative ways. This excerpt from John's comment is especially instructive:
"My experience with the UN over the past 18 years is in Afghanistan. Here's what I've seen since 9/11...sorry for the garritous length.
....An enormous and highly profitable international aid apparatus has assembled in Kabul and has largely ignored the input of the Afghan people or their largely American liberators; the latter stand by in disbelief as taxpayers contributions to Afghanistan disappear into outfitting the extravagant needs of European aid community. The UN pays $400 a day (more than a year’s pay for an average Afghan ) plus a generous per diem. This enormous aid infestation has fostered rightful resentment. The UN and associated NGOs ran through years of aid funding in a matter of months. Now when money cannot be found for reconstruction, the UN issues reports criticizing the parsimonious Americans. Meanwhile, the UN and NGOs live like pashas. Hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for Afghans have been transformed into fleets of top-of the-line Toyota Landcruisers, villas and estates to house their workers complete with swimming pools, an endless supply of underpaid servants, luxurious furnishings (accented with looted antiquities,) the latest laptops, video equipment, cases of Johnny Walker Blue and the bling bling ...perks that might even seem excessive to Ken Lay are justifiable expenses charged off to the US. No accountability, no oversight. They don’t bother cooking the books, they don’t even keep the books!
Afghan citizens fear that vocal objections to this patronizing treatment will result in economic reprisals by the UN...."
Amazingly, the story gets worse as one continues. To say that John is upset about all this is a massive understatement. Then we have posts from some U.S. State Dept. folks at the Diplomad, who have chronicled this phenomenon (and the U.N.'s pathetic response) in the wake of the recent Tsunami. See: Almost fUNny | UN Death Watch | Things That Make You Say 'Blah!' The UN Response to the Tsunami.
Perhaps this should not be surprising with respect to the U.N., whose makeup and structure nearly guarantees this sort of "Toyota Taliban" behaviour.
What's eminently clear is that non-governmental NGO "do-gooders" and international bodies deserve closer scrutiny than they usually receive, and require rigorous accountability mechanisms that include the threat of public exposure.
"Amazingly, the story gets worse as one continues."
Yes, I did notice the utter lack of verifiable facts in the quoted sections.
- If you want westerners to work in places like Afganistan and Iraq you are going to have pay them well.
- If you are going to be relying on the natives in these countries, you are going to have corruption.
That is the dilemma, you either have to give nothing, or put up with the waste that goes along with the administration of the aid.
I was reminded of the GOP Youth Corps alias the CPA living in the Baghdad Green Zone.
It seems that corruption is a constant, that the corruption of western aid orgs and international institutions is as bad or worse that local graft, but much more expensive. We would be smart to outsource the task since it gets more money into the target locations and costs less.
My brother is out there as one of the support workers. (Running the kitchens of the military base in Kabul.) The money is good, better than an equivalent job in the UK (would have to be as Factory notes). Yet he lives in a shipping container and has done for a year. Obviously there are different rules for those funded by the UN eh?
Say hello to the new Raj.
I like back40's idea of outsourcing greed.
What is clear, however, is that non-governmental NGO "do-gooders" and international bodies deserve closer scrutiny than they usually receive, and require rigorous accountability mechanisms that include the threat of public exposure.
You can say that again, especially when it comes to the UN, the least pleasant and most arrogant (and that's saying a lot) foreign organization I encountered in Uzbekistan. The UN runs a small, barely visible "volunteer" program. I say "volunteer" because it's similar to what I did as a Peace Corps Volunteer except that I didn't have my own two-story house, my own Land Cruiser, a driver, and a salary. I met an American UN Volunteer who lived in Karshi who was pretty up-front about the shortcomings of her employers. I got the impression that everything the UN was doing in the country was all part of an enormous fantasy in which their presence and excesses would be tolerated to give the government a bit of legitimacy while both parties would pretend that the UN was making things better (UNESCO was fairly useful, admittedly, though USAID did similar things with an economic development bent).
As for the rest of the aid community, I rarely had good experiences. Most of the people I ran into were more interested in how good reports back to the head office looked rather than actual results. For example, the head of the Navoi office of Project HOPE told the secret police that I and my fellow volunteers might know details about murders in Bukhara . This and the rampant corruption of the do-nothing doctors on staff in Navoi were brought up with USAID, who funds Project HOPE, and the regional head of the organization. Neither cared. They said that the reports were better than they'd ever been.
There were good ones around though. I like what OSI/Soros Foundation did in Uzbekistan. The Asian Development Bank was a great group of people to meet--they didn't take any BS. Local NGOs are great because the people who start them have such a stake in whatever it is they do.
Factory, if you're looking for verification in the form of a link, you won't find it. The Afghanistan details sound accurate to me based on my experience in Uzbekistan. The pay and per diems that governments and NGOs give are incredible. All of this money, especially in Tashkent, funds a fairly luxurious and decadent lifestyle. The best description I ever heard for one large, very visible chunk of the Tashkent expat community (which I'm sure is fairly similar to many other in the third world), is a big, on-going frat-house party in which everyone has slept with everyone else. And it's all right in front of the faces of the locals.
I think back40 has it right. Much of this work is better done by local NGOs with a larger stake in success. There's also room for the involvement of Westerners, but today's aid industry is simply out of control.
The United Nations, its Euro-centric staff and sycophantic supporters demonstrate again and again how they "care" and "feel" about the natives. Peasants are peasants and the Aristocracy that is the UN knows whats best for the peasants....just make sure the peasants never get a taste for the freedom that the UN denies them.
Check out The Road to Hell by Michael Maren. Some problems with NGO's are structural. Reviews here and here.
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This is nothing new.
The UN has been a 3rd world kleptocracy with an E.U. face for longer than I have been alive (and I'm 41).
What is different is that there are now non-Mainstream media reporters on-hand to make that fact clear.
In the past it was all blown off by the usual media subject because the "UN-NGO industrial complex" was a source of stories for the 5-star hotel media brigades.
This is almost funny. Doesn't anyone read Doonesbury anymore? Duke did this in Afghanistan and now Iraq.
I was referred to this website, and Whew, what a discovery!
This post deserved be headlined everywhere!
Sadly, except Fox, the same voice is not heard much in MSM.
Do you think the President will take them on? We must get rid of it or reform it.W is the only man I can imagine would have the guts and backbone to reform the UN.
I was dismayed at the US government's declaration of support for Kofi Annan. However, it is understandable as the President wants the UN's support for the Iraqi elections and Kofi seems to have changed his tune recently. We all know that our President is a patient man and I trust that this treat of Kofi is just temporary.
Still, the Toyota Taliban makes me ill.
Wherever there are large sums of money, there will be corruption. It is human nature.
Therefore, I would echo "Back40" -- diminish the pools of money, in order to diminish the waste due to corruption.
All politics should be local -- because localization provides the best mechanism for accountability.
PAJEROBAD
Same s**t here in Nepal. The 4WD Mitsubishi Pajero even gave name to a political/aid-people clas: PAJEROBAD (Rule of the Pajero). The Nepalis are good at this: already in 1991 they enriched the world's vocabulary with DEMOCRAZY.
My blood boils when I see the HUGE white SUVs driving by (living on a road to Nagarkot, popular resort E of KTM), with diff. logos: WFP, UNDP, UNICEF (yeah, the children' fond: the car full of children, yeah, the bureaucrats' own!). I always suspected 90% of the foreign aid doesn't get past Ring Road. I was wrong - there is a new study by a nepali researcher: it's only 80%!!!
Abolish and rebuild UN, so the price of admission is democracy, we cannot sit in the same Assembly with canibals and butchers.
We should all email, call and write to the White House, and our House and Senate members. A UN reform is needed or the US should just back out, and form another international organization with our true allies!
And we should also think of a way to get our voices heard in the mainstream media! The blogging world still can not match their power yet.
Does anyone know which NGOs spend (or don't spend) aid money on big-screen TVs and expensive luxuries for their workers? I want to donate some money to a group for tsunami relief (I've had Mercy Corps recommended to me) but I want to make sure it'll do some good, not make an aid worker rich.
Jefe, I'll vouch for Mercy Corps. I heard nothing but excellent things about them in Uzbekistan. They and Northwest Medical Teams (both are in Portland, OR) do excellent work and struck me as primarily concerned about improving people's lives rather than their bottom line.
Himalayan Bamboo: Peace Corps had a small fleet of the Land Cruisers when I was in Uzbekistan. God, how I loved those things, but I was always apprehensive about having the things pull up in front of my apartment building when they came to town. They were great for travel (corrupt police officers are scared of them), but having one sitting in front of your house while you unload cases of MREs makes it hard to convince your neighbors that you don't make a big salary and live a life of luxury. (The MREs, by the way, were part of our safety and security plan, and intended to be used in situations such as an earthquake when food would not be easily available. We ate as many as possible when we were getting ready to evacuate after 9/11.)
"...a big, on-going frat-house party in which everyone has slept with everyone else. And it's all right in front of the faces of the locals."
That is exactly exactly exactly what I've seen myself. Al I want to add is that it has been like this for along time -- at the very least, since 1976 when I first observed the UN at the Habitat conference in Vancouver. That was when the meaning of the cliche about "tables groaning" with luxury foods first clicked into focus for me. The african delegates spent most of their time with high-priced prostitutes and the quangos (as NGOs were called then) sipped wine and talked Marxism and the small-is-beautiful antiglobalism in vogue at the time. The only real difference is that today more people are catching on to the UN reality.
The chairman of the German relief organization "Green helmets", Rupert Neudeck, accused the United Nations to waste donation funds in the German Newspaper "Neue Presse" from 4.1.2005. With allusion to the Asian flood catastrophe he said "... he (Neudeck) would give nothing to the UN ... those (the UN) have to do first times the next days and weeks with organizing its own accomodation and parking lots. ..."
Neudeck said further: "I have a horror from the UN refugee camps, which cost just as much as the building material for huts and houses."
http://de.news.yahoo.com/050105/12/4d0zc.html
I agree that corruption can not be escaped in this case. I'm also sure that similar things are happening in many other places. It just happened so that this time somebody took the "dirty linen" of the UN out to the public.